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STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

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STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, XXXII, 1994

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STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Volume XXXII June 1994

THE U.S. ECONOMY

IN THE LIGHT OF

JUSTICE, SOLIDARITY, AND

COMPLEMENTARITY

An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Siegfried G. Karsten

editor

Cover Design: Henry Setter

THE U.S. ECq^tMtf\mj^ J^E,USH*OF JUSTICE,
SOLIDARITY, AND COMPLEMENTARITY

by

Siegfried G. Karsten

(Volume Editor)

Volume 32 of West Georgia College Studies In The Social Sciences
Francis P. Conner (Series Editor)

Copyright 1994 by:
West Georgia College
Carrollton, GA 30118

ISBN: 1-883199-04-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form -
except for brief quotation in a review or professional work - without per-
mission from the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America

As far as the laws of economics

refer to reality,

they are not certain;

and so far as they are certain,

they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein
(paraphrased)

m

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Contributors viii

Economics in an Interdisciplinary Setting - Introduction A

Siegfried G. Karsten

Social Justice - An Artist's Commentary 15

Henry Setter

Economics and Society: A Consideration of the

Epistemology of Economics 23

William C. Schaniel

Economics and Social Morality 37

Douglas Hilt

Industrial Speenhamland:

British "Lessons" of History 53

James Stephen Taylor

The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative

Reforms on the Attainment of Economic

Security, Equity, and Justice 67

Stanley M. Caress

Institutional Conditions for Efficient

Sustainable Development: Implementing

Low Social Time Preference 81

Jacob J. Krabbe

Growth as a Prerequisite for Sustainability 97

P.C. van den Noort

Sustainable Development: Redefining

Economic Policy Goals 109

Michael Spyrou

IV

Humanizing the Workplace for Increased

Productivity and Worker Satisfaction 125

Cheryl Sink Rice and Donadrian L. Rice

Income Taxation and Justice 147

Richard F. Fryman

Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment:

The Social Responsibility to Lend to the Nation's

Poor Communities 161

David Boldt

Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in the

Context of Social Market Economics 177

Siegfried G. Karsten

VI

Acknowledgement

This volume represents a somewhat rare undertaking in that it com-
piles varied efforts from distinct disciplines addressing a topic of
common concern. Th-e editor thanks the individual authors for their
contributions and cooperation in making this issue possible. The
editor is especially indebted to Professor Henry Setter for the de-
sign of the cover. He also expresses his appreciation to Mrs. Liz Key
and Mr. Vedat Giinay for technical assistance, to Mr. Aydin Tasdelen
for assisting in the preparation and editing of the manuscripts, and
to Mrs. Ellen Karsten, for proof reading and valuable suggestions.

vu

Contributors

David J. Boldt serves as Assistant Professor of Economics at West
Georgia College, CarroUton, GA 30118. He earned his B.A. in Eco-
nomics at San Diego State University, his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
at the University of New Mexico. Previously, he held positions as
an Economist with the Bureau of Business and Economic Research,
University of New Mexico, and as a Research Analyst with SRI In-
ternational. He has presented and published papers in the areas of
regional economic development, environmental economics, and
economic education.

Stanley M. Caress holds the position of Assistant Professor of Po-
litical Science at West Georgia College, CarroUton, GA 30118. His
B.A. and M.A. degrees were earned at San Jose State University, his
Ph.D. at the University of California at Riverside. He has served as
Lecturer at California State University at Long Beach and as Assis-
tant Director of the Center for Future Democracy. His research in-
terests are in the areas of American politics, governmental bureau-
cratic behavior, and legislative reforms, in which he has published
two books: Dynamics of American Politics and Issues in State Politics
and Administration.

Richard F. Fryman has been Professor of Economics and Chair-
man of the Department of Economics, West Georgia College, Car-
roUton, GA 30118, since 1986. He received his B.S. and M.A. de-
grees from Miami University, Ohio; his Ph.D. was earned at the
University of Illinois. He previously served as Professor of Econom-
ics at Southern Illinois University and has had teaching assignments
in the Virgin Islands, Malaysia, and London. His research interests
are in the area of public finance and taxation.

Douglas Hilt has held the positions of Professor and Chair of the
Department of European Languages and Literature at the Univer-
sity of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honululu, HI 96822, since 1988, where he
has twice been named Principal Humanities Scholar. He received
his B.A. in German and French at the University of Bristol in his
native England, and wrote his M.A. in Spanish at the Universidad
de las Americas in Mexico. His doctorate, from the University of

Vlll

Arizona, dealt with German and Spanish comparative Hterature.
He has taught languages and literature in Europe, Canada, Mexico,
and the United States, and was Department Chair of Foreign Lan-
guages at West Georgia College for ten years. In the summer of 1982
he was a Fulbright scholar to Germany. He has written extensively
in the cross-cultural fields of European history and comparative lit-
erature, including two books: Ten Against Napoleon and The Troubled
Trinity - Godoy and the Spanish Monarchs. His current research con-
cerns German and Spanish exiles who came to the United States
following the Spanish Civil War.

Siegfried G. Karsten is Professor of Economics at West Georgia
College, Carrollton, GA30118. His teaching career began at the Uni-
versity of Utah, where he earned B.S. (Mathematics), M.S., and Ph.D.
(Economics) degrees. He served on the faculties of the Universities
of Utah and Wyoming and at Jilin University, China, as Fulbright
Professor of Economics (1986/87), and participated as a Fulbright
Scholar in seminars in Germany (1984,1991) and India (1989). Dur-
ing his professional career he had assignments as a systems analyst
for Hercules Powder Company and conducted demand and elas-
ticity studies with regard to electricity and natural gas for the State
of Utah and served as a consultant in rate hearings before the Pub-
lic Service Commission of Utah. Besides writing columns for the
newspaper, he has published articles on methodology, industrial
policy, consumer behavior, environment and development, the so-
cial market economy, China's and the Soviet Union's approaches to
socialist social market economics, and on other topics (also in China,
Germany, and the Netherlands). Translations of his book. Business
Forecasting and Economic Cycles, and of several of his articles were
published in China.

Jacob J. Krahbe, Tulpenlaan 1, 6866 DT Heelsum, The Netherlands,
presently serves as Visiting Professor of Economics and as Coordi-
nator of the M.Sc. Program of Environmental and Resource Eco-
nomics at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (Crete),
Greece. He has held the positions of Associate Professor of Econom-
ics and Head of the Department of General Economics at
Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands. His academic
career began with a two year practical experience in the banking

IX

and trade sector of Indonesia. He earned his M.Sc. Degree at Erasmus
University and his Ph.D. at Wageningen Agricultural University,
The Netherlands. His research and publications are in the areas of
economic theory, history of economic thought, and in environmen-
tal and resource economics.

P.C. van den Noort holds the positions of Professor of Economics
and Chairman of the Department of Agricultural Economics and
Policy at Wangeningen Agricultural University, P.O. Box 8130, 6700
EW Wageningen, The Netherlands. He has served in teaching posi-
tions at Michigan State University and at the University of Limburg,
Belgium, and as a consultant for the OECD, the European Commis-
sion, and for the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture. He has published
in the areas of agriculture and the environment, land use problems,
technology, and economic methodology - most recently a book on
Chaos Theory and Evolution.

Cheryl Sink Rice is a sociologist and free lance writer, residing at-
711 N. Lakeshore Dr., Carrollton, GA 30117. She earned her B.A. in
Sociology at West Virginia Wesleyan College and her M.S. (Sociol-
ogy) and M.Ed. (Rehabilitation Services) at Auburn University. She
has taught sociology at the University of Tuskegee, Auburn Uni-
versity, and West Georgia College. She is active as a free lance writer
and has published articles in Parenting and Marriage and the Family
magazines.

Donadrian L. Rice serves as Associate Professor of Psychology
and Chairman of the Department of Psychology at West Georgia
College, Carrollton, GA 30118. He was awarded the B.A. (Psychol-
ogy) at Wofford College, the M.A. (Clinical Psychology) at Western
Carolina University, and the Ph.D. (Psychology) at the Saybrook
Institute in San Francisco. He is a licensed Professional Counselor
and a Marriage and Family Therapist. Previously, he has taught at
Auburn University and served as a therapist in mental health in
Lee County, Alabama. He is co-editor of a book Psychology of the
Martial Arts, member of the editorial board of The Humanistic Psy-
chologist, and past editor of the Transpersonal Psychology Interest Group
Newsletter. His research interests and publications are in the areas
of humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, medical psy-
chology, psychotherapy, and the psychology of martial arts.

William C. Schaniel is Associate Professor of Economics at West
Georgia College, Carrollton, GA 30118. Prior to coming to West
Georgia College, he has held teaching positions at Tennessee's
Tusculum College and Maryville College. He received his B.B.A.
degree from Gonzaga University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the
University of Tennessee at Knoxville. His research interests and
publications are in the fields of economic anthropology (with spe-
cial attention to Africa, India, and Polynesia), the economic history
of the Maori of New Zealand, and institutional analyses of economic
systems.

Henry Setter holds the position of Professor of Art at West Georgia
College, Carrollton, GA 30118. He studied at the University of Day-
ton (Ohio), where he received his B.S. (Education) degree, at the
University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and at the Gregorian Pontifi-
cal University (Rome). His professional art training started at the
Dayton Art Institute (Ohio), continued at the Ecole du Louvre (Paris),
and culminated at the University of Georgia, where he earned his
M.F.A. (Sculpture). He has taught Latin, German, theology, and art
during his thirty-seven year teaching career in high schools and
colleges. As a professional sculptor he has completed twenty major
commissions in the U.S. and Europe. His work has been honored
with numerous awards in competitive exhibitions and juried shows.

Michael Spyrou is Assistant Professor of Geography and Planning
at West Georgia College, Carrollton, GA 30118. His B.A. in Geogra-
phy and Education was awarded at Cyprus College, Cyprus; his
M.A. and Ph.D. were earned at the University of Oregon. He has
taught at the University of Oregon, University of North Carolina at
Wilmington, and in public and private schools on Cyprus. He has
also held consulting positions with the Rural Center of North Caro-
lina and DARE, Inc., dealing with the redevelopment of downtown
Wilmington, NC. Research interests and publications are in the ar-
eas of rural development (economic, community, and housing) and
tourism.

James Stephen Taylor serves as Professor of History and Chair-
man of the Department of History at West Georgia College, Carroll-
ton, GA 30118. He earned his B.A. degree at Northwestern Univer-

XI

sity, his M.A. at Georgetown University, and his Ph.D. at Stanford
University He also studied at the London School of Economics and
Political Science and at the Institute of Historical Research in Lon-
don. His teaching career began at Ohio State University and he held
the Koch Chair in the Humanities at Wells College. His research
interests focus on British social welfare history, especially of the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, i.e., of the early period of the
"industrial revolution." He has published articles and two books in
this field - Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolu-
tion and Jonas Hanway (an analysis of Christian mercantilism).

xu

xm

XIV

Economics in an Interdisciplinary
Perspective - Introduction

Siegfried G. Karsten

How societies forge and maintain the bonds which guarantee their
material survival constitutes the basic problem of economics. Simi-
larly, the basic problem of production is to devise socioeconomic
institutions which will mobilize human energy for creative and pro-
ductive purposes to attain as high a level of well-being as possible
with a given resource base. This necessitates that societies efficiently
organize systems of producing goods and services which they need
for their own perpetuation. Furthermore, they need to arrange for
systems of effectively distributing the fruits of production among
their citizens in order to stimulate more production. In the final
analysis, the continuing existence as a prosperous nation hinges on
the tacit precondition that the mechanism for socioeconomic orga-
nization will continue to function effectively.

People are prosperous, not as individuals, but as members of a
prosperous society. Hence, people's material well-being is actually
only as reliable as the bonds which forge them into a socioeconomic
whole. This implies a holistic, an interdisciplinary approach to so-
cioeconomic challenges, integrating economics with other social and
humanistic sciences in defining a paradigm which best addresses
the needs and aspirations of society and of its people.

I.

Wilhelm Roepke, a great defender of the principle of a free mar-
ket economy, was of the opinion that effective competition needs to
take place within a framework of ethical economic behavior, of so-
cial and economic justice, of human dignity and decency, and of
community and solidarity. (17, pp. 63, 119, 133-34, 182, 194)

In Roepke's view, it is a "catastrophic mistake" to assume that
the "market system" is autonomous in nature, that it is a natural
condition existing outside the political sphere, that it automatically
assures honorable conduct and solidarity, requiring no defense or
support. (17, pp. 118, 127-28) In other words, a viable market
economy needs a moral, political, and institutional framework, i.e..

2 S.G. Karsten: Economics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective - Introduction

minimum standards of business ethics (which now receive increas-
ing attention in schools of business), a strong state, sensible regula-
tions, and anti-monopoly policies. Therefore, the state ought to play
a positive though limited role in assuring not only the proper po-
litical and social framework for a free market economy but also for
a "free, happy, prosperous, just, and well-ordered society." (17, pp.
XV, 52, 181, 186, 192) To strengthen such a framework, he suggested
"conformable intervention," consisting of policies which least in-
terfere with the "nerve center of the price mechanism." (17, pp.
xv-xvi, 159-63) Roepke's basic premises have, at least in part, been
incorporated and applied in the paradigm of a social market
economy (e.g., in West Germany). The last paper in this volume.
Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in the Context of Social Market
Economics, by Siegfried Karsten, discusses these propositions and
their applicability in greater detail.

The front cover of this volume, designed by Henry Setter, reflects
these concepts of Wilhelm Roepke, as well as those of a social mar-
ket economy, in his depiction of Themis, the Greco-Roman personi-
fication of wisdom and justice. Similarly, the Preamble of the U.S.
Constitution states:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Pos-
terity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United
States.

What is meant by domestic tranquility, social and economic jus-
tice, and by general welfare? It appears that these concepts form the
"imaginary" battleground between the so-called conservatives and
liberals of all shades and orientations. The premises of social and
economic justice, however defined, that each citizen should be able
to lead a "productive" life, that unemployment, inflation, an unsat-
isfactory rate of economic growth, poverty, and a polluted environ-
ment, to mention some, are undesirable, are commonly accepted in
the U.S. It is also commonly agreed that the purpose of govern-
ment is to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Where
the disagreement arises is how to address these challenges.

Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Centesimus Annus, empha-
sized that although "the free market is the most efficient instrument

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 3

for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. ... there
are many human needs which find no place on the market." Fur-
thermore, "there exists something which is due to man because he is
man, by reason of his lofty dignity." (10, pp. 66-67)

Henry Setter, in Social Justice - An Artist's Commentary, asserts that
"justice is the hinge upon which the individual and society should
pivot with equity, impartiality, propriety and rationality." In his
perception, social justice, addressing numerous social challenges,
is not only a matter of economics but involves actions to restructure
socioeconomic institutions, which are beyond the scope of individual
action. As he sees it, the aim of social justice is to promote the com-
mon good by obliging individuals to work collectively for society.
The application of social justice does not eliminate the need for col-
laboration among individuals in checking and balancing socioeco-
nomic institutions nor does it replace government as an actor on
the socioeconomic scene.

Walter Eucken, one of the architects of the West German economic
miracle, was of the opinion that no socioeconomic policy is viable
in the long run which does not take into account people's desires
for a life in dignity. Hence, he called for the conscious shaping of a
socioeconomic system that also makes allowance for human free-
dom, justice, economic security or protection from economic calam-
ity beyond the individual's control, and efficient economic processes
to the maximum extent possible, combining advantages of compe-
tition with concerns for equity and justice - the hallmark of his
paradigm of a "social market economy." (3, pp. 123-32, 182; 4, pp.
76-77,91)

II.

These concepts of dignity, justice, tranquility, common welfare,
and others, in essence involve value judgements. William Schaniel
addresses the question of valuing means and ends as well as the
role of "trust" in traditional economic models in his paper Econom-
ics and Society: A Consideration of the Epistemology of Economics. Dem-
onstrating the interrelationship of epistemology, economic anthro-
pology, and "trust," he stresses the necessity of an interdisciplinary
perspective and approach in addressing economic, political, as well
as social challenges. Schaniel essentially makes the point that socio-
economic systems do not function in terms of fixed and stable rela-

4 S.G. Karsten: Economics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective - Introduction

tionships but are subject to dynamic processes of change, involving
communication, feedback, and continuity, as posited by "structur-
alism" and "functionalism." (11) Similarly, "quantum theory" chal-
lenges a mechanistic picture of the socioeconomic world. Metaphysi-
cal issues such as ethics, morality, and truth are as important to sci-
ence as empirical evidence. Furthermore, training, research, preju-
dices, customs, habits, etc., affect the basic assumptions and pre-
mises which the analyst formulates. (12)

New methodological insights brought to light by "chaos theory"
point out that an important characteristic of many economic vari-
ables is that they can and do change unexpectedly and discontinu-
ously, with their long-term effects on the economy often being un-
predictable. Although these changes or events may appear to be
random, they are not - being unpredictable does not necessarily
imply randomness. Chaos theory postulates that every event is
unique. Its occurrence distinguishes it from all other events and is
influenced by the entire labyrinth of past events. Hence, socioeco-
nomic phenomena cannot be separated from the universe of which
they are a part and then be reconnected in some causal relationship
with other "isolated" events. (16, p. 226)

Douglas Hilt's Economics and Social Morality reinforces the points
made by Setter and Schaniel. As he discusses, the socioeconomic
challenges facing society, such as energy, defense, education, trans-
portation, the inner cities, medical care, and special interests, to
mention some, are all interrelated. He calls on educators, politicians,
and community leaders to be more aware of the fact that all people
are sitting in the same boat, to consider a more humanitarian ap-
proach, greater balancing of the material and immaterial aspects of
life, and paying greater attention to the insights which social sci-
ences and the arts can contribute, i.e., advocating in essence an in-
terdisciplinary approach towards a more humane socioeconomic
setting.

III.

Stephen Taylor provides the reader with historical insights to-
wards this end in his review oi Industrial Speenhamland: British "Les-
sons" of History, furnishing valuable hints for contemporary policy
makers. The lesson to be learned from the "Speenhamland system"
is that a social safety net can play an important role in a dynamic

YJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 5

industrial society. Taylor points out that the British patchwork of
"social welfare provisions" of more than 200 years ago not only cre-
ated greater social stability but, most importantly, significantly pro-
moted the "industrial revolution." He finds so-called "evidence"
that these social safety net measures under-motivated or immobi-
lized the poor to be mostly anecdotal and inconsistent. Furthermore,
he observes that "social welfare provisions" are most satisfactorily
employed in areas which are economically growing and expand-
ing. This is in stark contrast to contemporary popular held notions
that "welfare" tends to deprive workers, and especially the poor, of
incentives to work and to limit their number of children. Taylor's
contention may have received additional credibility from a recent
study conducted at the National Bureau of Economic Research. This
study concluded, contrary to emotional charged rhetoric, that the
institution of Canada's national health insurance program increased
both long-term employment (by about 2 percent) and also wages.
These results are attributed to Canada's health insurance system
improving both workers' health and mobility, resulting in higher
worker productivity, which, in turn, induces firms to hire more
people. (6, p. 22)

Rawl's theory of justice, which essentially gives the moral justifi-
cation for many socioeconomic policies stipulates that

... all social primary goods - liberty and opportunity, income
and wealth, and the bases of self-respect - are to be distrib-
uted equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of
these goods is to the advantage of the least favored. (15, p.
303)

Although this, or similar theories of justice, have been applied to
justify inequalities in the distribution of income, in favor of upper
income groups, it could also be used to justify universal health care,
education, etc.

For example, it is generally recommended that former so-called
communist-oriented socioeconomic systems set up social safety nets
to facilitate their transitions to market economies, as is being done
in China and strongly suggested for Russia and other countries. A
rational social safety net, combined with welfare reform, education,
training, and health care, has the potential of invigorating the labor
force, increasing motivation and mobility. As Taylor suggests in his
research on "Christian Mercantilism," national wealth may be more

6 S.G. Karsten: Economics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective - Introduction

meaningfully defined in terms of a skilled, healthy, and motivated
labor force rather than in terms of the quantity of non-human re-
sources. The experiences of Japan and Switzerland may serve as
appropriate examples.

Taylor also suggests that the purpose of a socioeconomic system
is "high civilization" - human dignity and a balance between the
collective and individual good, not primarily greed and
self-gratification. Zbigniew Brzezinski recently warned of a spiri-
tual crisis in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. He sounded
the alert that "consumerism and hedonism are becoming our soci-
etal standards. Freedom is increasingly defined as the accumula-
tion of rights, entitlements, and a license for any form of
self-gratification." (1, p. 28)

Stanley Caress, in The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Re-
forms on the Attainment of Economic Security, Equity, and Justice, takes
the position that the national government can and should play a
significant role in actively promoting a greater sense of community
and solidarity, as well as subsidiarity and complementarity, as
Brzezinski apparently suggests. As Caress posits, the government,
especially the Congress, has the power to provide society with
greater economic security, economic fairness, and economic equity.
The question is, of course, whether Congress will do so. In this light,
the issue of Congressional reform is essential for a more equitable
social and economic order. The author defines economic justice in
his article in terms of all citizens having fair opportunities to accu-
mulate wealth, to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, and to
share in the economic resources of their nation.

IV.

Jacob Krabbe adds another dimension, in his Institutional Condi-
tions for Efficient Sustainable Development, to the points made by
Stanley Caress. Krabbe expresses concern about the basic structure
of a continuously evolving system of economic interactions which
ignores the role of "nature." He advocates an "economic structure
policy," defined to maintain and to improve a basic system of insti-
tutions that focuses on economic efficiency. However, economic ef-
ficiency is not to be defined solely in terms of "hedonistic" prefer-
ences and "natural" factors, but more importantly with reference to
social value judgements to make the socioeconomic system more

' West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 7

humane. This, in turn, demands a modification of the traditional
concept of "efficiency." Furthermore, "economic efficiency" needs
to be revaluated in the context of what he refers to as "sustainability
policy," a policy which pays close attention to "nature-preserving"
technological developments.

Krabbe is of the opinion that customary interest rates do not sat-
isfactorily ration scarce resources when nature and her resources
are taken for granted. To deal with this more rationally, he recom-
mends the establishment of a "normative discount rate," which
should evolve in the political process of a community of people who
accept responsibility for the long-term interests of mankind. Simi-
larly, Ulrich Hampicke suggested the adoption of a "rational-just
marginal interest" - one which is free of elements of both usury and
of irrational myopic motives - to facilitate intragenerational
allocative and distributive effects. (7, pp. 402, 410) In both instances,
however, the question that remains unanswered is how to measure
such a "normative discount rate" or "rational-just marginal inter-
est."

In line with Krabbe's call for "nature-preserving technological
developments," P.C. van den Noort's article: Growth as a Prerequisite
for Sustainability emphasizes the importance of a continuous pro-
cess of inventions and innovations. Van den Noort stresses that
"nature-preserving" policies cannot be equated with a
"zero-growth" policy, even in a highly economically developed so-
ciety. As he illustrates, adoption and implementation of a
"zero-growth" strategy would lead to a collapse of the existing so-
cioeconomic order. Such an approach would lessen people's will-
ingness to make sacrifices for the common good, e.g., for preserv-
ing and improving the environment, for the social infrastructure,
and meeting other socioeconomic challenges. As a result, the stan-
dard of living would suffer, society would be de-stabilized, and
people's desire for a life in dignity and freedom would be called
into question. In other words, "sustainability" would be impossible
under a scenario of "zero growth."

Michael Spyrou's Sustainable Development: Redefining Economic
Policy Goals rounds out the arguments made by Krabbe and van
den Noort. This article examines the concept of "sustainable devel-
opment" in greater detail; it focuses on economic development, and
reviews applicable policies. Spyrou is of the opinion that a policy of

8 S.G. Karsten: Economics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective - Introduction

"sustainable development" would enjoy broad-based support due
to its underlying synthesis of people's concerns for justice, equity,
economic efficiency, environmental integrity, and for a secure and
sustainable livelihood. As he points out, natural resources need to
be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many and not
merely for reasons of profit for a few. It reflects people's awareness
that environmental protection and economic growth and develop-
ment are complementary and not necessarily antagonistic in na-
ture. In other words, people and nature are interdependent with
many different acceptable ways of using nature and her resources
rationally. To facilitate this, he recommends a system of "cost ac-
counting of natural resources," including the defining of a "gross
ecological product" (GEP) to replace society's current GDP (gross
domestic product), which does not account for the depletion and
preservation of the environment and natural resources. Krabbe's
suggested "normative discount rate" or Hampicke's recommended
"rational-just interest" could serve important functions in defining
such a cost accounting system.

To fully account for the costs of using "nature," Hans Immler
recommends that she be treated as a factor of production, like labor
and capital, in order that nature's material wealth, including hu-
man labor, is not destroyed but preserved and expanded. He is of
the opinion that "nature" can no longer be taken for granted or which
can be exploited without substantial costs to society in the form of
air, soil, and water pollution, rapidly depleting natural resources,
soil corrosion, and environmentally-conditioned diseases affecting
not only man but also animals and the plant world. (8, pp. 15-25,
425-26)

To strengthen "sustainable development," Immler advocates that
traditional concepts of a market economy be transformed into those
of an "ecological market economy," based on four basic principles:
(a) Nature is productive, (b) Nature is produced, (c) Man and soci-
ety are products of nature. And, (d) Man and society create or en-
hance nature. (9, p. 224) To restructure the socioeconomic setting
according to the concept of an "ecological market economy," he
outlines a ten-point program consisting of: (a) Commitment to an
ecological-oriented order, (b) Set-up of a functional "nature system."
(c) Minimum compensation of nature (for its preservation), (d) Bud-
geting or cost accounting for nature, (e) A strategic nature initia-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 9

tive. (f) Ecological re-orientation of business and industry, (g) Econo-
mizing of nature through more ''market and planning." (h) An eco-
logical oriented legal system, (i) Work and environment - full em-
ployment through the rehabilitation of nature. And (j), preserva-
tion of nature in general and of endangered species in particular. (9,
pp. 296-313)

V.

The paper by Cheryl and Donadrian Rice, Humanizing the Work-
place for Increased Productivity and Worker Satisfaction, focuses on the
human element in the production process from a psychological per-
spective. The authors advance the argument that a more humane
workplace, characterized by greater flexibility and substantive com-
munication between labor and management, improves solidarity,
complementarity, and does not violate the principle of subsidiarity.
When both managers and workers learn to communicate more ef-
fectively with each other and when they become more sensitive to
each others' attitudes and feelings, they also tend to become more
responsive to change and exhibit greater adaptability to changing
requirements in the workplace. Hence, greater productivity can be
achieved, which, in turn, translates into better profits, more invest-
ments in plant and equipment, higher economic growth, rising in-
comes, a higher standard of living, greater social harmony, as well
as improved human dignity and social and economic justice.

The relevancy of the arguments by Rice and Rice for modifying
man's values towards a more rational and humane consideration
of the production process in general and of people in particular, has
been borne out by Jon Wisman. He calls attention to the importance
of synchronizing production processes with labor and management
as more equal partners. Wisman poses the question whether "de-
mocracy," with its underlying assumption of sharing responsibili-
ties in political decision-making processes, might not also be appli-
cable to other social domains, especially the workplace. (18, pp.
11-23) He is of the opinion that in an affluent, dynamic, industrial
society, there exists no long-term alternative to workplace democ-
racy. It will inevitably be brought about by intensifying domestic
and global competition, and by the necessity to increase productiv-
ity, profits, and the standard of living - points which are also made
by Rice and Rice.

10 S.G. Karsten: Economics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective - Introduction

Richard Fryman, discussing the question of Income Taxation and
Justice, suggests how the attainment of the above outHned goals may
be better faciUtated through tax reform. By analyzing the presently
applied structure of a progressive income tax, he concludes that it
is neither just, fair, nor humane. As a solution, he recommends re-
placing the current system of progressive income taxation with a
flat tax, exempting low income levels from taxation. Fryman is of
the opinion that this in itself would be tantamount to a progressive
tax but one which is fairer, more just, and more humane. He conjec-
tures that this type of tax reform would result in greater honesty
and compliance, enabling government to collect more tax revenues
with the same tax structure. Hence, more funds would be available
for meeting socioeconomic challenges, stimulating economic activ-
ity, and, therefore, move society in the direction of greater prosperity.

The proposition that financial institutions ought to be mobilized
for community development and socioeconomic objectives is dis-
cussed in David Boldt's paper: Financial Institutions and Community
Reinvestment: The Social Responsibility to Lend to the Nation's Poor Com-
munities. Boldt is of the opinion that banks, savings and loan and
other financial institutions have a social responsibility, if not a moral
obligation, to pay attention to the credit needs of local, especially
impoverished, communities. Similarly, he argues that it is neces-
sary for the federal government to play a more active role in com-
munity development. In order to face the socioeconomic challenge
to raise the standard of living in the inner cities and in rural com-
munities, it is essential that the private and the government sectors
complement each other towards achieving the social objective of
improving and increasing the housing stock of poor communities,
to reduce poverty, to create jobs, and, therefore, to lay the founda-
tion for a greater sense of community, solidarity, fairness, social and
racial harmony, and a more dignified life for a major segment of the
population.

VI.

The common theme that permeates the varied papers in this vol-
ume is that a meaningful private enterprise system needs to take
into consideration society's social interests and the interrelationship
between ethics, laws, government, and public policy. Siegfried

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 11

Karsten (in Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in the Context of
Social Market Economics) stresses that

Private enterprise and entrepreneurship are part of a wider
culture. They do not exist in a vacuum but are conditioned by
human aspirations as well as by socioeconomic, cultural, po-
litical, and environmental factors. A free enterprise system
which sticks to passive positions with regard to social chal-
lenges or rigidly insists on maintaining the status quo will find
itself increasingly out of step with changing socioeconomic
conditions.

The renown journalist and scholar Will Lissner observed:

Early in my life I was impressed by the fact that social life was
subject to two movements, one toward ethical and physical
progress, the other toward entropy (deterioration). ... I came
to believe that it was only through human intervention that
the former can be strengthened and the latter weakened. (2, p.
288)

In the words of Alfred Marshall: "government should govern as
little as possible but not do as little as possible." (14, pp. 336, 363)
This mandates, in essence, a "functional" free enterprise system,
which not only accommodates economic growth and change but
which also makes allowance for human dignity and freedom, inte-
grating economic principles with concepts of order and justice. As
the papers in this volume imply, and as this writer emphasizes, for
our socioeconomic system to remain viable in the long run, it needs
to transform itself into a more "socially responsive market economy."
The latter is thought of as a free enterprise system which combines
individual initiative with social progress. It should be a paradigm
within which entrepreneurs and citizens are encouraged to coordi-
nate their own interests with those of society.

The observations and conclusions of the varied papers in this
volume may be summarized by Erhard Eppler's observation that a
socioeconomic system only possesses validity if it offers people as
much freedom and self-determination as feasible, satisfies as many
of their needs and wants as possible, and safeguards for future gen-
erations conditions for a high quality of life. (5, p. 128) Or, quoting
Alfred Marshall: "... the wellbeing of the whole people should be
the ultimate goal of all private and public policy." (13, p. 47)

12 S.G. Karsten: Economics in an Interdisciplinary Perspective - Introduction

References

1 . Brzezinski, Zbigniew. "Crisis of the Spirit," Interview, American Legion, Janu-

ary 1994, pp. 28-29, 58-62.

2. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 101. Ed. Frances C. Locker. Detroit, MI: Gale Re-

search Company, 1981.

3. Eucken, Walter. Grundsatze der Wirtschaftspolitik. Eds. Edith Eucken Erdsieg

and Paul K. Hensel. Hamburg: Rohwolt Verlag, 1959.

4. . "Das Ordnungspolitische Problem," Ordo-Jahrbuch fiir die Ordnung

von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1, 1948, pp. 56-90.

5. Eppler, Erhard. "Wie gut sind die Besseren?" Der Spiegel, 8 February 1993,

pp. 128-33.

6. Farrell, Christopher. "Canada's Health Plan Gives Employment Figures A

Rosy Glow," Business Week, 28 February 1994, p. 22.

7. Hampicke, Ulrich. Okologische Okonomie. Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher

Verlag, 1992.

8. Immler, Hans. Natur in der okonomischen Theorie. Opladen, Germany:

Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985.

9. , Yom Wert der Natur. Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag,

1989.

10. John Paul II. Centesimus Annus. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1 May

1991.

11. Karsten, Siegfried G. "Dialectics, Functionalism and Structuralism in Eco-

nomic Thought," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 42, April
1983, pp. 179-92.

12. . "Quantum Theory and Social Economics," American Journal of

Economics and Sociology, 49, October 1990, pp. 385-99.

13. Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics. 9th ed. London: MacMillan and Com-

pany, 1961.

14. Pigou, A. C, ed. Memorials of Marshall. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.

15. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1971.

16. Rifkin, Jeremy. Entropy. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

17. Roepke, Wilhelm. The Social Crisis of Our Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-

tion Publishers, 1992.

18. Wisman, Jon D., ed. Worker Empowerment - The Struggle for Workplace Democ-

racy. New York: Bootstrap Press, 1991.

Social Justice - An Artist's Commentary

Henry Setter

Themis, the Greco-Roman personification of Wisdom and Jus-
tice, as depicted on the cover of this journal, testifies to the bUnd
objectivity required to guarantee impartial equity and genuine hon-
esty in providing to every human being what is rightfully due.
Themis ranked as the most important of the lesser gods among the
Titans and the Olympians, who vanquished the Titans and cast them
into the dark, bottomless Tartarus. Unlike her disgraced Titan broth-
ers, Themis merited honor and favor on Mount Olympus.

The three Fates - Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos - are credited
with matchmaking the wedding of Zeus with Themis at a time well
before Hera, Zeus' later Olympian wife, ever assumed her regal
marital role. For all the jealousy harbored by Hera for the numer-
ous escapades of her husband Zeus, Hera always remembers that it
was Themis who handed her the cup of nectar on the day of her
enthronement and wedding on Mount Olympus.

At Mount Olympus and at the Temple of Delphi, Themis offered
counsel and service. She maintained order there and organized the
Olympian and Delphic ceremonials. On earth, Themis protected the
just and punished the guilty. She was the goddess of justice. Judges
declared law upon her advice and decreed so in her name. Her wis-
dom prevailed at public assemblies and at the deliverance of oracles.
Her attributes are the blindfold, a pair of scales and the cornucopia.
Deliberately, her sword, a symbol of retribution and punitive sanc-
tion, has been omitted.

I. Justice

Speaking architectonically, we assert that justice is the hinge upon
which the individual and society should pivot with equity, impar-
tiality, propriety and rationality. Although justice can be perceived
both positively as "giving everyone what is due" or negatively as
"rectifying the wrong" through some form of compensation or pun-
ishment, it will be the positive perception that will be the primary
concern of this commentary. For this reason, no sword!

15

16 H. Setter: Social Justice - An Artist's Commentary

A further clarification appears to be in order. Real distinctions
need to be made concerning the variant forms of individual and
true Social Justice. Confusion among speakers and writers seems to
prevail. At the outset it must be understood that it is not sufficient
to address Social Justice issues merely in terms of commutative jus-
tice, distributive justice or legal justice. Briefly, commutative justice
is the virtue exercised between equals; that is, the due given to the
fellow person. Distributive justice influences the conduct between
superiors and subjects, between the "boss" and the "worker." Legal
justice regulates the individual's conduct toward society and soci-
etal conduct toward the individual. Alas, the latter virtue can be
officially binding without the law being truly just. Legal power can
be, and has been, abused.

II. Social Justice and Restructuring

Social issues concerned with the injustices burdening society at
any given moment in history are best addressed by the cooperative
effort of those directly and immediately involved. It is the day-in
and day-out experts in a specific realm of inequity who must at-
tempt to rebuild or restructure that institution of society that is hin-
dering the Common Good. Individuals in influential positions may
well recognize the social problems of inequity and may eagerly de-
sire to rectify the injustices, but they find that alone, by themselves,
they are helpless. For that reason, everyone bears the personal re-
sponsibility to collaborate with others also qualified in the respec-
tive areas of expertise. Social Justice is concerned with the restruc-
turing of those social institutions which hinder or prevent the Com-
mon Good; it is not merely limited to issues of economics.

Earlier in this century, the guaranteeing of a living family wage
for bread-winners was a major preoccupation of Social Justice in
the western world. Today, it is evident that the same problem still
exists in some of the less fortunate regions of the world. For that
reason. Social Justice still needs to be applied in those countries.
However, other violations of the Common Good in the western
world also require the application of Social Justice by those of us
who enjoy experiential know-how.

It is easy to be critical of the social institutions which seem to
cause the wholesale abuses of the Common Good: drug-dealing,
violence, massive ignorance, prejudice, illness and disease, inner-city

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 17

crime, homelessness, political corruption, deception in the media,
bribery, war, bigotry, etc. But how difficult it is to assume personal
responsibility for collaboration with others, who share the same
expertise, to make a difference for the Common Good. For example,
those in the medical profession fittingly should be the most able to
rectify the inequities that deny health care to the disadvantaged.
Obviously, when the medical profession fails in its duty to make
health care available to all, then the government must justly inter-
vene. The individual medical practitioner, for all the nobility of good
intention, is helpless. Ideally, the societal institution of medical prac-
titioners can affect the availability of health care for everyone; not
just for only those who are wealthy enough to pay.

Although the ancients recognized Themis as the personification
of Justice and Wisdom, the concept "justice" seems to have been a
vague optative for all of the virtues (sometimes called "cardinal"
virtues from the Latin "cardo" meaning hinge) that would make
for law-abiding citizens. Plato and Aristotle, in typical Greek fash-
ion, preferred the just man - the self-disciplined man - whose pas-
sions or emotions are always controlled by reason. Uncontrolled
passion was the mark of the brutish animal. Greek sculptures
preached the idealism, the perfection, befitting gods and men. In
fact, the perfect man was the prototype for their Greek god.
Protagoras had asserted in the fifth century B.C.: panWn chrematon
metron anthropos, MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS. Later,
Stoic philosophers concluded that justice was naturally discover-
able by human reason and is superior to positive law and custom.
The Stoics further argued that justice treats all men as equals. Plato's
justice did not. Interestingly enough, the Romans permitted the le-
gal institution of slavery in their empire even though they admitted
slavery to be contrary to natural justice. Strangely, these classical
ancients could sometimes put Wisdom on hold - Themis not with-
standing.

III. What Does Social Justice Demand?

It was the thirteenth century A.D. scholastic philosopher St. Tho-
mas Aquinas, sometimes indelicately dubbed the "Dumb Ox" by
his fellow monks, who redefined the vague Aristotelian "legal jus-
tice" as a special virtue aimed directly at pursuing and achieving
the Common Good. But Thomas Aquinas never clarified how this

18 H. Setter: Social Justice - An Artist's Commentary

"legal justice" was more specifically directed to the Common Good
than any other virtue. Only after several centuries, the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries to be specific, did a major trea-
tise on Social Justice appear.

The context of the document was prompted by the timely need
in the 1930s to attempt to guarantee workers' rights to earn living
family wages and to enjoy ownership of personal property. Com-
memorating the fortieth anniversary of the earlier Papal Encyclical
Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of the Working Class), written
by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 (9), Pope Pius XI addressed the topic of
"The Reconstruction of the Social Order" in his Encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno (10). Ten times Pius XI employs the term "Social
Justice" in this papal letter. However, the timely urgency then in
Europe and the USA, to confront the issues about a "living family
wage," the "right to own property," "labor conditions," "capital-
ism," "communism," etc., suggested then and suggests now to some
readers and commentators to conclude that "Social Justice" con-
cerns itself only with the issues of economics. Let us do a test run to
verify the presumptions or understanding of "Social Justice," with
reference to the following passage of Paragraph 71 of Pope Pius
Xl's Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno:

Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families
receive a wage large enough to meet common domestic needs
adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing
circumstances, social justice demands that changes be intro-
duced [into the system] as soon as possible whereby such a
wage will be assured to every adult workingman. (10, p. 426)

Without looking back to the text just cited, answer kindly this
question: "What does Social Justice demand?" Most respond quickly:
"A family wage." Look again! Don't confuse commutative justice (the
virtue that regulates actions and rights that should exist between
individuals) with Social Justice. Nor should one confuse distributive
justice (the virtue that regulates actions and rights between superi-
ors and subjects) with Social Justice. In the first sentence of the quoted
paragraph, the Pope clearly teaches that the employer does owe the
employee a family wage by virtue of distributive justice. But the
Pope also suggests a new wrinkle. For all the good intentions of the
individual employer, "existing circumstances" may hinder the ex-
ercise of rightful, proper distributive justice. Kindly go back to the

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIl, 1994 19

paragraph cited. What is the direct object of the verb "demands?"
rhe Pope proclaims that Social Justice demands SOCIAL ACTION,
BECAUSE THE INDIVIDUAL EMPLOYER IS HELPLESS. The ac-
tual passage reads: "Social Justice demands that changes be intro-
duced [into the system] as soon as possible ..." Social Justice de-
mands the REORGANIZATION OF THE SYSTEM. When the insti-
tutions of society are badly organized social INJUSTICE prevails.
For that reason, SOCIAL JUSTICE must restructure the institutions
3f society in order to safeguard the Common Good for all society.

IV. Responsibility for the Common Good

Social philosophers recognize "institutions of society" as aspects
3f social life in which distinctive value-orientations and pursued
interests generate specific modes of social interaction. Informal or
"natural" social groups such as "hayseed farmers," "city slickers"
3r "frontier cowboys" are easily recognized and clearly distin-
guished from the formal or "planned" social groups, such as realtors,
politicians, bankers, clergy, teamsters, physicians, professors, and
Dthers. Every institution of society, at whatever level (from the fam-
ily, neighborhood, city, state, province, nation, continent to an inter-
national forum), controls some aspect of human life and the net-
work of subordinate institutions.

Because each person participates in these different levels of hu-
man life and in the subordinate groups, no one is exempt from the
responsibility to work for the Common Good. It is only when indi-
viduals at the level of their respective competencies unite for coop-
erative effort can these specific groups (a.k.a. "social institutions")
affect the Common Good. Regrettably, the inveterate individualis-
tic moralist will protest screamingly: "Good example is what I give.
Who doesn't notice my honesty, my generosity, my trust of others?"
Left alone, the individualistic moralist will experience the dishon-
est taking advantage of the generosity and trust displayed. Social
evils are never remedied with only individualistic means.

V. Social Justice and Government

At no time does Social Justice replace effective government. Nor
should government eliminate the need for effective collaboration
of individuals in the checking and balancing of the institutions of
society. Frequently the government issues necessary legal decrees,
but these laws can remain ineffectual if they are not genuinely and

20 H. Setter: Social Justice - An Artist's Commentary

promptly implemented. Obviously, any deliberate violation of the
Law should be and will normally be prosecuted. But how often have
we not observed foot-dragging? The "March on Selma" has been a
long time ago. Consider, for example, the legal requirements en-
acted for "desegregation" and the declarations proclaimed for "equal
opportunities among all minorities" in the country. The laws are on
the books, but who will deny that the "white Plantation Owner"
has yet to die? That the "Male Supremacist" has yet to remove his
imagined crown and to quit playing "King of the Hill?"

Today, Social Justice must address the numerous social issues and
social concerns: the plight of the homeless ... the prevailing literary
ignorance in our society ... the desperation of the "battered" physi-
cally and emotionally ... the hopelessness of the addicted ... the in-
trusive violation of what is sacred and decent by the mass media ...
the greed of corrupt financiers and war mongers. We shall never be
relieved or absolved from our responsibility. Social Justice did ad-
dress the issues and concerns, and did confront the inequities in
labor, wages, and property rights in the 1930s.

VI. Conclusion

Social Justice is double pronged, because it aims to guarantee the
Common Good and to oblige individuals to work collectively for
society. These personal convictions, long held and enacted where
and when possible, have inspired the cover illustration of this issue
of the West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences. Themis, the
personification of Wisdom and Justice, is blindfolded but she is not
blind! Themis, the Protectress on Mount Olympus, weighs carefully,
exactly, and without prejudice the individual and societal rights to
the Common Good. Themis, the Delphic Oracle-Counsellor, shares
abundantly from her cornucopia for our social responsibilities. Are
we humans - men and women - truly up to being the measure of
all things?

References

1. Bokenkotter, Thomas. "Social Justice: The Church's Call to Action," in Essen-

tial Catholicism. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1986, pp. 352-76.

2. Curran, Charles E. American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth Century Approaches.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, pp. 56-61.

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 21

3. Calvez, J.Y. "Social Justice," in New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. Washing-

ton, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1967, pp. 318-20.

4. Eister, Allen W. "Social Structure," in A Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Eds.

Julius Gould and William L. Kolb. New York: The Free Press, 1965, pp.
668-69.

5. Ferree, William J. Introduction to Social Justice. Dayton, OH: Marianist Publi-

cations, 1948.

6. Guirand, F. "Greek Mythology ~ Themis," in Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythol-

ogy. Ed. Felix Guirand. London: Paul Hamlyn Limited, 1966, pp. 156-57.

7. Kelly, J.N.D. "Leo XIII and Pius XI," in The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 311-13, 316-18.

8. Kiing, Hans. "Social Relevance," in On Being a Christian. Trans. Edward Quinn.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978, pp. 551-89.

9. Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum. "On the Condition of the Working Classes." 15

May 1891. Boston: Daughters of St. Paul.

10. Pius XI. "Quadragesimo Anno," On Reconstruction of the Social Order, 15

May 1931, in The Papal Encyclicals. Vol. 3: 1903-1939. Ed. Claudia Carlen.
Wilmington, NC: McGrath Publishing Company, 1981, pp. 415-43.

11. Plamenatz,J.P. "Justice," in ADictionary of the Social Sciences. Eds. ]u\iusGou\d

and William L. Kolb. New York: The Free Press, 1965, pp. 363-64.

12. Rose, H.J. "Themis," in The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Eds. M. Carey, et al.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949, p. 891.

13. Schneider, Louis. "Institution," in A Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Eds. Julius

Gould and William L. Kolb. New York: The Free Press, 1965, pp. 338-39.

14. Smith, William. "Themis," in Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. New

York: AMS Press, 1967, p. 1023.

15. Stone, Merlin. "Themis and Dike," in Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1979, pp. 366-68.

Economics and Society:
A Consideration of the
Epistemology of Economics

William C. Schaniel

Economics, as a social science, is concerned with issues of valu-
ing means and ends of socioeconomic processes, involving questions
of livelihood and the issues surrounding it. Cultural variations in
livelihood processes - from the kula ring of the Trobriand Islands to
the caste system of India - are engendered by different structures of
valuing, which mandate interdisciplinary approaches to the studies
of livelihood. Unfortunately, cultural and interdisciplinary charac-
teristics, focusing on issues of social valuing, are not commonly con-
sidered in the models of standard or mainstream economics.

In general, mainstream economics tends to view history, anthro-
pology, sociology, and other social sciences to be insignificant for
economic inquiries. Similarly, questions of justice, community, and
trust - questions about the valuing of ends and means by society -
are often viewed as being irrelevant to economic analyses. This pa-
per will raise two inter-related questions. Why is economics not
interdisciplinary in its approach? Why are questions of social jus-
tice generally overlooked in economics? The answer to both ques-
tions may be found in the epistemology of mainstream economics.

The approach to answering these two questions will be cast in a
narrower context than is implied above. Rather than discuss the
wide range of social valuing issues, this article will focus on a single
issue - trust. Similarly, this paper will discuss only one of the mul-
titude of interdisciplinary approaches - economic anthropology. In
the conclusion, I will contend that the points made within these
narrow confines also apply more generally. Thus, within this nar-
rower range of scrutiny, this treatise will examine the question of
why standard economics appears not to be interested in social in-
terrelationships.

Before delving into analyzing "trust" in the context of econom-
ics, a definition of trust must be established. This will be done in

23

24 W.C. Schaniel: Economics and Society

the first section of the paper. The second section will discuss the
question of whether trust matters in economic analyses and in eco-
nomic systems. Finally, "trust" will be considered as an essential
component of socioeconomic systems.

I. A Definition of Trust

In the popular press, the term "trust" has been used in connec-
tion with politics, sales promotions, and community spirit. Popular
usage of the word implies a clear definition of "trust," but such a
definition is of little use for economic discourse. Newspaper col-
umns and statements, such as "Why Americans Don't Trust Repub-
licans" (3) and that an individual's "trust in humankind" has been
restored by the kind act of a stranger (1), are examples of simplistic
explanations of this concept. A 1960 cold war polemic plays off the
popular usage of "trust" in its title "You Can Trust the Communists
(to be Communists)." (15)

In these and numerous other cases, the term "trust" suggests a
faith in positive qualities, actions, or intentions of others. The con-
cept, though, does not imply positive outcomes for society. The
criminal trusts his confederates as much as the legitimate entrepre-
neur trusts his employees. Trust, as an article of faith, depends on
the one doing the trusting, and not on the one being trusted. For
example, in political discussions some people do not trust Demo-
crats - this could just as well read Republicans - because of their
personal certainty about the outcomes of proposed policies (e.g.,
suggested health care changes will destroy the ability of doctors to
provide the best care for their patients). A different group could be
equally certain about the outcomes which they perceive and, hence,
find that a reason to trust them (i.e., the proposed health care changes
will provide access to some basic health care for all citizens).

In other words, two individuals can look at the same informa-
tion, evaluate it in the same manner, yet arrive at different conclu-
sions. The difference is to be found in the valuing of outcomes, not
in the outcomes themselves. Thus, two individuals can have the
same belief in the certainty of actions, but differ as to whether they
trust or do not trust the individual or institution based on their valu-
ing of perceived outcomes. Without a universally agreed upon set
of valuations of outcomes, no interpersonal consistency of the term
"trust" exists. Indeed, the use of the concept infers more about the

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 25

beliefs of individuals than anything else. Hence, another source
beyond common usage must be found for a useful definition of trust.

The term "trust" does have meaning in the history of social sci-
ences. One of the formative debates for modern political science,
and for social science in general, were the debates over the legiti-
macy of governments. The debate, as framed by John Locke in the
seventeenth century, had three general camps: those who argued
for the divine rights of the rulers; those who thought that the rulers
were equals with the ruled; and those who viewed the rulers as
being servants of the ruled. John Locke developed, and advocated
the third position in his Two Treatises of Government. (9)

Locke in his formulation of a social contract attempted to legiti-
mize England's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, during which lead-
ing members of the nobility helped to depose James II. Locke ar-
gued that a government was the servant of the people and used the
term "trust" to express this concept. The obligation of the govern-
ing body was to implement the will or desires of the governed. Thus,
"Governments are dissolved ... when the legislative, or the Prince ...
act contrary to their trust." (9, p. 54) Government was not the mak-
ing of God, or natural in its organization, but rather derived from
the consent of men.

The focus of this paper, though, is not on political science but on
economics. Locke's definition is broad enough to encompass any
social process, including the processes of livelihood. In this
context," trust," as a socioeconomic process, embodies the idea of
social consent, that the institutions of a society exist to fulfill the
desires of members of society. Hence, economic as well as other in-
stitutions, are legitimized by their ability to meet the needs per-
ceived as important by the people. Trust, therefore, is indicative of
this broader social contract of which livelihood is but one element;
it is the belief in the fulfillment of the aspirations of a society. With
this definition in mind, we can move to the more perplexing ques-
tion of the relationship between trust and economics.

IL Economics and Trust

To discourse about trust in economic systems presupposes that
trust matters in economic affairs. If it does not matter, a discussion
of trust is irrelevant at best and definitely misguided from a scien-
tific point of view. The lack of discussion of trust in mainstream

26 W.C. Schaniel: Econoynics and Society

economics is because the topic is thought of as being irrelevant. The
reason that trust does not matter in standard economics involves
the epistemology of economics, that is how knowledge about eco-
nomics is arrived at and how it is organized by economists.

Epistemology is important. How a question is formulated or how
facts are to be explicated contours what data is to be collected and,
most importantly, the way it is to be analyzed. The evidence that is
researched to validate an argument is influenced by what is to be
proven. Max Weber posited that "all of our 'knowledge' is related
to a categorically formed reality ..." (16, p. 188) In other words, the
question that is sought to be answered defines both what we are
looking for and also how we look for it. Rephrased, the question
that is central to a discipline defines the "truth" it seeks to explain -
the epistemology of a discipline. This argument has been made in
more detail by other economists. (5)

John Locke is an informative example of the epistemology of stan-
dard economics. In Some Considerations of the Consequences of Lower-
ing the Interest and Raising the Value of Money, Locke develops what
some consider the first complete formulation of the quantity theory
of money. (8, pp. 1-22) He even hints at Irving Fisher's reformula-
tion two centuries later. (7, p. 267) The social order implicit in Locke's
formulation of the quantity theory of money is in striking contrast
to his earlier view of the importance of a social contract in establish-
ing political legitimacy.

As indicated above, Locke, in Two Treatises of Government, argued
that political systems were human creations subject to trust. (9, p.
54) This position differs from what he posited in Some Considerations
of the Consequences of Lowering the Interest and Raising the Value of
Money (8, pp. 54-89), in which he viewed economic relations to be
outside of the will of the participants and, thus, not subject to "trust."
This contrasting conclusion reflected his thinking about the rela-
tionship between economic variables. For example, the relationship
between money, its velocity, the price level and output he thought
to be immutable, not be contravened by the will of society. In mod-
ern economic theory, this immutability is a reflection of the
self -regulating nature of the system. The role of the state relative to
the economy is not to control it, but to insure the necessary condi-
tions for the satisfactory interplay of economic relationships. (8, pp.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 27

J4-89) This is the earliest presentation of the epistemological ap-
proach of modern mainstream economics.

In his essay on money (8), Locke muses about social will and the
economy. Locke assigned volition not to the legitimacy of the eco-
lomic system, as he did to political systems, but only to one ele-
Tient of the economy - money. It was created by common consent,
wssibly again foreshadowing modern concepts. (8, pp. 88-94) But
o Locke, the economy was not one of consent, but one of immu-
:able principles. His vision of the economy as a process beyond in-
lividual or social control and influence is consistent with the view
)f contemporary mainstream economics. This mode of thinking
:an be traced from Adam Smith, and his forerunners such as Locke,
:o present day economists in most texts dealing with the history of
economic thought. (12, pp. 37-38, 42-43) The economy is thought of
is an artifact of nature and not of man. However, this is not the only
epistemological tradition in economics.

Three broad epistemological approaches had evolved in econom-
cs by the turn of the twentieth century: the Classical /Marxist ma-
:erialistic approach which was founded on a labor theory of value;
:he historical /cultural approach of the German Historical, English
rlistorical, and American Institutional schools of thought; and neo-
rlassical demand and supply theory. Lionel Robbins, in 1932, re-
stated the neoclassical epistemology in its now familiar form. "Eco-
lomics is the science which studies human behavior as a relation-
ship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."
'13, p. 16) Robbins work presented not only a rejection of the first
:wo epistemological approaches, i.e., of the Classical /Marxist and
:he historical /cultural, but also a refinement of the neoclassical
[nethodology His definition of neoclassical economics was estab-
lished in part by attacking both the historical /cultural and the ma-
terialistic conception of economics.

The explicit dismissal of alternative epistemologies by Robbins,
in itself, formed an important element of his book. Prior to Robbins,
5ome economists took a more eclectic view of the nature of eco-
nomics. Marshall, for example, comments favorably on the work
3f the historical school of economics and occasionally employed
the comparative method of the historical approach. (11, pp. 774-78)
This eclectic pursuit may have led Marshall to conclude that "eco-
nomics contains no long chains of deductive reasoning." (11, p. 781)

28 ]N.C. Schaniel: Economics and Society

Robbins, on the other hand, rejected the vaUdity of the alternative
historical and materialistic approaches as well as the eclectic method.
He sought not only to establish the epistemological basis of eco-
nomics but also its epistemological purity.

Robbins' argument, that allowed for the absolute rejection of the
alternative epistemologies, represented the absolute immutability
of the neoclassical epistemology This was logically predicated on
two parts - first, the inherent nature of the problem, and second,
the universality of the process of solution. To establish the first,
Robbins reasoned that "economics brings into full view the conflict
of choice which is one of the permanent characteristics of human
existence." (13, p. 30) The second part of the argument placed the
neoclassical tools of economic analysis on the same plane as those
of natural science.

Economic laws describe inevitable implications ... In this sense
they are on the same footing as other scientific laws, and as
little capable of "suspension." If, in a given situation, the facts
are of a certain order, we are warranted in deducing with com-
plete certainty that other facts which it enables us to describe
are also present. To those who have grasped the implications
of the propositions set forth in the last chapter the reason is
not far to seek. If the "given situation" conforms to a certain
pattern, certain other features must also be present, for their
presence is "deducible" from the pattern originally postulated.
(13, pp. 121-22)

Robbins thus posits a relationship between data and logic that
has become the position of standard economics. Evidence for the
validity of analysis is not established in the context of data but in-
dependent from the data under consideration. The validity of the
analysis was inherent - that is, deductively derived - in the tools.

The argument for the immutability or universality of economic
laws implies that the economy operates on principles which are
beyond human creation and control. This has important conse-
quences for the actor or participant in economic relations as well as
for the observer of those relations. For the actor, the system is greater
than the sum of its parts. This is because the consent of the partici-
pant, or even his awareness, is unnecessary for the operation of the
system. The actors need not be conscious of these laws because
they act "as if they occurred in a hypothetical and highly simplified

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 29

world containing only the forces that the hypothesis asserts to be
important." (2, p. 40) In other words, the participant is unimportant
for the functioning of the system. For the observer or economist,
the approach defines appropriate and inappropriate lines of inves-
tigation. Thus, according to Milton Friedman:

... the canons of formal logic alone can show whether a par-
ticular language is complete and consistent, that is, whether
propositions in the language are "right" or "wrong." Factual
evidence alone can show whether the categories of the "ana-
lytic filing system" have a meaningful empirical counterpart,
that is, whether they are useful in analyzing a particular class
of concrete problems. (2, p. 17)

The role of categories for the organization of knowledge that Max
Weber perceived is reversed. That is, the model is derived from logic
first and evidence is valued only as illustrations of logical processes.
Since economic systems are driven by forces outside of and are un-
affected by the participants, questions about the participants' inter-
action with the system are unimportant.

In the context of the epistemology of standard economics, "trust"
would be a description of noise, rather than of substance, in such a
system. Hence, no individual or group can permanently contravene
inherent economic processes. Thus, the question of trust is an un-
important question in mainstream economics because of the belief
that economic processes are irresistible and external to the partici-
pants.

Furthermore, Robbin's argument that the neoclassical epistemol-
ogy was immutable resulted in his rejection of the possibility of
other social sciences making contributions to economics. The so-
cial, behavioral, as well as historical contexts of an event were
thought to be unimportant to the economic analysis of that event.
The role of data was to illustrate the argument rather than to estab-
lish it.

It follows from the argument of the preceding sections that the
subject matter of Economics is essentially a series of relation-
ships - relationships between ends conceived as the possible
objectives of conduct, on the one hand, and the technical and
social environment on the other. Ends as such do not form
part of this subject-matter. Nor does the technical and social

30 W.C. Schaniel: Economics and Society

environment. It is the relationships between these things and
not the things in themselves which are important for the econo-
mist. (13, p. 38)

Other economists have reiterated this argument in their rejection
of an interdisciplinary approach to economics. Frank Knight asked
and answered the question "as to 'what use' anthropology can be
to the economist ...?" (6, p. 516) Knight reasons that "as to the sig-
nificance of [anthropology] in economic exposition, the answer must
be that it usually makes little or no difference whether the compari-
sons are anthropologically authentic or not." (6, p. 516) This is true
because

... of the categorical difference ... between economics as an ex-
position of principles - which have little more relation to em-
pirical data of any sort than do those of elementary mathemat-
ics - and as a descriptive exposition of facts. From the oppo-
site point of view, there is this difference - that any intelligent
or useful exposition of facts imperatively requires an under-
standing of the principles, while the need for facts in connec-
tion with the exposition of principles is far more tenuous, and
the "facts" which are really in question need not be facts at all
in the sense of actuality for any particular point in time or space,
provided they are realistically illustrative. (6, p. 516)

If information did not conform to the model at hand, more ap-
propriate data was to be sought to make the proper illustration.
Indeed, the data used to illustrate the logic of economics did not
have to be behaviorally accurate. It only has to be accurate in the
context of the principle being illustrated. Anthropology, and by
extension any social science, is of use only if it provides examples.
However, within the context of the epistemology of standard eco-
nomics, the social sciences cannot provide any useful insights into
economic processes.

The epistemology of those engaged in interdisciplinary ap-
proaches to economics differs significantly from those in orthodox
economics. From the perspective of economic anthropology, the
economy - processes of livelihood - are part of the culture. There
are no innate institutions or patterns of doing things for obtaining
livelihood. Man "has no 'natural disposition' to barter." (4, p. 15)
The variations in livelihood processes that are described in the lit-
erature of economic anthropology are broad. For example, in the

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 31

Trobriand yam system, described by Bronislaw Malinowski (10),
there was a complete circuit of yam transfers. Every man had a
biological or adopted sister to whom to give yams to, and a sister or
wife who received them from some kind of brother. It represented a
symmetrical circuit with many stations, of pairs of givers and re-
ceivers, and never reversing roles - the party that a household gave
yams to was different from the party that the household received
yams from.

Another example of the diversity of livelihood systems can be
found in the Indian village economy, which can be viewed as an
arrangement among castes. It is a system of reciprocity between
castes. Members of each caste produce the caste's own specialty for
members of other castes, as needed or as appropriate to circum-
stances, sometimes having to do more work, sometimes less. As
members of the circuit, the non-cultivating castes receive food from
the farming castes (which is their specialty). Each caste performs
duties for others and each benefits as others do their duties. In other
words, the Indian village economy represents a complex, integrated
circuit of obligatory performance without directly associated or
immediate recompense, but in which each was nevertheless recom-
pensed. The institutions of livelihood are means created to achieve
ends which were defined by the participants. Every society varies
in the ends desired, the boundaries of appropriate and inappropri-
ate behavior, and the processes of achieving those ends. Thus, from
the viewpoint of economic anthropology, trust - the actualization
of social will - is reflected in the diversity of livelihood systems.

III. Trust as Process

Trust, or the actualization of social will, is an element in the pro-
cesses of change. The valuing of new opportunities that arise from
technology, culture contact, and variance in societal parameters re-
sult in changes in rules, institutions, and the processes of livelihood.
New opportunities do not carry any values with them, but instead
are valued in the context of the adopting society. This process of
valuing is important. If new opportunities carry values with them,
then the expression of the desires of society are as unimportant in
the process of change as they are assumed to be in the immutable
epistemology of standard economic analysis.

32 W.C. Schaniel: Economics and Society

The cultural history of white potatoes serves as a useful illustra-
tion of the process of adoption. The Incas of South America consid-
ered white potatoes to be food for those of high status; their cultiva-
tion was closely monitored. Europeans, however, in adopting the
white potato, did not accept the white potato ceremonies of the Incas,
nor the Incas' valuing of white potatoes as a food to be eaten by
important people. Indeed, the white potato was considered to be
an inferior food in Europe, and was even banned for some time in
several of its regions. (14, p. 112) By the late seventeenth century,
however, the white potato was widely adopted in Ireland. Popular
myth of the day, tied the Irish adoption of the potato to their low
standing as a people.

The later European introduction of the white potato to the native
Polynesians of New Zealand, the Maori, resulted in another rever-
sal of the social role of the white potato. It was viewed by the Maori
as a food appropriate for chiefs and feasts. Hence, the valuing of
white potatoes by the Maori was independent of the valuing of the
Europeans who introduced them. Indeed, the Maori adapted their
sweet potato techniques and ceremonies to the cultivation of white
potatoes.

The process of valuing a new opportunity is done within the con-
text of the adopting society. This process of adoption takes place
within the context of what is considered appropriate or inappropri-
ate - the frame of reference - of the adopting society. That is, pro-
cesses of valuing and integrating are part of the processes of ex-
pressing social will or trust.

Trust is not just a feature of economic change, but a feature of the
general processes of livelihood. The effectiveness of leaders in many
tribal cultures - African, Polynesian and American Indian, for ex-
ample - are often attributed to their effectiveness in manipulating
events and the symbols of society in order to build a consensus of
support. Tribal tasks were undertaken in Polynesia after the chief
had mustered the support and commitment of the tribal members.
An effective chief could marshal the tribe to produce the food and
gifts necessary to conduct inter-tribal relations which were deemed
necessary to maintain and expand the status of the tribe. In other
words, livelihood is integrated into the fabric of society in part by
trust.

V^est Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 33

IV. Conclusion

The epistemology of standard economics precludes issues of valu-
ing of means and ends of economic processes. The universal nature
of the economic problem and the processes of its resolution meant
that the data of other social sciences at best could provide examples
of these processes, but could not furnish any additional insights,
into the processes.

This epistemological approach is implicitly rejected by social eco-
nomics by its interdisciplinary approach and analysis of the valu-
ing of social means and ends. Trust, justice, and community are
important elements of analyses for economists because of their im-
pact on economic processes, which can only be comprehended
within the context of broader social processes. This broader social
context, that encompasses economic processes, can only be fully
understood by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach.

References

1. "Carrollton Thanked", The Times-Georgian, 16 February 1993, p. 4.

2. Friedman, Milton. Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1953.

3. Gigot, Paul A. "Potomac Watch: Why Americans Don't Trust Republicans,"

The Wall Street Journal, 5 March 1993, p. A8.

4. Hoyt, Elizabeth Ellis. Primitive Trade. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1926,

1968.

5. Karsten, Siegfried G. "Quantum Theory and Social Economics: The Holistic

Approach of Modern Physics Serves Better Than Newton's Mechanics
in Approaching Reality," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology,
49, October 1990, pp. 385-99.

6. Knight, Frank H. "Anthropology and Economics," The Journal of Political

Economy, 49, April 1941, pp. 508-23.

7. Kuhn, W. E. The Evolution of Economic Thought. 2nd ed. Cincinnati:

South- Western Publishing Co, 1970.

8. Locke, John, Some Considerations of the Consequence of Lowering the Interest and

Raising the Value of Money. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1692, 1977.

9. . Tiuo Treatises of Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1690,

1962.

10. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: George
Routledge & Sons, 1922.

34 W.C. Schaniel: Economics and Society

11 . Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume. 8th ed. Lon-

don: Macmillan and Co., 1930.

12. Rima, I. H. Development of Economic Analysis. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin,

Inc., 1972.

13. Robbins, Lionel. An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.

2nd ed. London: Macmillan and Co., 1932, 1948.

14. Salaman, RedcUffe N. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge:

At the University Press, 1949, 1970.

15. Schwartz, Fred. You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists). Englewood

Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1960.

16. Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Trans, and Eds. Edward A.

Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949.

Economics and Social Morality

Douglas Hilt

It would be immoderate vanity on my part to compare myself to
Robert Reich, widely considered to be one of President Clinton's
closest advisors on economic policy and co-author of Putting People
First, the Clinton 1992 campaign economic gameplan. To my sur-
prise I learned that Reich is not an economist by training, an omis-
sion that darkened his prospects for tenure at Harvard. Faced with
this daunting academic battle, Reich wisely turned instead to the
more attainable task of helping solve the nation's myriad economic
problems. I am even less an economist by profession - for my sins I
labor in the ever-fractious groves of foreign languages and litera-
tures. That one in my field may have interests beyond modish liter-
ary theory and esoteric linguistics (to my shame I confess a prefer-
ence for old-fashioned language and literature) may surprise some.
In this essay 1 shall cheerfully leave the four trillion dollar national
deficit and any peace dividend to the experts, and concentrate in-
stead on areas that professional economists may choose to over-
look or dismiss entirely. These include problems related to educa-
tion and the inner city, humane imperatives, the need for clear pri-
orities, and consideration of a host of social implications that im-
pinge on all our lives.

I. The Role and Responsibility of Economics

One of the few benefits from the 1992 protracted election cam-
paign was a heightened public awareness of the pivotal role that
economics plays in our daily lives. Thanks especially to candidates
Ross Perot and Bill Clinton, the mounting national deficit with all
its social implications was presented to the public in clear outlines.
Less obvious, but in the long run of equal importance, are the so-
cial, moral, and aesthetic considerations that must inform the deci-
sions to be taken. Today, economics is no longer the "dismal sci-
ence" restricted to making financial sense out of recalcitrant raw
data while seeking to provide theoretical and practical applications
to specific economic problems. Rather it must in today's world in-
volve itself with a whole host of related questions that a previous

37

38 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

generation of business-oriented economists might well have
shrugged off as being none of their concern. What will be the social
effects of governmental decisions on the environment? Are there
aesthetic values we should address that don't make strict economic
sense yet which contribute to our inner sense of well-being and that
of the larger community? Belatedly, recognition is growing that so-
cial consequences and the overall quality of life are linked in an
all-encompassing economic framework.

Ultimately, economics is a matter of priorities considered and
decisions carried out. Our cities, industries, schools and museums,
the landscape we view, whether rural or urban, our work condi-
tions, how we travel from place to place, what we breathe and eat,
even our leisure activities - all of this and much more, stem from
economic choices made and subsequent actions taken. As citizens
who vote for officials at local, state, and national levels, we are all
involved, like it or not. Just as politics, religion, the arts, the applied
sciences impinge on many facets of life, we now see that economics
affects nearly every aspect of our daily course. There is a growing
sense that in social priorities - health care, family leave, unemploy-
ment benefits and job security, to name but a few - as a nation we
are lagging behind not only Western Europe but Canada, our own
neighbor to the north. If American academicians win nearly every
Nobel Prize for Economics, why are we seemingly incapable of cur-
ing our own ills?

Perhaps as a European transplanted to America 1 can venture
some clues. 1 am repeatedly taken aback by the dangerous double
myth that is widely accepted in the U.S., especially during national
elections: namely, that Americans are taxed beyond endurance, and,
as a somewhat shaky corollary, they need only toss out the villains
in the state capitals and in Washington for unsullied outsiders to
step in and solve every problem. Frequently the promise not to raise
taxes is the only one politicians keep (though the national deficit is
now so forbidding that recent presidents have had no option but to
renege). Despite Ronald Reagan's failure to keep his campaign
pledge to balance the budget, he won easy reelection in 1984, due in
large part to Walter Mondale's temerity in suggesting a tax increase.
It can easily be proven that West Europeans pay a noticeably higher
percentage of their salaries in taxes than Americans do. Gasoline
prices are often triple what they are in the U.S. (ask any returning

}Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 39

tourist who has rented a car), yet, until recently, we have stead-
fastly refused to pay the few cents more that would cut back on oil
imports and at the same time help reduce the federal deficit.

II. Mistaken Economic Priorities

Clearly we need to distinguish between genuine and false issues,
between arguments of real merit and those that are selfish and which
only offer short-term palliatives. Aspiring legislators of integrity (in
contrast to poUtical hacks) must repudiate facile cliches such as "gov-
ernment is not the solution, government is the problem" and is there-
fore incapable of solving anything. In fact any number of pressure
groups and lobbyists devoutly believe just the opposite, as is dem-
onstrated when businesses run into economic trouble. In these situ-
ations it behooves Washington to provide bailouts and guarantees
no matter to what extent such action distorts the free market. A like
consideration applies to the closing of military bases in a candidate's
home district with the attendant loss of jobs. The ethical office-seeker
faces many a cruel dilemma: dare he or she spell out the need for
sacrifice and extra taxes to help achieve the national long-range goal
which may only show positive effects far beyond the candidate's
own term of office? And what about the politician who presumes to
advocate strict gun control laws or the rights of women to an abor-
tion? Remaining true to one's convictions may prove fatal to get-
ting elected, while an opponent with fewer qualms and a more
malleable stand will be in place to influence future legislation.

In today's world, emphasis on the role of government is inescap-
able. Not only have the twelve years from 1980 to 1992 witnessed a
near quadrupling of the national debt, but, Reaganite protestations
to the contrary, the Administration has become directly involved in
multiple facets of our daily lives. We are now paying a heavy price
for more than a decade of self-indulgence to the point of national
bankruptcy, to superficial images of "feeling good" and "standing
tall." The piper is at last presenting his bill for the massive failures
of banks and savings institutions, for leveraged buyouts of compa-
nies, for inside speculation and manipulation of stocks and bonds.
As a nation we have very little of a positive nature to show for such
profligacy.

True fiscal conservatives, who care to remember the origin of the
word, are among the first to concede that the Reagan /Bush years

40 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

were an aberration of traditional rightist tenets. Nor must we forget
that both houses of Congress, with Democrat majorities, went along
with this adventurism. There is much to answer for on both sides of
the political aisle, though the current reform atmosphere in Wash-
ington and in state capitals gives cautious grounds for optimism.
The same holds true for business. Dare we hope that producers and
manufacturers will no longer be solely driven by the profit motive
and keeping their shareholders happy, even less so by cynically
charging "what the traffic will bear?" Our leaders are beginning to
recognize that economic problems are not merely isolated financial
exercises but are at heart human and social concerns in which the
better placed must sacrifice something in order to help those who
have fallen through the social net. This, of course, is the essence of
all religions and altruistic philosophies, and ultimately what de-
fines the worthiness of human society.

Such considerations are not merely theoretical. Honesty, even in
state capitals where shameless manipulation has hitherto been the
rule, increasingly becomes its own reward. More and more backroom
politicos are being replaced with men and women of conviction who
possess a broader grasp of the overall socioeconomic picture. True
enough, the powerful committees in both houses of Congress are
still determined by seniority, and many projects are still of the boon-
doggle and pork barrel variety. The good news is that these waste-
ful expenditures are receiving closer scrutiny and more open criti-
cism. A bi-partisan commission has been set up to study closings of
military bases, specifically to avoid party politics. No district, espe-
cially one where unemployment is already running high, is ever
happy to receive the sad news of a closing, but at least the manner
in which the decision is reached can be seen as objective and as
impartial as possible.

But a serious ethical question now intrudes: do powerful corpo-
rations over the years acquire a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo? More specifically, does the arms industry at heart wel-
come continued international tensions and, together with the mili-
tary, benefit from the threat of an external enemy? By all accounts
the Gulf War of 1991, in strict financial terms, showed a serendipi-
tous profit due to the sizable contributions exacted from nations
dependent on Arab oil. The morality of waging a highly techno-
logical war, resulting in the death of upward of 100,000 young Ira-

YJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 41

qis, has never really been addressed by the American people, nor
for that matter our responsibility in the events leading up to the
conflict. Similarly, few universities seriously debated the rationale
of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), viewed by many as
an unabashed defense-industry gravy train with little chance of ever
proving effective. Yet how many research scientists stifled their
doubts and quietly accepted lucrative long-range contracts? The
services of these minds and others were lost to the nation, making
competition with Germany and Japan that much more difficult. To
make the most of any peace dividend, we must ensure that the best
brains are free to bolster the productive economy and address ur-
gent social needs.

III. The Future of Transportation

If, as a nation, we are prepared to go to war to defend faraway
oilfields, then we must also see ourselves as others see us. Having
long since frittered away our own resources in past decades by driv-
ing steel behemoths that barely achieved ten miles a gallon, we are
now dangerously dependent on foreign oil. But how distant Presi-
dent Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war" on wasted sources
of energy seems today! The days of oil embargoes and testy lines at
the gas pump have long since been forgotten; powerful vehicles are
all the rage, the kids are back to cruisin' the streets and idling their
motors while lining up for another 'burger (who needs clean air?).
Happy days are here again, well, at least for some.

In a nation so dependent on the car, the Big Three of Detroit have
long played a dominant role in the economy, but with little con-
straining ethical sense. Alain Lipietz, the well-known French econo-
mist, in a recent book (3) has described how Henry Ford eagerly
adopted Frederick Winslow Taylor's principle of timed tasks which
took the artisan skill out of work and in turn led to mass produc-
tion. The result was that a whole host of products - in this case,
motor vehicles - became available to a wider public. In the process
niggling questions dealing with inhumane work conditions on the
relentless production line were dismissed as irrelevant at best and
unpatriotic at worst. Costs were kept low to make cars affordable,
but so were quality and especially safety features (any emphasis on
the latter was seen as implied criticism of the industry). Detroit
fought the introduction of head supports, padded dashboards, ra-

42 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

dial tires, and double braking systems, all of which were introduced
by foreign competitors. A one-piece bench up front (as in
horse-drawn carriages) was deemed sufficient for all passengers.
The advertising was blatantly false: the pretty girl perched on the
hood never came with the car.

Today, thanks largely to European and Japanese competition, the
emphasis is on quality and safety. Few would dispute that Ameri-
can cars have improved greatly, but the heritage of planned obso-
lescence - more accurately, early and frequent replacement - dies
hard. Now, with over a third of all cars sold in America being of
foreign origin, the price paid in lost jobs, lowered confidence, and
customers vowing never again to be defrauded, is beyond calcula-
tion. Yet despite high unemployment in the auto industry, affluent
Americans are still buying luxury foreign cars such as the Mercedes
and the Lexus (in some upscale residential areas Alfa Romeos and
Maseratis are also favored). Why such supercharged outrageously
expensive cars are necessary in dawdling traffic is not for the econo-
mist but rather for the psychologist to answer. While the ethics of
such purchases may be argued, Detroit remains the classic caution-
ary tale of an industry that lost its sense of responsibility.

Parallel with the above is the sorry state of public ground trans-
portation in America. There is considerable evidence that the tire
industry during the 1940s helped sound the death knell for buses
and streetcars in many major cities, reducing a once
all-encompassing transportation system to a patchwork of its former
self. The transcontinental trains with their proud names were next
to go, followed by shorter distance intercity services. The vestiges
of this wanton neglect are there for all to see: rusting tracks, run-
down rolling stock, and generally indifferent service. Amtrak and
freight trains alike are depressingly prone to topple off the rails due
to sheer fatigue. Meanwhile, our overreliance on petroleum contin-
ues unabated, no matter the destruction wrought upon wildlife and
the environment through its extraction and shipping. In the next
century the world's oil supply is expected to diminish noticeably,
once more bringing train travel to the fore. Given the lack of any
long-range planning, in all likelihood the fast interurban trains and
the highspeed track required will all come from abroad. Why is there
no American TGV or Bullet Train? In economic and social terms.

Yiest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 43

A^hy were the vital questions never asked and acted upon accord-
ngly? Are we any more serious today?

IV. Urban Considerations

Which brings us to the parlous state of our cities, perhaps the
jingle most vexing issue facing the nation. A whole host of bedevil-
ing crises descend on the urban planner, many with no ready solu-
:ion. Such are the urgent needs, the reconstruction of our inner city
renters could swallow up the nation's tax resources for years to come,
flecently I took the shuttle bus from downtown Manhattan out to
La Guardia airport. Though by no means the worst urban blight in
Sfew York, even so, block after block of dilapidated row housing,
graffiti- scrawled walls, rusty cars and other junk in front yards and
ilong the cracked sidewalks, was as depressing as anything I had
jeen during the two years I lived in Mexico City. At street corners
>tood forlorn groups of men of all ages, with scant prospect of any
asting job. Pent-up frustration was visible on their faces, revealing
:he dehumanising effect of extended unemployment. These beings
ire not just economic statistics, to be measured in numbers and per-
zentages, but men and women of flesh and bone who feel and suf-
fer intensely. Describing Los Angeles nearly a year after the 1992
disturbances. Norma Cook, the assistant director of Operation Re-
wound, observed: "People's real concerns center on jobs and hous-
ing. It's an economic issue. That's at the bottom of the feeling of
hopelessness." (1, p. 35) There could be no plainer link between
economics - the means available to bring about much-needed
:hanges - and social morality, the driving force behind any such
determination.

Here civic leaders bear a great responsibility. Highly visible
projects clearly pay the best political dividends to candidates and
incumbents. A new stretch of highway or a wider bridge is there for
all to see and use, and perhaps one day will even bear the name of
the official who sanctioned the funds. Underground sewage and
drainage systems, on the other hand, provide little incentive, even
though they have a far more direct bearing on the health of the av-
erage citizen. Few city mayors would care to run on a platform urg-
ing the affluent to pay for the effluent (admittedly, not the most
catchy of slogans), but it is environmental priorities such as these
that help determine the quality of urban living for everyone. Simi-

44 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

larly, our hastily constructed and poorly planned housing develop-
ments, whatever the short-term benefits, are little better than the
crudely built and justly despised Stalinallee in East Berlin, future
shantytowns on a vast scale, the negation of any except the most
basic human needs. Do we not have a right to expect more than this
from our politicians, from our universities which trained these pro-
fessional planners, and our citizenry who, by refusing to pay more
taxes, pay later in far more significant ways?

If for the most part European cities have done better, surely it is
because the spiritual and aesthetic needs of their inhabitants have
been taken into account. There is a realization that urban planners
must address the whole person, not just the dollars-and-cents effec-
tiveness of a project, that crowded inner cities benefit immensely
from greenery, fountains and lakes, extensive flowerbeds, the occa-
sional curve to relieve the monotonous rectangular look of apart-
ment buildings. Children react positively to imaginative play areas
and to the sense that some token of nature has come to the city.
Access for all to public gardens, museums, subsidized concerts and
theatre - all appeal to the child's imagination and allow the person
to develop an aesthetic sense and pride in oneself and in one's com-
munity. None of this comes cheap, but then neither does the cost in
human and physical terms of clearing up a ghetto racked by days
and nights of widespread violence. As it is, the disparity of housing
in America, from grandiose residences to piteous shacks, is uncon-
scionable for any form of government, let alone in a self-proclaimed
democracy.

V. Educational Planning

In any community the schools, colleges and universities tradi-
tionally play a major part in determining social patterns. Taken as a
whole, American graduate schools are without a doubt the best in
the world. Certainly the university libraries, laboratories and other
educational facilities are far and away the best I have seen in any
country. It is all the sadder that, despite prestigious departments
and highly qualified faculty, this fails to translate into a better edu-
cated populace living in aesthetically pleasing cities and working
at satisfying jobs. All too often undergraduates turn into unmoti-
vated degree-assemblers, only too glad to escape once they tot up
the magic number of credits.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 45

The picture is even less encouraging at the pubUc school level.
Local schools vary enormously in educational quality, ranging from
the excellent (especially those near a major university) to the totally
inadequate. Some states, notably in the South, simply lack the nec-
essary resources to support a quality school system. More critical -
and unacceptable - are the wide disparities within the same city or
county, often along income or racial lines. Another factor is the lo-
cal taxpayers' willingness (or lack thereof) to raise taxes to support
their schools. In Kalkaska, Michigan, officials declared the school
year over in mid-March when the money ran out. In three elections
the Kalkaska voters had rejected an increase in property taxes to
cover a $1 .5 million shortfall. The pattern is repeated again and again
throughout the nation, sad testimony to Galbraith's dictum of "pri-
vate wealth and public poverty." One need only reflect upon the
disastrous consequences to California of Proposition 13, that monu-
ment to shortsighted self-interest.

But increased funding alone is not the answer. We must also sac-
rifice our more immediate desires to that quaintly oldfashioned con-
cept, greater discipline. Surely the relentless pap served up on much
of radio and television, the vast bulk of deafening electronic "mu-
sic," rap and rock videos, the interminable mindless commercials
represent an incalculable waste of creative mental resources. Mil-
lions of schoolkids are growing up on junk activities, junk reading
(if they read at all), a spiritual vacuum that diminishes the quality
of their lives and their future. Violence-filled movies with graphic
sex are purposefully aimed at impressionable teenagers, the ones
with money to spend in today's disordered society, a depressing
case of the tail wagging the dog. In a broader social sense, econom-
ics - what we are prepared to pay and sacrifice - has to be value
oriented, beginning at the home and local levels.

Earlier mention was made that our taxes are, in fact, some of the
lowest in the Western world. One consequence is that our school
day and year are far shorter than those in most other countries. The
typical 180-day academic year, with its origins in the agricultural
communities of the eighteenth-century, has no relevance to today's
competitive world. Clearly, the day and year must not only be length-
ened, but the academic programs also be expanded and invigorated.
If we fail to do so, we have no right to fare well in economic terms
with other nations. Pep rallies, the adulation of sports and pop-music

46 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

heroes, the time spent on football and road trips, can all be signifi-
cantly reduced to the advantage of learning. Some supervised home-
work would also not be amiss (parents in Germany are held legally
responsible that their children have completed their assignments).
Final high school examinations along the lines of the German Abitur
and the French baccalaureat, corrected by outside examiners, would
give the diploma real substance.

Having advocated a stronger academic program in both the sci-
ences and language studies - SAT scores have declined precipitously
over the years - may I also enter a heartfelt plea for the arts in all
their extension. The case for better trained mathematicians and sci-
entists is clear enough, but the need to improve the offerings in the
humanities, including the fine arts, is less obvious in the public mind.
In recent decades, budget-conscious school authorities have cut back
on theatre, art, and music classes as mere fringe offerings, useful
enough in their way, but not really essential to the degree program.
Grudgingly they may be offered as extras, to be paid for by indi-
vidual parents. Likewise throughout the nation. Public Radio and
Television are reduced to unseemly begging just to ensure their bare
survival. Our symphony orchestras and local theatres seem to exist
on sufferance, receiving but a fraction of the subsidies paid to their
confreres in Europe. Again, we are not talking about luxuries, but
the basic quality of life and its cultural dimension.

VI. Humane Imperatives

For it is clear by now that economics, if applied only in its most
limited sense to human activity, is an inhumane exercise. Matthew
Arnold's observation that, "There are a good many people in our
paradisiacal centres of industrialism and individualism taking the
bread out of one another's mouths" (2, pp. 347-48), remains apt a
century and a quarter later. If this inhumane effect still exists re-
garding human beings, consider that of pure economic determin-
ism upon the sentient non-human beings forced to exist in
factory-farms and destined for the slaughterhouses. When a
chicken-factory entrepreneur who has enriched himself from this
horror contributes substantially to the campaign of the newly-elected
president, is his contribution regarded in the same light as that of a
textiles manufacturer?

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 47

These and countless related issues belong within the realm of
both economics and humanistic studies. Yet the hopefully-begun
reemergence of the humanities in the early 1980s was stymied by
the combined forces of budgetary constraints (reduced tax revenues)
and the excess with which some humanities recipients of govern-
ment grants expressed their so-called art. One example of philoso-
phy and history suggesting to us a solution to the dilemma of art
and censorship is Aristotle's notion of the mean between extremes,
with reasoned virtue as the goal. (4, pp. 483-90) Indeed, the humani-
ties teachers' insistence on isolating their subject matter from social
mores was a major factor in the defeat of that hoped-for renaissance.
The humanities may also be faulted in their self-separation from
the practical applications of economics and science. The far-ranging
ethical effects of economic policies and scientific advances must
become a primary concern not only of humanistic studies, but of
economics and science themselves.

At the most obvious level, we now see in the universities grow-
ing armies of lower ranked, non-permanent, and part-time instruc-
tors, a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in in-
dustry: the disposable worker, insensitively referred to as a "temp,"
hired and fired according to perceived economic need. The reduc-
tion of the workforce is euphemistically termed "downsizing;" that
wage earners, human beings, are directly affected is lost in a stack
of statistics aimed to please company stockholders. Here the uni-
versity and big business have become interchangeable, both of them
at the mercy of bottom-line economics, while large and pressing
concerns remain unaddressed.

Which brings us to yet another vicious circle. With medical ex-
penses rapidly outpacing the cost of living, companies can no longer
afford to pay their share of contributions, which again discourages
the hiring of more full-time employees. Over the last decade alone,
temporary employment in the U.S. has increased by almost 250 per
cent. The consequences in human terms are enormous, as compa-
nies seek to escape the need to pay fringe benefits, health costs, and
pensions, while being able to hire and fire at will with little fear of
litigation and little pause for considerations beyond the most im-
mediate goals.

Yet many economic decisions, knowingly or unknowingly, rest
with ourselves as individuals. Why do a large number of us work

48 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

overtime or even at two jobs? In some cases there is a real need to
produce extra income to make ends meet, but often it is to buy luxu-
ries and marginal services. At the same time, the average worker in
the U.S. is considered lucky to have two weeks of vacation a year
(the comparable figure in Europe is double or triple), while our
workweek is one of the longest with few local, national, or religious
holidays to relieve the tedium. The need, in truth, is to reduce work-
ing hours, not only to engender more work opportunities for others
truly in poverty, but equally important, to enable employees to en-
joy leisure pursuits. Instead of emphasizing increased wages and
excess consumption, our thoughts should turn to improving the
inner quality of our daily lives, which in turn can improve the qual-
ity of both our environment and our economic system.

VII. Social and Moral Implications

In the end applied economics is rooted in social mores, alterna-
tives weighed and decisions taken. We have seen that short-run
options which seem to make economic sense frequently overlook
ethical or aesthetic implications. Recently, arguments in favor of
gambling have won support in many communities with the justifi-
cation that schools and hospitals can be funded with no correspond-
ing increase in taxes. But do we really wish to encourage citizens to
fritter away their income and become hooked on a pernicious habit?
Higher taxes on tobacco products and liquor are easier to defend
than gambling, though the exact moral responsibility of govern-
ment in health matters and, by extension, enforcing safety measures
(e.g., mandatory seat belts, smokefree work zones, laws to reduce
drunk driving) must at some point become arbitrary, in favor of the
greater good of the whole. This in turn raises further questions. How,
for example, can one defend continued government subsidies to
the tobacco industry? Faced with the proven risk of cancer from
smoking, does the right hand know what the left is doing? As it is,
two of our leading exports, mainly to Third World countries, are
arms and tobacco products, both ultimately causes of death. Should
we export goods that may be legal, but which morally are indefen-
sible?

Here matters become murkier still. Few would argue that radio
and television commercials are intrusive and habitually insult the
intelligence. Yet unless Americans are willing to pay an annual li-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 49

cense fee as in most European countries, the quality of program-
ming is unlikely to improve. As it is, the best drama offerings on
Public TV are imported, a bleak commentary on where we place
our priorities. Parallel to TV commercials, the billboards that dis-
figure our highways are easy to justify in purely financial terms;
they are legitimate, taxes are collected, and occasionally the signs
may even provide information. But what of the visual blight, not to
mention the material wasted in their construction? And what of the
telephone poles and overhead wires that further scar our neighbor-
hoods, the freeways that gouge out the very heart of our cities? As
with modern shopping centers and concrete highrise parking lots,
in our car-driven society they are practical enough. But why are so
many city dwellers only too anxious to flee the crime-ridden urban
centers with their shared ugliness? No one wishes to live in an aes-
thetic vacuum, devoid of visual gratification. Yet that is what mil-
lions of Americans are condemned to.

When on vacation at home and abroad we seek out the historic
sites that please the eye and appeal to our imagination (even
Disneyland harks back to some vague bygone era or leaps forward
to a scientific futurist realm, anything but present-day Downtown
USA). The irony is that we prefer the colonial and medieval centers,
towns and villages supposedly built under oppressive rulers, to our
own lackluster conurbations designed in more "enlightened" times;
Toledo, Spain, will always be preferred, by tourists at least, to To-
ledo, Ohio. We marvel at the medieval artisan and his handiwork,
the great cathedrals and imposing buildings that line many a river
and lakefront. With us, a structure rises, serves its brief purpose,
and then is torn down to make way for its equally transitory suc-
cessor. No doubt this can be justified in the name of progress and
efficiency, but the argument fails to convince.

It would be naive to believe that enlightened economics can cure
every social ill. Yet as we have seen, far from being a detached aca-
demic exercise, economics employed imaginatively can frequently
deal with everyday situations. Even as I write this, millions of Ameri-
cans still go to bed hungry, or at best, barely make ends meet. How
do we measure the real cost in wasted lives? Clearly corruption in
our country has not reached the rampant levels in Latin America
and Italy, but for all that, there is no lack of dubious practices, rang-
ing from doctors referring patients to their own profit-making fa-

50 D. Hilt: Economics and Social Morality

cilities to innumerable cases of price fixing, politicians in hock to
lobbyists and special interest groups. These questionable deals are
accepted all too often as the price of conducting business; if we are
incapable of viewing them as morally reprehensible, at least we may
recognize that they are inefficient in economic terms as well. We
have become a debtor nation in every sense.

Still to be mentioned is violence in today's America. Despite
armed police and the arbitrary use of capital punishment (abolished
in Canada and most of Europe) we still have by far the highest
murder rate in the Western world. In a grotesque distortion of the
Constitution, guns are as readily accessible to citizens as a driver's
license. Professional hunters and marksmen in other countries are
only too anxious to see weapons kept out of the hands of rank ama-
teurs, but not here in America, where in some states more young
men between the ages of 15 and 34 are killed by guns than in car
accidents. The gun lobby still cows irresolute politicians who find it
more expedient to accept campaign contributions from the NRA
than to oppose that powerful organization. Foreign tourists are be-
ginning to think twice before coming to America, and teachers are
beginning to think twice before taking high school jobs.

VIII. Conclusion

What can we do? To a large extent, it is a matter of individual
conscience and social courage. Educators, politicians, community
leaders must also in a wider sense become humanitarian econo-
mists, just as professional economists, in their turn, must seek com-
mon ground with sociologists, philosophers, artists, musicians, and
historians, to name but a few fellow disciplines. The need, surely, is
to view the larger picture in all its interacting facets, to educate the
whole person for living in a more humane society. The economic
and ethical challenge facing each one of us is to maintain our sys-
tem of democracy while imposing the discipline of real learning
upon the individualistic American reared in a freewheeling, mate-
rialistic society. Through renewed emphasis on the humanities and
their application to the practice of economics rooted in social mo-
rality, we may hope to meet such a challenge. We must see the Bill
of Rights not as a list of privileges to be pursued to the utmost per-
sonal advantage, but as a two-sided coin with which we pay our
civic dues (not merely taxes) as well as receive our benefits, a Bill of

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 51

?^ghts and Responsibilities that asks us to demand less and con-
Tibute more.

References

'.. Green wald, John. "L.A's Open Wounds," Time, 8 February 1993, pp. 35-36.

!. Honan, Park. Matthew Arnold, A Life. New York: McGraw-Hill Book, 1981.

5. Lipietz, Alain. Towards a New Economic Order; Postfordism, Ecology and Democ-
racy. London: Polity Press, 1993.

[. Solomon, Robert C. Introducing Philosophy. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1985.

Industrial Speenhamland:
British ''Lessons'' of History

James Stephen Taylor

"Damn," said the Duchess. Agatha Christie once opined that those
lines were optimal for getting the reader's attention. Such help may
be necessary in an essay which seeks to show how social welfare
provisions at the inception of the British industrial revolution played
an important role in allowing that revolution to happen.^

First, what are the lessons of history? The principal one is humil-
ity. We know that things change, that there are no perfect trajecto-
ries into the future, no models not deeply flawed, and that perhaps
the principal and very salutary lesson one learns from academic
history is that there are no firm lessons, except to be on guard against
the snake oil salesmen in academic or political garb who attempt to
peddle them. But there is the experience of past time, the knowl-
edge thereof lending insight to understanding current circumstances,
and there are, perhaps, rules of thumb.

Certainly one can not view current debates in the United States
involving the economy and social welfare without echoing Yogi
Berra's "deja vu all over again," or Solomon's more stately utter-
ance, "there is nothing new under the sun."

I. The English Poor Law, Old and New

Most Americans' knowledge of the English Poor Law begins (and
ends) with Charles Dickens. In the Christmas Carol, Scrooge's re-
sponse to a charity appeal was to recommend the workhouse, and
those who have read Oliver Twist, or seen the musical, know what
that meant - a single helping of gruel. Of course, at the time Dickens
wrote, England and Wales were the only countries in the world with
a comprehensive welfare system, providing assured relief to all in
need.^ To be sure, the level of relief was often little better than Oliver's
dinner. Yet even today, one does not have to look far to find a major
country that does not assure shelter and sustenance for all its citi-
zens. Second, Dickens was caricaturing the New Poor Law, intro-
duced in 1834, which was reflective of the influence of Jeremy

53

54 J.S. Taylor: British "Lessons" of History

Bentham's utilitarianism and T.R. Malthus' demographic vision of
the future.^

Yet by 1834 Britain had already taken off into the industrial revo-
lution. Historians debate when the revolution officially began, but
the general range is from the mid-eighteenth century to the close of
the war with the American colonies. By 1834 Britain had entered
the railway age, a second stage of its industrial development.

During this pre-1834 period, indeed, stretching back to the six-
teenth century, there was a poor relief system known as the Elizabe-
than Poor Law or the Old Poor Law. This system, if that is the right
word, was extremely complex, variegated and ramshackle compared
to the new improved poor law initiated by the Poor Law Amend-
ment Act of 1834, perhaps the quintessential example of Benthamite
principles at work."^ While the New Poor Law was more rational,
uniform and supervised, it was also in spirit, and to some extent in
operation, less humane. The doctrine of "less eligibility" applied in
the Act was to make poor relief the least eligible (or attractive) alter-
native to any form of self-support available to the poor. This was
done by mandating the establishment of consolidated workhouses
supported by unions of parishes. By centralizing relief in such es-
tablishments, and by ending "outdoor" relief (relief outside of work-
houses), it was hoped that poor relief would be less expensive and
would spur its likely recipients to save against sickness, unemploy-
ment, and age in order to avoid the awful fate of the union work-
house.

In fact, the new law groaned imperfectly into operation, and was
particularly ill-received in the industrial North of England. It proved
to be neither as inhumane as its critics had feared or as efficient as
its supporters had hoped.

Many factors motivated the "get tough" mood of the Parliament
that passed the 1834 Act, quite apart from Malthusian and
Benthamite currents. Politics is always a factor. So too is the locus of
power, and one incentive for reform was to enhance the position of
the magistrates (justices of the peace) in dealing with recalcitrant
parish officers. There was a sense that the old system was out of
control, administered as it so frequently was by annual volunteers
as overseers of the poor, or delegated by the parish vestry to an
employee who might be despotic or corrupt.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 55

II. The Myth of Speenhamland

Still, in the swirl of thought and action one word has come to
symbolize the inefficiency and misplaced generosity of the Old Poor
Law. That word is Speenhamland. It all supposedly started on May
6, 1795, when the Berkshire justices met at the Pelican Inn, located
in a tithing of Speen Parish. The justices established for their juris-
diction a regular process of subsidizing laborers' wages from the
poor rates (taxes), with the size of the allowance based on the size
of the family and the price of bread. This "Speenhamland system,"
as it came to be called, was thought to have spread throughout the
agrarian counties of southern England, leading to a number of un-
fortunate results, so it was believed. The "system" was thought to
have deprived workers of the incentive to move from the parish
providing the subsidies, or incentive to better their condition in that
parish, or to limit the size of their families. Indeed, the more chil-
dren, the larger the subsidy.

The meeting at the Pelican Inn occurred during the dark days of
war with revolutionary France, and at the end of a terrible winter. It
was motivated in part by a temporary shortage of bread. Emergency
measures to prevent starvation (and a rebellious peasantry) became,
so it was later argued, a pervasive system for decades, which en-
couraged welfare dependency and robbed Britain of much of its
workforce.^

Such beliefs were promoted by the Poor Law Commissioners'
Report of 1834, which preceded passage of the Act. Wildly
unstatistical and biased, the 1834 Report gave verisimilitude to per-
vasive opinion. In the generations to follow, Speenhamland became
enshrined in the temple of historical verities. It was used by
historian-reformers in the twentieth century, such as Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, whose magisterial English Poor Law History (19) be-
came the major source for those who studied the poor law. The
Webbs were assiduous scholars, and were not defenders of the New
Poor Law, but they had a social agenda, and were prepared to ac-
cept the judgment of the 1830s.^

Recent research has shown that the Speenhamland system was
not a system. What was adopted at the Pelican Inn was part of a
patchwork of efforts to deal with poverty through provision of fam-

56 J.S.Taylor: British "Lessons" of History

ily allowances, and the evidence that it immobilized and
undermotivated the poor is anecdotal and inconsistent.

III. Social Welfare and the Industrial Revolution

In all the debates on the English poor law there is a curious myo-
pia affecting most scholars of the subject. First, there is the failure of
perspective alluded to at the beginning - that however imperfect
the poor law was, old or new, it was still better than any other na-
tion at that time had developed. The second even more striking
oversight is that at the very time that many English workers were
thought to be immobile and undermotivated, Britain was initiating
the world's first industrial revolution, a process that would put Brit-
ain at the top as a world power in the nineteenth century. Was this
impressive transformation in spite of the Old Poor Law or was that
law irrelevant to the economic changes? Given the magnitude of
the poor law system, neither alternative seems likely. The Old Poor
Law reached into every parish and administering it was the princi-
pal business of parish government. Settlement law, developed to
determine the parish responsible for each pauper, was in the eigh-
teenth century the largest single branch of English jurisprudence, if
judged by the number of cases, individuals affected and lawyers
employed.^

There remains a third alternative, and that is that the Old Poor
Law contributed positively to making the industrial revolution pos-
sible. In other words, the welfare system, far from impeding eco-
nomic change, worked to promote it, in three ways. First, there can
be little doubt that the existence of the poor law helped dampen the
prospects of social revolution. Weekly allowances, relief in kind,
and in variously styled institutions for the poor (workhouses,
carehouses, almshouses, poorhouses) meant the English lower or-
ders (classes) were unlikely to trade these cold comforts for the even
colder business of barricades and marches. To be sure, there were
riots and sporadic outbreaks of machine breaking, but disturbances
tended to be localized, and largely deprived of a sustained and com-
prehensive vision. The Chartist Movement is one of several excep-
tions. However, the exceptions show even more clearly that the Brit-
ish working class lacked the stomach for major revolution, surely
in part because the workers had some assurance their stomachs
would be fed, if not filled.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 57

Second, the Old Poor Law undoubtedly did inhibit migration of
some people from some parishes, especially in southern England.
Relief was locally disbursed, and to move to a distant parish might
raise complex legal questions that could drastically upset an
individual's life. A pauper, for example, might be forced to sell out
and move back to his home parish, if he could not find employment
elsewhere. Alternatively, he might be marooned in his new parish,
having fulfilled one of the myriad ways a new settlement could be
obtained.^ In such a case, his original parish might not be willing to
welcome him back. Yet, inhibiting migration was not necessarily
disadvantageous in either economic or social terms, however much
it violated civil liberty. One need only reflect on the bloated barrios
of South and Central America today. Indeed, much of the world has
suffered from dramatic urban-rural shifts that have been socially
and economically destabilizing. The very ramshackleness of the Old
Poor Law guaranteed that movement would not be prevented, but
moderated, which served to keep the less employable at home but
posed little barrier to those who wished to move and could find
work.

IV. Industrial Speenhamland

Third, there was a system in the industrial North of England that
positively enhanced migration from the agrarian to the industrial
sector. It is this which I call, using some license with the original
term, "industrial Speenhamland." (The agrarian-industrial di-
chotomy that follows is, of course, simplistic; all sorts of communi-
ties were involved in the interchange of migrants.)

To understand how it worked, it is necessary to keep in mind two
postulates in the administration of the poor law It might not be overly
rash to call them the twin pillars of most governance at the local
level, and they are located far from the realms of thought inhabited
by the devotees of Malthus or Bentham. Most parish or township
officers, most of the time, had as their guiding principles the avoid-
ance of trouble and expense. Unpleasant confrontations with pau-
pers or supervising magistrates were not sought by overseers serv-
ing out their annual stint in office. The same was true, perhaps to
lesser extent, with hired officers, known as assistant overseers. Pau-
per complaints to vestry or, still worse, to a magistrate could be
troublesome. Besides, it is more difficult to be rigorous to a neighbor

58 J.S. Taylor: British "Lessons" of History

than to an unknown, and the local nature of administration meant
that givers and receivers were likely to be known to one another.
This introduced an element of benevolent paternalism in which the
moral conduct or reputation of the pauper petitioner weighed heavily
in the generosity or the lack of it from relief providers.

Avoidance of trouble pulled overseers in the direction of gener-
osity but avoiding expense operated inversely. If the locally taxed,
that is, the ratepayers, decreed stringent economies then the over-
seers might have little choice but to say "no." The dynamic tension
between the two poles introduced the most variegated circumstances
over time and in different places. Of course, the overseer was usu-
ally most content when he could satisfy both ratepayer and pauper.
This is what industrial Speenhamland enabled him to do.

The process was inordinately commonsensical, and worked to
universal advantage, at least in the short run. A poor person who
might otherwise be a burden on the rates would decide to move
from his agrarian township to Manchester, or some other industrial
town, in order to find employment and a better life (townships, not
parishes, were the principal unit of local government in the North).
The home township might subsidize the move as an investment in
lower poor rates (the poor person would not be around to request
relief). The best scenario would be for the poor person to earn a
settlement elsewhere, and so save his township any further obliga-
tions. The second best scenario would be for the person to find full
employment and become self-supporting for an extended period of
time. The third scenario would be for the person to find some work
in town, either regular or part-time employment, or periods of full
employment alternating with no work and subsequent dependency.
In fact, the third scenario was exceedingly common. What to do?
The industrial township did not want to support such people, nor
did it wish to lose laborers who might be needed in the next trade
upswing. The agrarian township did not want to have poor mi-
grants return to be heavy charges on the rates, nor did the migrants
themselves usually relish returning, disrupting their new beginnings
and acknowledging failure.

Under such circumstances, the least trouble and expense all
around was for the agrarian township to send an allowance to its
charge, and the industrial township to act as the go-between.
Everyone gained something in this beneficent circle, yet one must

V\lest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 59

not be Pollyannaish about it. The lives of these rural migrants were
usually at the outer edges of misery. Wages of unskilled labor, and
they usually were unskilled, were low, and the subsidies they were
likely to receive, still lower. There was little or no motivation for
such "out-parishioners" to avoid work because of a paltry subsidy.
The agrarian township could be stingy, knowing that the recipient
was far away and not likely to be troublesome, while the industrial
township was given a subsidized workforce for little more than the
costs of administering the allowances.

Nothing is perfect. The mails were unreliable and various ad hoc
arrangements in this triangular trade could go awry over problems
of communication. The agrarian township might be delinquent in
making payments or so stingy that the industrial township either
had to supplement relief or remove the pauper to his home town-
ship. There was room for fraud from both relief officers and recipi-
ents. And yet, if it had not worked reasonably well, cities such as
Manchester or Preston would not have supported it. In these cir-
cumstances, quite modest welfare investment led to a mobile and
motivated workforce in Lancashire and the West Riding, the world's
first industrial heartland.

Evidence for industrial Speenhamland is partly inferential, and
based on knowledge of how the poor law actually functioned on
the local level. Most arrangements were extra-legal, and so the pa-
per trail is imperfect. Nevertheless, there are collections of corre-
spondence, entries in overseers' accounts, and bills from industrial
townships to agrarian townships, which reveal the pervasiveness
of the system and how generally accepted it was. One of the most
revealing illustrations of this was the many printed forms drawn
up precisely to serve this end, with only the blanks for the town-
ships' and paupers' names, and the amount of money to be trans-
ferred, to be filled in by township officers. The Manchester
Churchwardens' Accounts are particularly helpful in providing a
broad statistical accounting over an extended period of time.

The Accounts also contain records of relief given to a large Irish
contingent. Ireland did not have a comprehensive social welfare
system, and so there was no way for the Manchester authorities to
be reimbursed for expenditures made on behalf of Irish sojourning
in their city. However, the option of not providing support was to
incur the cost of transporting the Irish back to Ireland. Least trouble

60 J.S. Taylor: British "Lessons" of History

and expense was often the policy of providing niodest subsidies to
tide Irish sojourners over a bout of unemployment or sickness.^

Some townships did not welcome sojourners from other town-
ships because the local economy might have been stagnant over an
extended period of time. That is, there might be too many unem-
ployed inhabitants, with a claim on their township. Also, a series of
bad experiences with agrarian townships might make the overseers
shy of entering new arrangements. However, it was precisely in those
areas that were expanding economically that the system worked
best - where the workers were needed is where they, in fact, tended
to go. In addition, the sojourners, either English or Irish (and some-
times Scottish) were on probation, subject to removal whenever the
local authorities decided. This provided sojourners incentive to work
well, and incentive for the local authorities to want to keep them.

V. Mercantilism and Industrialism

The Old Poor Law was essentially mercantilist in nature, and
conceived quite opposite to the views of Adam Smith, one of the
Law's critics. What James Fallows (5) identifies with Asia's fastest
growing economies today was, in fact, in place during the take-off
stage of the British industrial revolution. ^ There are interesting par-
allels, such as China's current settlement restrictions which serve to
moderate migration in her expanding economy.

The Christian mercantilists of mid-eighteenth century England
preceded Friedrich List in emphasizing productivity at home over
the satisfying of consumer wants, the importance of protection, in-
telligently employed, and the welfare of the nation over the
self-interest of the capitalist. The Christian mercantilists were par-
ticularly interested in promoting the welfare of the workers, identi-
fying national wealth less with resources than with healthy, trained
and willing workers. Unfortunately, this view, which prevailed in
the London merchant community, failed to find an exponent with
the brilliance of Adam Smith."

Natural law was the order of the day, applied to the sciences by
Newton, to politics by Locke, and to the economy by Adam Smith.
The untidiness and complexity of mercantilist views were
off-putting, and it did not help much when thirteen American colo-
nies decided to revolt in 1776, the year of publication of Smith's
Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith and the successful colonists helped

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 61

put eighteenth-century mercantihsm out of business. However, it
was a gradual process, and it was the old ideas, not the new, that
launched the initial industrial revolution. James Fallows is correct
in arguing that laissez-faire and free trade are the luxuries of econo-
mies that have arrived. (5, pp. 79, 84, 87) Neither, however, may
always be beneficial for a society that aims at justice and solidarity.

Ever since Bernard Mandeville launched his disturbing ideas in
the early eighteenth century, economic thinkers have had to wrestle
with the notion that private vices lead to public benefits. (9) Adam
Smith helped give Mandeville's work intellectual respectability, but
to base an economy on either man's thought is surely to miss the
point of what an economy ought to be for. It is not primarily to sat-
isfy all the ephemeral wants of consumers, not even to provide the
greatest happiness for the greatest number, and not to maximize
productivity.

The purpose of the economy is to undergird high civilization.
Such civilization involves the ability of humans (a) to live comfort-
ably and peaceably in large communities; (b) to balance between
the collective and the individual good; and (c) to provide sufficient
diversity of skills, knowledge, cultures and perhaps even income
levels, so as to motivate its members in creative pursuits. Of course,
no civilization has ever attained perfection in all those ways, and
no ism, economic or otherwise, is sufficient for such a complex end.

It is the so-called golden ages of history, such as fifth-century
B.C. Athens or fifteenth century Florence, that have come closest to
such high civilization, under a variety of economic circumstances.
Self-gratification, material plenty and an absence of anxiety are not
essential to high civilization. These, certainly, do not characterize
all golden ages, although sometimes great wealth in the hands of a
few may be used to support the creativity of others, as in the Flo-
rence of the Medici.

Britain, during the early industrial revolution, was able to create
a certain balance between the collective and individual good in a
society that provoked and motivated its members in creative ways
- from designing new machinery for factories to designing new
methods of governance. The social welfare system in place, com-
monly known as the Old Poor Law, contributed to that end until
British society became so wealthy and powerful it could afford to
adopt dogmas that had little to do with its initial success.

62 J.S. Taylor: British "Lessons" of History

VI. Conclusion

So what does all this contribute to an understanding of the theme
of this volume? If nothing else it provides a bit of perspective, and
perhaps four rules of thumb.

First, human affairs are messy and complex; it is natural to strive
for order and simplicity, but moderate success in that effort is all
one can hope for. Second, conditions in Britain in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries are impossible to recreate, even if
one were foolish enough to wish it. Life was Hobbsian for many
and certainly miserable for most, at least by later standards in the
West. Rule two, then, implies that there is no return passage. Rule
three is that if there is any rule governing human behavior, on the
grand scale, it is a propensity to avoid trouble and expense in all the
manifold ways they present themselves. There are, to be sure, higher
and lower principles affecting human action, but this is the main
current that carries us forward, or more accurately, the principal
property dictating the direction the water will flow.

Finally, Rule four, and most central to this essay's thrust, a social
welfare system offering comprehensive security at a modest level
may contribute to economic growth if it stabilizes and motivates
large numbers of people. One should be prepared for some
untidiness, including welfare fraud, but guard against
over-dependence on anecdotal evidence. Individual and family al-
lowances, in the form of stipends and other forms of relief (medi-
cine, clothing and shelter), in spite of the costs, and, especially if
they encourage workers' physical and social mobility and flexibil-
ity, may pay for themselves in increased economic productivity.
Furthermore and more importantly, these may facilitate an advance
to a higher level of civilization.^^ The people of the United States
could not tolerate the levels of deprivation experienced by the Brit-
ish common people during the industrial revolution. Neither should
they be prepared to tolerate homelessness or hunger for any of its
citizenry.

Speenhamland was once a term symbolizing what was thought
to be a failed system of social welfare. It was, in fact, one of the
processes that transformed Britain into the greatest power among
nineteenth-century states. It did this by helping Britain undergo the
world's first industrial revolution.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 63

Notes

l.This article builds on three earlier works by the same author: "The Impact
of Pauper Settlement, 1691-1834" (14); Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the In-
dustrial Revolution (16); and "A Different Kind of Speenhamland: Nonresident
Relief in the Industrial Revolution" (18).

2. England and Wales were integrated in a poor relief system that excluded
Scotland and Ireland. Scottish and Irish sojourners in England and Wales could,
in some cases, receive poor relief, however.

3. An excellent introduction to Dickens, as history, is Humphry House, The
Dickens World. (8) The intellectual history of poverty is explored by Gertrude
Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. (7)

4. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Report from His Majesty's Commission-
ers for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws,
1834 (44), 27-28. Volume 27 is the Report itself. The other volumes are massive
compilations of information of great value, but little used in the Report itself.

5. Speenhamland has been examined in several studies by Mark Neuman,
such as "Speenhamland in Berkshire" (11). Reevaluations of the Old Poor Law
are found in Mark Blaug, "The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the
New" (2); James Stephen Taylor, "The Mythology of the Old Poor Law" (13); and
D.A. Baugh, "The Cost of Poor Relief in South-East England, 1790-1834." (1)

6. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's work is embedded in three volumes (7-9) in
the authors' still more magisterial English Local Government. Another fundamen-
tal shaper of later opinion was Dorothy Marshall's The English Poor in the Eigh-
teenth Century. (10)

7. The centrality of the poor law is most clearly seen in the thirty editions of
Richard Burn's The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (3), variously published in
London between 1755 and 1869. Virtually every aspect of public welfare was part
of the poor law, and directly or indirectly, as administrators or recipients, it touched
the lives of the great majority of the English and Welsh people in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.

8. It would take hundreds of pages to describe all the ways settlement might
be gained or lost. It could be derived through one's family or acquired by one's
actions. However, the great majority involved marriage (the wife assuming her
husband's settlement), the serving of an apprenticeship or serving out a con-
tracted year of service. Renting or owning land, serving in local government, and
paying rates (local taxes) also figured in settlement determinations.

9. City of Manchester, Cultural Services, Central Library, Churchwardens' Ac-
counts, 1809-48, M3/3/46A & B. (4) A preliminary analysis of this splendid source
is found in the present author's "'Set Down in a Large Manufacturing Town':
Sojourning Poor in Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester." (17)

10. James Fallows' article is certain to give the student of eighteenth-century
mercantilism an acute case of deja vu, as he discusses the mainsprings of Asia's
fast growing economies. His knowledge of British history seems rudimentary.

64 J.S.Taylor: British "Lessons" of History

Edward III did not create the manufacture of woolen cloth, and Elizabeth did not
found the mercantile marine and foreign trade of Britain (p. 66). In fairness, his
essay is partial confirmation of this essay's argument.

11. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations.
Eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. (12) This is well-edited; Campbell and
Skinner are not shy in pointing to the weaknesses in Smith's analysis of pauper
settlement. The most prolific exponent of Christian mercantilism was Jonas
Hanway. An extremely effective philanthropist, he was no scholar or writer, and
his eighty-five published works are a trial to read. See the present author's Jonas
Hanway. (15)

12. In 1969 the present author was contacted by a junior official in the Nixon
Administration about Speenhamland's relevance to family allowances in the
United States. The contact was transitory. Even today, most textbooks, if they
mention Speenhamland at all, still provide the interpretation of the 1920s. It is
rather discouraging.

References

1. Baugh, D. A. "The Cost of Poor Rehef in South-East England, 1790-1834,"

Economic History Review, 28, 1975 2nd ser., pp. 50-68.

2. Blaug, Mark. "The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,"

Journal of Economic History, 23, 1963, pp. 151-83.

3. Burn, Richard. The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer. 20th ed. London: A.

Strahan, 1805.

4. City of Manchester, Cultural Services, Central Library, Churchwardens' Ac-

counts, 1809-48, M3/3/46A & B.

5. Fallows, James. "How the World Works," The Atlantic Monthly, December

1993, pp. 61-87.

6. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Report from His Majesty's Commissioners

for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws,
1834 (44), 27-28.

7. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

8. House, Humphry. The Dickens World. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University

Press, 1942.

9. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2

vols. Ed. F. B. Kaye. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.

10. Marshall, Dorothy. The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century. London: George

Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1926.

11. Neuman, Mark. "Speenhamland in Berkshire," in Comparative Development

in Social Welfare. Ed. E. W. Martin. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972, pp.
85-127.

V^est Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 65

12. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

13. Taylor, James Stephen. "The Mythology of the Old Poor Law," Journal of Eco-
nomic History, 29, 1969, pp. 292-97.

14. . "The Impact of Pauper Settlement, 1691-1834," Past and Present,

73, November 1976, pp. 42-74.

15. . Jonas Hanivay. London: Scolar Press, 1985.

16. . Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution. Palo

Alto: SPOSS, 1989.

17. . "'Set Down in a Large Manufacturing Town': Sojourning Poor in

Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester," Manchester Region History Re-
view, 3, Autumn/Winter 1989-90, pp. 3-8.

18. . "A Different Kind of Speenhamland: Nonresident Relief in the

Industrial Revolution," Journal of British Studies, 30, April 1991, pp.
183-208.

19. Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice. English Poor Law History, 3 vols. London:
Longmans, Green & Co., 1927-29.

The Impact of Proposed Structural
Legislative Reforms on the Attainment of
Economic Security^, Equity^ and Justice

Stanley M. Caress

While the economic prosperity of the United States is primarily
dependent on market forces, available resources, and private initia-
tive, the role of the national government in the distribution of mate-
rial goods is undeniable. The American national government,
through its taxation, budgetary, and regulatory authority, can sig-
nificantly influence societal patterns of wealth and impact virtually
every aspect of the domestic economic system. (12, pp. 2-3) The taxa-
tion policies adopted by the national government determine which
segments of society will shoulder the cost of providing public ser-
vices and if any particular income group will carry a disproportion-
ate share of the tax burden.

The government's budgetary decisions have a profound impact
on which segments of the American people will benefit from gov-
ernment action. The federal budget specifies which programs will
be funded and, consequently, which individuals and groups will
receive government funds and services. (11, pp. 2-5) Moreover, the
national government, through its regulatory practices, can also pro-
mote or inhibit particular classifications of industries and businesses,
which can have a considerable impact on their potential for mate-
rial growth and success. The national government, therefore,
through its exercise of legitimate governmental duties, is in a piv-
otal position to impact the economic life of this nation and thus to
determine who in American society prospers and who does not.

Because of its potential economic power, the national government
is frequently considered to be the ultimate insurer of society-wide
economic justice. This is a logical extension of its constitutionally
mandated authority to promote the general welfare and to secure
the blessings of prosperity for the American people. (6, p. 3) Thus, it
is not surprising that throughout American history, the national
government has been petitioned to intervene in private economic
matters to help produce equitable economic conditions and results.

67

68 S.M. Caress: The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Reforms

Despite American culture's continuous enthusiasm for free enter-
prise and market capitalism, the involvement of the government in
promoting a fair business environment has always attracted strong
popular support. Moreover, in the twentieth century, an expanded
role of the national government has been publicly embraced, which
includes protector of the temporarily and permanently disabled or
displaced, facilitator of economic growth, and legitimate overseer
of the utilization of the nation's resources.

The increased participation of the national government in eco-
nomic matters in this century has provided the genesis of the
government's involvement in the pursuit of economic justice. Eco-
nomic justice, for the purposes of this article, will be defined as a
situation where all citizens have a fair opportunity to accumulate
material wealth, enjoy a comfortable standard of living, and share
the economic resources of their nation. This definition implies that
no elite class is given disproportionate advantage in the pursuit or
maintenance of wealth and that all citizens, regardless of social sta-
tus or other personal characteristics, are entitled to an equal oppor-
tunity to participate in the economic life of the nation.

I. Congressional Economic Authority

In the American governmental structure, the ultimate authority
over taxation policy, budgetary allocations, and regulatory practices
rests with the United States Congress. (5, pp. 90-93) The United States
Constitution grants the power to levy taxes exclusively to the Con-
gress and also gives it the authority to regulate commerce and to
pass the federal budget. These functions provide the Congress with
the means to impact the economic system considerably more than
the other branches of American government. While Presidents can
devise extensive economic programs, it is the Congress that decides
if they will be enacted into official government policies. Presidents
can only attempt to provide the nation's economic direction. How-
ever, unless Congress is willing to follow this lead, these efforts are
meaningless. The leadership of the Congress typically develops its
own economic objectives, which eventually determine the
government's policies in this area. The majority viewpoint of the
membership of both houses of Congress, therefore, is the primary
determinant of national economic policy. This constitution-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 69

lUy-specified power arrangement has often made the Congress the
"ocus of efforts to insure economic justice.

Since the decisions of Congress have such a far-reaching impact
3n the allocation of this country's material goods and resources, the
'esults of Congressional elections, the composition of the Congres-
sional membership, and the subsequent rules that govern legisla-
tive behavior have a tremendous relevance to the attainment of the
goal of economic justice. The decisions of Congress can either facili-
tate or hinder the equitable distribution of the nation's wealth. If
Congress, for example, tailors tax policy to favor a particular seg-
ment of the American population, that segment will reap more than
its fair share of economic rewards. If, however, the Congress is com-
mitted to representing the interests of the entire public in a fair and
just manner, no grouping within the nation will receive any dispro-
portionate advantage. Therefore, the potential for the adoption of
measures that promote economic justice has a linkage to the cir-
cumstances that surround Congressional elections as well as to the
regulations that impact legislative functions. Hence, the issue of
Congressional reform is significantly relevant to the creation of a
more equitable social and economic order.

Despite the potential influence that Congress can exert on eco-
nomic conditions, its interpretation of its own proper role in the
management of the economy, and the appropriate extent of govern-
mental involvement in the pursuance of economic justice, has var-
ied considerably over time. During the formative years of Ameri-
can nationhood, there existed only limited public pressure on the
Congress to aggressively intervene in economic matters beyond
merely regulating the currency and promoting international trade.
As American society industrialized and urbanized in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, calls on the Congress to involve govern-
ment to a greater extent increased dramatically.

Industrialization generated a very apparent unequal distribution
of wealth on an unprecedented scale. It also gave rise to previously
unknown negative societal conditions, such as child labor abuses,
industrial accidents, and long-term forced unemployment. This situ-
ation produced widespread public outrage and concern. The Con-
gress, because of both its potential for economic authority and its
representative function, was called upon to take action to mitigate
the more obvious abuses of industrialization. Congressional will-

70 S.M. Caress: The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Reforms

ingness to intervene in this previously untouched poUcy area, how-
ever, changed only gradually

II. Congressional Economic Policy Classifications

It is useful at this point to examine the evolution of the willing-
ness of Congress to involve the national government in directing
economic forces in pursuance of social goals such as economic jus-
tice. The Congress specifically, and the national government gener-
ally, have considered and adopted economic policies that can be
classified into three broad categories. Each category represents a
different focus and level of commitment to use government to ad-
dress economically related social problems. Moreover, Congress has
demonstrated a noticeable inclination to support legislation that falls
into each of these three specific classifications during well defined
historical periods. Thus, the adoption of legislation that fits each
category tends to be concentrated in specific decades. These cat-
egories of legislative orientation can be labeled: economic security;
economic fairness; and economic equity.

A. Economic Security

Policies that can be properly classified as "economic security"
are predicated on the belief that the government has a legitimate
obligation to protect its citizens from economic calamity and latent
financial crises. Congressional action that falls into this category
protects the citizenry from the more negative consequences of un-
employment, disability, economic displacement, and old age. Eco-
nomic security programs empower the government to function as a
nationwide insurance company. In this type of policy, the govern-
ment passes legislation that authorizes the collection of revenues
which are aggregated into a large fund that is utilized to financially
protect all participating citizens. Hence, the government assumes
the role of mitigator of widespread negative economic conditions
and protector of the citizenry from economic catastrophe.

Policies that promote economic security have a distributive na-
ture because the revenues used to fund them are also collected from
the individuals who potentially benefit from the policies. Thus, re-
cipients help pay for their own benefits. The financing mechanisms
of economic security programs rely on citizens who are gainfully
employed, paying a portion of their income into reserved funds,
which are subsidized by both their employers and the government.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 71

These funds support the programs that protect citizens in the ad-
vent of loss of employment, ill-health, accident, economic down-
turns, or old age.

While the role of the government in providing economic security
programs today is broadly accepted, and in fact expected by the
public, this was not always the case. Early attempts to promote the
government's role in this area were viewed by critics as an abroga-
tion of individual freedoms. During the nineteenth century, the
Congress displayed a strong reluctance to aggressively pursue eco-
nomic security matters, and was frequently hostile to the subject. It
was not until the virtual collapse of the economic system in the 1930s
that numerous neophyte Congressmen were elected to alter the pre-
vailing Congressional resistance to governmental economic inter-
vention. The new Congress of 1933 enthusiastically supported the
programs of President Roosevelt's New Deal that had economic
security policies as their centerpiece. (9, p. 264) Today economic lib-
erals and conservatives both accept the legitimacy of government
involvement in the area of economic security. Programs such as
workmen's compensation, disability insurance, and social security
have become interwoven into American society and are never seri-
ously challenged in Congress.

B. Economic Fairness

Economic fairness policy represents an increased level of gov-
ernmental involvement in the nation's economic life. Policies of this
type go significantly further than the protection offered by economic
security programs; they attempt to rectify economic maladjustments
within society. Legislation that falls into this category seeks to re-
move artificial barriers that inhibit certain groups within American
culture from full participation in the economic system. These artifi-
cial barriers can be based on the lack of education or job training.
They may be the result of patterns of poverty or the product of ra-
cial, religious, or ethnic discrimination. These types of policies are
based on the assumption that specific identifiable clusters of citi-
zens have not reaped the benefits of American society because of
institutional and culturally-erected obstacles. Government initiatives
are required to correct this situation, and to mitigate these social
and economic barriers. Specific programs enacted by Congress that
promote economic fairness include various civil rights acts that pro-

72 S.M. Caress: The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Reforms

hibit discrimination in employment opportunities, educational en-
richment programs, and job training legislation for the disadvantaged.
While economic security legislation was primarily enacted in the
1930s, it was not until the mid 1960s that sufficient popular impetus
was present to motivate Congressional action in the area of eco-
nomic fairness. Specific aspects of these programs still remain con-
troversial today because of their redistributive nature. Criticism of
this class of legislation revolves around the principle that the re-
cipients of these programs do not pay the taxes that are used to
finance them. Employed individuals are required to cover these
expenditures even though they may not receive direct benefits. The
fundamental premise of prohibiting economic discrimination, how-
ever, has been generally accepted by the American public. Congress
has committed itself to correcting this problem by continuously
supporting legislation in this area.

C. Economic Equity

Economic equity policy is a major departure from the other two
categories. While economic security has been popularly accepted
and even taken for granted, and economic fairness programs, though
remaining marginally controversial have generally been enacted,
economic equity remains beyond the current political mainstream.
Economic equity policies include government action aimed at sys-
tematically reducing the difference between the affluent and im-
poverished segments of the population. Guaranteed annual income
and comparable worth are two examples. The rationale for policies
that fit this classification is that the government must go beyond
merely opening up opportunities and providing educational train-
ing; it should actually promote the interests of economically disad-
vantaged groups. These policies attempt to manipulate and direct
economic factors in order to create an equitable society. While ideo-
logically liberal Congressmen have introduced legislation in this
area, the majority of Congress has been extremely reluctant to adopt
these initiatives. Previously enacted programs, that fall marginally
into this category, remain controversial and subject to revision.
Moderate Congressmen, for example, frequently espouse rhetoric
about cleaning up the welfare system. Two decades ago, a Presi-
dential candidate dared to suggest that a basic income level should
be federally guaranteed. An avalanche of criticisms immediately

vilest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 73

occurred. The suggestion proved to be a major political embarrass-
ment and was quickly retracted. Thus, Congressional support for
economic equity policies, despite the acceptance of both economic
security and fairness, is at best sporadic.

III. Congressional Policy Tendencies

Throughout this century, there had been a steady progression in
Congressional acceptance of policies that promote economic jus-
tice. Economic security policies were first adopted in the 1930s, and
then economic fairness programs were enacted in the 1960s. Finally,
economic equity initiatives were considered in the early 1970s, even
though the Congress never accepted their legitimacy and soon re-
tracted from them. During the 1980s, however. Congress reversed
the direction it had taken since 1933 regarding economic justice. In
the 1980s, a number of new Congressmen were elected who influ-
enced the then prevailing majority view of Congress on economic
matters. This reconstituted Congressional membership changed the
tax code which substantially reduced the rates of upper-income
groups and simultaneously passed budgets that lessened services
to the poor.

These actions were taken in response to popular dissatisfaction
with the economic conditions of the late 1970s. (1, p. 543)
Double-digit inflation and a significant level of unemployment,
which at the time were considered unacceptably high, generated a
climate of public fear. These negative conditions were used as cam-
paign issues by a variety of Congressional candidates in the 1980
election. The public's concerns regarding the country's economic
well-being were fertile ground for opponents of the government's
movement towards economic justice, leading Congress to reverse
its traditional economic policy direction after this election.(7, p. 1143)

Moreover, during this time period a number of industries were
deregulated which caused a variety of ramifications. In some in-
stances, this produced a succession of major scandals such as the
savings and loan debacle, while in other cases, it fostered corporate
restructuring and contraction which drastically increased unemploy-
ment. These and other factors contributed to a growing disenchant-
ment with government.

Congress typically comes under intense scrutiny during pro-
tracted periods of economic uncertainty. (13, p. 570) The actions taken

74 S.M. Caress: The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Reforms

by the national government in the 1980s failed to produce the pre-
dicted sanguine results. The Congressional reversal from its tradi-
tional progress towards economic justice neither stimulated real
economic growth nor significantly improved conditions for the
American middle class. Only the wealthiest echelons of the Ameri-
can people experienced a measurable material improvement, as a
result of these actions. Consequently, public sentiment to alter the
existing political order intensified. In Presidential politics, this sen-
timent was expressed by the turning out of an incumbent Presi-
dent. At the Congressional level, it was manifested in new demands
for legislative reform.

American history is ripe with examples of demands for Congres-
sional reform; the last decade of the twentieth century is a prime
example. While numerous proposed reforms had emerged earlier,
they received an intensified impetus since 1990. In recent years.
Congressional salary caps and district readjustments have been sub-
jects of serious public discourse. Term limits and public campaign
financing, however, have attracted the most widespread public con-
sideration.

Congressional term limits and public campaign financing are two
reforms that have gained a degree of credibility and have been the
subject of intense popular debate. Both have been promoted as hold-
ing the potential for improved Congressional behavior and have
experienced some degree of public popularity. The question that
should be addressed at this point is: do these reforms have the po-
tential to improve domestic economic conditions and, also, to ulti-
mately promote the attainment of economic justice?

IV. Congressional Term Limits

The public disenchantment with government that resulted from
the lingering recession and various scandals of the 1980s stimulated
calls for limiting the number of years an incumbent Congressman
can serve in office. Term limits are promoted as an effective method
for ameliorating the abuses of those in power. Proponents of term
limits contend that Congress has become insulated from public opin-
ion because of the tendency of incumbent Congressmen and Sena-
tors to be continuously reelected. (3, p. 5) These Congressional crit-
ics claim that reelection is less an indication of popular support than
the result of creative district drawing and of disproportional cam-

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 75

3aign resources. They claim that Congress has become a body com-
posed of permanent careerists who seldom are seriously challenged,
rhis situation has created an environment where the members of
3oth chambers of Congress have developed concerns that reflect
:he power elites of Washington and not of their constituents. For
:hese critics. Congress has become an intransigent institution that
s incapable of reflecting public opinion.

The attractiveness of term limits is obvious. If the current mem-
bership is not performing well, limiting terms of office can expedite
1 rapid change of members. Theoretically, this will produce fresh
"epresentatives with innovative ideas and prevent Congressmen
Tom being in office for such a duration that they lose concern for
:he needs of their constituents. This simplistic solution to a com-
plex problem unfortunately contains numerous latent negative rami-
'ications. The only known consequence of term limits is a constant
:urnover of members. However, continuous turnover would sig-
nificantly disrupt Congressional procedure. (4, p. 3497) The rules of
I^ongress are arcane and complex; most freshman members require
\ minimum of a year, and frequently longer, to master basic parlia-
Tientary procedures. With a large class of newcomers in each ses-
sion. Congress would constantly be in a state of acclimating its mem-
bers. Consequently, the creation of legislation might be impeded,
regardless of its ideological underpinnings. Clearly, this inefficiency
does not insure that Congress will reflect the needs of the public.

Moreover, the utilization of term limits does not alter the dynamics
Df the existing political system. There is no mechanism for prevent-
ing incumbents from anointing like-minded individuals to be their
successors. This process already exists when an incumbent retires.
While the endorsement of the incumbent does not ensure election
dctory, it does provide a major advantage which typically trans-
lates into electoral success. Thus, even with a consistently revolv-
ing membership, the ideological and philosophical makeup of Con-
gress might remain intact.

V. Campaign Finance Reform

A vast amount of scholarly and journalistic attention has been
directed towards the financing of Congressional campaigns. (10, pp.
5-6) The fact that the cost of campaigning has skyrocketed in the
past three decades has been an overriding, often repeated conclu-

76 S.M. Caress: The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Reforms

sion. The current average cost of conducting a reasonably effective
Congressional campaign is about $300,000. Senate campaigns in
larger states typically exceed several million dollars. The huge sums
of money that all successful candidates must raise has been a fre-
quently mentioned source of concern.

A more troubling problem than just the amount of money needed
to run for Congress, relates to the source of the funds used for Con-
gressional campaigns. The lion's share of funding comes primarily
from two sources. The first source of funding is Political Action
Committees that represent a wide spectrum of interest groups. It
has been well-documented that interest groups contribute campaign
donations in hopes of convincing Congress to favor their legislative
initiatives. Group theory literature has frequently noted that effec-
tive groups have a narrow focus, and, because of their contribution
policy, do enjoy disproportional influence over the creation of leg-
islation. (8, pp. 62-63) The other source of campaign-funding comes
from individuals with great personal wealth. While many candi-
dates engage in mass solicitations of small donations, increasingly
candidates have concentrated their efforts on appealing to wealthy
contributors who can personally donate the maximum of $1,000.

The dependency of Congressional candidates on wealthy donors
and narrowly focused interest groups raises serious questions about
ethics and equitable representation. The reliance of Congressmen
on large contributors gives the appearance of impropriety and also
provides disproportionate access and influence to the most affluent
elements in American society. While numerous campaign finance
regulations were enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal of
the 1970s, they merely limited the amount of each donation and
required that contribution sources be recorded. These reforms do
not alter a fundamental political reality - private contributions fi-
nance the campaigns of public officials. This arrangement is not in-
herently corrupting, but it creates a condition where specific seg-
ments of the population have a disproportionate impact on the cre-
ation of law.

Major contributors have access to Congressmen and Senators that
is not available to the general citizenry. Hence, concerns arise that
political donors receive unequal degrees of Congressional attention,
while other constituents' issues must compete for the limited time
remaining. It is arguable that if Congressmen consider bills that have

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 77

a direct impact on their major financial backers that this necessarily
creates a conflict of interest. This situation, however, clearly tends
to give the wealthiest segment of the American people a vastly un-
equal share of influence on the legislative process. This influence
can translate into benefits as illustrated by the fact that Americans
with the highest income currently pay less in federal taxes, as a pro-
portion of income, than twelve years ago. (2, p. 31)

Restructuring campaign financing methods is a possible solution
to some of the more troubling aspects of the current system of cam-
paign contributions. A frequently mentioned proposal is public fi-
nancing. Public financing eliminates private contributions and re-
places them with a government supported source of funding. The
particular details of the different public funding proposals vary, but
the underlying premise is the same. Each candidate for a particular
Congressional seat receives the same amount of funds to utilize for
election purposes. These funds may be augmented with govern-
mentally provided postal services and free media time; but private
monetary donations of any kind are prohibited. Winning candidates,
therefore, are not beholden to individuals or groups who finance
their campaigns. This arrangement theoretically prevents a wealthy
elite from dominating the legislative process and removes the ap-
pearance of conflicts of interest.

Public financing of Congressional campaigns is currently cham-
pioned by civic reform organizations such as the League of Women
Voters and Common Cause. These and other similar organizations
view public financing of legislative campaigns as an effective means
of facilitating equal representation and ethical government. Public
financing, however, is vehemently opposed by taxpayer organiza-
tions that object to using public money to fund all candidates. These
groups believe that individuals should have control over which can-
didates are funded with their taxes. Incumbent Congressmen also
have been reluctant to support these reforms because they would
remove the campaign advantages that they currently enjoy. Thus,
while public financing is frequently a subject of scholarly debate.
Congress is not likely to adopt it in the near future.

VI. Conclusion

Can structural alteration to the Congressional election process
facilitate the attainment of the goals of economic justice? A defini-

78 S.M. Caress: The Impact of Proposed Structural Legislative Reforms

tive answer is elusive, but it is extremely plausible because there is
a clear linkage between the actions of Congress and the economic
conditions of the nation. The cursory examination of the evolution
of the economic and social policy orientation of Congress, presented
in this article, demonstrates that Congress does have the power to
promote economic justice. Given this reality, do either of the pro-
posed Congressional reforms analyzed have the potential to increase
Congress' willingness to resume its traditional direction towards
the achievement of economic justice? The answer to this question
also can be only conjectured; however, one of the two reforms ana-
lyzed in this article has greater potential than the other. It is evident
that campaign financing reforms, not term limits, can promote a
Congress committed to economic justice.

Both Congressional term limits and campaign financing reform
are viewed by their proponents as being vehicles for positive change.
Term limits, however, while impacting the composition of the Con-
gress, do little to correct the underlying dynamics that inhibit Con-
gress' ability to enact policies that promote economic justice. Alter-
ations to the current system of private campaign financing, in con-
trast, do have the latent potential to produce a Congress that is less
deferential to wealthy individuals and narrowly focused interest
groups. This consequence could allow Congress greater latitude in
its policy deliberations. It would thus enhance the possibility that
Congress will give a higher priority to the needs of the non- wealthy
segments of the American people and resume its customary move-
ment towards economic justice.

References

1 . Alvarez, Michael R; Garrett, Geoffrey and Lange, Peter. "Government Parti-

sanship, Labor Organizations, and Macroeconomic Performance," Ameri-
can Political Science Review, 85, June 1991, pp. 539-56.

2. Dowd, Ann Reily "Clintonomics and You," Fortune, 22 March 1993, pp. 30-39.

3. Frenzel, Bill and Mann, Thomas E. "Term Limits for Congress: Arguments

Pro and Con," Current, July 1992, pp. 4-9.

4. Galvin, Thomas. "Big Chunk of the 103rd Congress May Have Limited Ten-

ure," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 5, 31 October 1992, pp.
3493-506.

YJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 79

5. Haveman, Robert H. The Economics of The Public Sector. New York: John Wiley

& Sons, Inc., 1970.

6. Huntington, Samuel P. "American Ideals Versus American Institutions," Po-

litical Science Quarterly, 97, Spring 1982, pp. 1-37.

7. Jackson, John E. and King, David C. "Public Goods, Private Interests, and

Representation," American Political Science Review, 83, December 1989,
pp. 1143-64.

8. Olsen, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and The Theory of

Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

9. Skocpol, Theda and Finegold, Kenneth. "State Capacity and Economic Inter-

vention in the Early New Deal," Political Science Quarterly, 97, Summer
1982, pp. 255-78.

10. Stern, Philip M. Still The Best Congress Money Can Buy. Washington, DC:

Regnery Gateway, 1992.

11. Wildavsky, Aaron. The Politics of The Budgetary Process. 4th ed. Boston: Little

Brown and Co., 1984.

12. Wilson, Graham K. Business and Politics: A Comparative Introduction. Chatham,

NJ: Chatham House Publishers, Inc., 1985.

13. Wright, Jr. Gerald, and Berkman, Michael B. "Candidates and Policy in the

United States Senate," American Political Science Review, 80, June 1986,
pp. 567-90.

Institutional Conditions for Efficient
Sustainable Development: Implementing
Low Social Time Preference

Jacob /. Krabbe

It is one of the aims of "economic structure policy" to maintain
and improve a basic system of institutions that is focused on eco-
nomic efficiency. Efficiency is not fully defined by "hedonistic" pref-
erences and "natural" factors. It also contains social judgements
about the means of production which are available not only at the
present but also in the future. This is particularly true if this policy
is focused on "sustainable development," which is the other orien-
tation point of my essay.

Economic structure policy forms part of an overall economic
policy. With regard to the former, one of the major concerns of poli-
ticians is about the basic structure of the system of economic inter-
actions in society, which is an evolving system. Other branches of
economic policy are directed towards the correction of deviations
from this basic dynamic system, for example, trade cycle effects.
For modifying such deviations and for achieving specific aims, an
additional set of instruments is used which is complementary to
the system of basic institutions discussed in this article. Thus, I con-
sider only the institutional framework of the economic process as
far as it centers on structural "institutional efficiency," placed in the
context of sustainability policy.

In my view sustainability criteria can be expressed in terms of
the rates of nature-preserving technological development, deple-
tion of exhaustible resources, population growth, and time prefer-
ence. The greater the social time preference, the greater also the de-
mand for technological progress, for the conservation of natural
resources, and for birth control. Comparing the spontaneous im-
pact of the economy on the environment and on stocks of natural
resources with the political ideal of sustainability, I consider that
the actual interest rate might not sufficiently express the compara-
tively low social time preference for nature preservation, as it is widely

81

82 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

understood in the political circuit. I attempt to explain that this dis-
crepancy must be eliminated in the institutional sphere, including a
modification of the spontaneous price structure. Towards this end,
factor substitution, in the context of institutional and technological
renewal, is at the heart of the nature-preserving model suggested.
My point of departure is an efficiency-oriented social aims func-
tion, expressed in terms of national income, income equality and
the quality of nature. Moreover, I examine various types of efficiency
determining institutions. Next, I look at the idea of "efficient tech-
nology," including the negative impact of comparatively high in-
terest rates on nature-benign technology. For this purpose, technol-
ogy and capital are conceived as a subsystem of the whole economic
system. The structure of this subsystem is being tuned to scarcity
ratios of the original factors of production - labour and nature. It is
in this context that I consider the deficiency of the spontaneous
interest-rate mechanism. Furthermore, 1 describe the functioning of
the efficiency-seeking system and discuss the applicability of the
proposed nature-oriented model.

I. The Basic System Determining Efficiency

The institutional message of the classical economists was laissez
faire, a term adopted from the eighteenth-century Physiocrats. The
concept is based on the enlightened idea of a natural order in soci-
ety. Present-day transformations of East-European centralized
economies into market-oriented systems indeed prove the signifi-
cance of the classical message; it became abundantly clear that the
ordering function of the market mechanism can not be ignored in-
definitely. However, in the Free World, political elements entered
the structure of the "natural" system in the course of time. These
elements include social security laws, other measures to maintain
the idea of the welfare state, and, more recently, measures for the
preservation of nature. Such modifications of the economic system
are not thought to affect efficiency in society. In fact, the perception
of social efficiency itself is changing. Making the socioeconomic
system more humane implies a modification of the efficiency idea.
This section outlines the structure of a contemporary "efficiency
determining basic system."

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 83

A. Efficiency Determining Factors

In welfare theory, efficiency is usually characterized by a Paretian
optimum, determined by a system of individual welfare and pro-
duction functions. This is also within the scope of my analysis. In
this study, however, this approach is broader and also includes in-
stitutional change, consistent with changing welfare functions. This
is referred to in terms of "institutional efficiency." Efficiency in soci-
ety can be reflected according to various principles. The following
approach is a somewhat specific one; I account for the degree of
income equality among welfare determining factors, considering it
decisive for indicating an optimum optimorum, in the sense that a
choice is made out of various socioeconomic situations, character-
ized by different distributions of income. This type of thinking or-
ders various attainable situations from a political point of view, ac-
cording to preference. On this basis an optimum income distribu-
tion can be determined. (3)

I connect efficiency with the situation in which social welfare is
maximized structurally. A situation is considered institutionally ef-
ficient if the dominating political conviction is that the structure of
efficiency-oriented institutions can not be improved. Van den Noort
(6), when referring to welfare theory in general and to Tinbergen (9)
specifically, makes a plea for a social aims function (Q) that is op-
erational in economic policy. In van den Noort' s vision, the func-
tion must be based on preferences that are manifested in the world
of socioeconomic policy. My conception of institutional efficiency is
also along this line of thinking.

Economic policy has consequences for the present as well as for
future welfare. A concise way of giving expression to this is by mak-
ing use of the magnitudes of national income (Y), the degree of in-
come equality (a), and a quality index of nature (N). Then efficiency
is given by:

(1) Max Q = 0(Y^,...Y^, a, N^,...N^),

where the subscript t refers to the time horizon of public policy. The
function 0 also reflects social time preference, on the basis of cer-
tain expectations for population growth. Conditions are given by
the quantities of production factors available. However, it must be

84 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

realized that there exists interdependency between these wel-
fare-determining variables. First, in the proximity of the equilib-
rium value of a, as well as the increasing function 0, there is the
decreasing function i/c

(2) Y^ = ^(a).

This equation shows that, within a certain range of values of a, an
increase of the degree of income equality may weaken production
incentives in the system. (3) (This refers especially to situations in
countries like the Netherlands and Sweden in which incomes are to
a large degree leveled out. In countries with great income inequal-
ity the opposite might be true. In this case, the function ( i/d might
increase, expressing that more equality has a positive impact on the
level of Y.) Secondly, besides the direct effect of the quality of nature
on welfare, as reflected by function 0, there is also an indirect effect
through production functions:

(3)Y=/,(N),

where functions /. (i=l,...,t) reflect expectations for population
growth, as already mentioned, and those for the level and structure
of technological development, including capital formation. By math-
ematical elimination of a and Y. in this system of equations, Q. be-
comes a function of N^. Moreover, the indices reflecting the quality
of nature are endogenous magnitudes in the institutionally-oriented
economic system that is under discussion.

B. Distinct Approaches to Judgement of Institutional Change

The effects of institutional changes are judged ex ante, before po-
litical measures are taken, as well as ex post, determining what the
measures brought about. Ex ante judgements are based on the present
knowledge of the functioning of the economic system. Ex post judge-
ments are of significance not only for obtaining additional knowl-
edge of the system but also for the preparation of further policy
measures. Another distinction is the difference between marginal
and mutational institutional change. An example of the former is a
small change of a tax rate. In general, effects of marginal measures
can be predicted with more certainty than those of mutationa
changes, especially if mutations refer to radical changes in the insti
tutional system. Examples of the latter can be borrowed from the

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 85

construction of the Western welfare state. Many measures had to be
amended after it became clear that not all effects were necessarily
favourable. Other examples can be found in the present-day trans-
formations of Eastern-European economies. Thus, the striving for
institutional efficiency is a political process. Sometimes the process
is characterized by gradual change in a certain direction; at other
times by abrupt changes, which may give the development pattern
a stochastic feature.

In "mechanistic economics" it is maintained that society is volun-
tary, "to be made," in accordance with generally adopted plans. In
"organic-oriented economics" it is posited that political plans often
result in long-term changes that are not in full accord with rational
political intentions. I agree with the idea of the relativity of the
mechanistic approach, also in the context of "institutional efficiency."

II. Types of Efficiency-Oriented Institutions

Institutions are factors that influence behavior in social intercourse.
Institutions that manifest themselves in the economic system are
called economic institutions. The set of economic institutions may
also be defined as the economic aspect of the set of social institu-
tions. Institutes are organizational units in the institutional sphere,
sharing responsibility and authority in society. The system of insti-
tutes maintains the system of institutions. For the distinction be-
tween institutions and institutes I also refer the reader to Gustav
SchmoUer. (7, p. 61)

In this section I discuss various types of efficiency-oriented insti-
tutions, which are subsets of the set of economic institutions in gen-
eral. I distinguish the following types: those that determine the in-
teraction pattern, prescriptive institutions, conduct-oriented insti-
tutions, market-oriented institutions, and institutions for the trans-
fer of income.

A. Institutions Determining the Interaction Structure

In the field of fundamental institutions, determining the economic
interaction structure, the main distinction is between production
activities and consumption activities. The first I regard as those ap-
plying scarce means of production and the second as consumer be-
havior with regard to private and public goods. This distinction is
typical of all developed economies. However, the institutional char-

86 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

acteristics of households as such, in which production and consump-
tion activities are practiced, differ profoundly in various societies.
Laws and other regulations, as well as customs, also belong to the
subset of interaction determining institutions. There are various
forms of production, carried on in various types of households, e.g.,
large-scale and small-scale production units, private and
government-run households. Consumption can take place in pri-
vate households as well as in the public sector.

The behavior of producers and consumers, characterized as ba-
sic institutes, is influenced by a whole network of institutions. This
network is maintained by institutes that are authorized to do so.
Institutions which sustain these authorities must also be considered
as interaction determining institutions. The following types of in-
stitutions also have interaction determining aspects.

B. Prescriptive Institutions

The key feature of prescriptive institutions is that government
offices dictate what other actors in the system should or should not
do. These prescriptions may affect actors in the system such as house-
holds of certain types. Other institutes in the system can also be
influenced by such prescriptions and can, in turn, influence the be-
havior of households, either directly or indirectly. These measures
may have an impact on each of the efficiency determining variables
Y^, a, and N.. Prohibition orders form the main type of institutions in
this category. This means that households are not allowed to do
certain things. The impact on welfare (Q) is mainly as follows. Pro-
hibition orders have a negative impact on Q by decreasing profits.
However, if the measure in question has, e.g., a nature-sparing char-
acter, then there is also a positive effect on welfare, either directly
on individual welfare or indirectly through an increasing capacity
of the factor "nature." There may be consequences for income dis-
tribution as well, if rents are earned by firms that are less limited in
their behavior than others. Trespassing against prohibition orders
is usually punishable by fines. If paying such fines becomes a mor-
ally accepted custom, the fines function as fees, discussed below. It
is desirable to legalize such payments and not to allow infringe-
ments of the law to become part of the legal economic system. Con-
ditional orders are representative of a specific type of prescriptive
institutions. The central idea is that government dictates conditions

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 87

of economic behavior, including precautionary measures - for ex-
ample, various forms of care for human and natural resources, i.e.,
for man and the environment. As far as the impact on welfare is con-
cerned, similar observations can be made as for prohibition orders.

C. Conduct-Oriented Institutions

Institutions oriented towards economic conduct are maintained
by private as well as public institutes. In this area, the key words
are education, information, and the changing of attitudes. The sig-
nificance of this type of institution, for the system under consider-
ation, is along the lines of the impact of government measures al-
ready mentioned. Governments are forced to intervene if, in certain
respects, voluntary behavior fails.

Thinking of conduct-oriented institutions in this context, one is
confronted with a fundamental difficulty in applied welfare theory.
It is paradoxical to consider an improvement of economic behavior
on the basis of social priorities that are supposed to determine the
original social welfare function as well as the institutional setting
which comes into being. The resolution to this paradox is to be found
in that the political conception of social welfare and its components
are subject to gradual change, constantly requiring adaptation of
the institutional system.

D. Market-Oriented Institutions

Institutions having a direct impact on market behavior are levies
and subsidies which are applied proportional to production and
sales as well as to the means of production used. Some of these
levies and subsidies are, in fact, related to the external effects of
production and consumption. As far as levies are concerned, it is of
interest to know which expenditures are financed by the funds
raised. Various forms of eco-taxes are examples of market-oriented
institutions. Turnover taxes belong to this category as well, although
they may also have the character of transfer institutions.
Market-oriented institutions are typically oriented towards efficiency
in social production.

E. Income Transfer Institutions

Institutions for the transfer of income may not only refer to pay-
ments between households, but also to those from the private to the

88 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

government sphere and vice versa. Transfers from the private to
the government sector may serve not only the financing of the pub-
Uc sector as such, but also facilitate the redistribution of private in-
comes. This institution is mainly focused on the welfare compo-
nent a. Yet, the components Y^ and N. are usually also affected, ei-
ther positively or negatively.

III. Efficient Technology

Capital plays a crucial part in modern production. In this sec-
tion, I focus on the role played by factor productivities and price
ratios in the formation of capital. The analysis addresses institu-
tional impacts on structural price ratios which are supposed to re-
flect relative scarcities.

A. Capital in the System

Marginal factor productivities and time preferences are of cru-
cial importance in determining the size and texture of capital, formed
and applied in the economic system. The state of applied technol-
ogy, related to specific production circumstances, is given by the
productivities of the original factors labour and nature and the de-
rived factor capital. Technology has an induced character; it is deter-
mined by scarcity ratios, manifesting in factor prices. Thus, in this
context, the optimal volume and structure of the factor capital is a
component of the applicable technology. It must also be viewed in
its relationship with available volumes of the original production
factors labour and nature.

B. The Impact of Factor Prices on the Structure of Capital

Capital is the key factor in technology. In the economic system,
technology and capital function as complementary elements. How-
ever, they can also be conceived as a subsystem, which may be use-
ful for the analysis of the structure of capital. In this subsystem a
certain structure crystallizes during the depreciation period, which
is tuned to the most remunerative technology.

It is known that substitution elasticities between factors of pro-
duction are greater in the long than in the short term. This is due to
the fact that technology adapts itself better to changing price ratios
when the adaptation period is longer. It can be demonstrated that
changing marginal factor productivities are the main determinants

YJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 89

in this long-term process of substitution. This is because techno-
logical change is directed towards applying more of those factors
which become comparatively cheaper due to increases in their mar-
ginal productivities. (4, pp. 19-20)

C. Institutional Impacts on Factor Prices

The increasing scarcity of the original factors of production mani-
fests itself in higher prices of these factors. Generally, this results in
an increase in the price of capital. This increase will be smaller in
the long than in the short term; the capital structure adapts itself
better, the longer the adaptation period. This adaptation process is
directed towards the realization of the economic principle: produc-
ing more with given resources, or, what boils down to the same
thing, producing a given volume with fewer means. In some cases,
the price-raising tendency caused by increasing scarcity is out-
weighed by a type of technological development that has the effect
of making the factors concerned more plentiful. It is clear that a
central problem of structural economic policy is how to create con-
ditions for efficient technologies by taking the latter effects into ac-
count.

In his work, Der moderne Kapitalismus, Werner Sombart noticed
that in the course of time production took on a scientific character.
The further development of scientific knowledge tends to move from
the sphere of independent inventors and universities to corporate
research departments. He pointed out that, in a culture of capitalist
invention, inventions are tested with regard to profitability. In other
words, what counts as "a good invention is a remunerative inven-
tion." (8, p. 95)

In his book The Social Costs of Private Enterprise, K.W. Kapp (2)
questioned whether, in a capitalist society, private costs are in line
with social costs. Kapp's position is that an environment-friendly
technology will not develop as long as "nature" is too cheap, both
as a resource and as a depository for waste. Kapp believed that
economists must investigate this matter profoundly and that politi-
cians must transform the economic system accordingly. This is what
happens at present. The basic objective of modern economic theory
and policy is to shape the economic system in such a way that effi-
cient technologies spontaneously come into existence.

90 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

D. The Impact of Interest on Nature-Benign Technology

According to Hotelling's rule, a determining factor in the pro-
cess of utilizing natural resources is the level of interest. Yet, the
rate of depletion that is considered desirable in preservation policy
might be considerably below that of the spontaneous depletion of
nature in a system of laissez faire. Thus, in general, a low interest
rate is favourable for the preservation of natural resources. How-
ever, an artificially lowering of the rate of interest will not solve the
problem; interest rates affect various parts of the economic system
differently. This implies that making interest rates fully subservient
to preservation policy would deregulate the economy because so-
cioeconomic aims such as monetary equilibrium and employment
would receive insufficient attention. Therefore, nature-benign tech-
nology must be mainly achieved through institutional changes. This
policy has two main dimensions: direct prescriptions for producers
and consumers and modification of the price structure.

IV. Time Preference in Sustainability Criteria

Time preference is the preference for consumption in the present
rather than consumption in the future, based on "perspective decli-
nation" of future wants. It is the main factor, together with the de-
mand for capital, that determines interest rates. The actual level of
interest reflects the time preferences of actors in the economic sys-
tem and, as such, the time preference of the economic system as a
whole. Time preferences of members of society for sustainable pro-
duction, however, could be considerably below this level.

The term sustainability expresses a judgement about certain pat-
terns of economic development. This implies realistic prognoses
about technological progress and, on that basis, determining a nor-
mative discount rate for future needs. This norm should evolve in the
political process of a community of people who accept responsibil-
ity for the interest of mankind. In valuing nature, a crucial part is
played by expectations of the intensity and character of technologi-
cal development. The substitution of components of nature that
gradually become scarcer by less scarce components forms an im-
portant element in this picture, although there exists much uncer-
tainty about substitution opportunities.

On the basis of these ideas a criterion for sustainability can be
formulated. For this purpose I have subdivided nature into

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 91

depletable production factors (nj, renewable production factors {n^ ),
and direct environment of life (n). Furthermore, I distinguish be-
tween the rates of time preference (/), the depletion of natural stocks
id), the technological progress that is preserving depletable nature
ih^), and the technological progress that is economizing renewable
nature (h^).

Leaving n^ and n^ out of consideration, the production function
is:

(4) y = y/n^), or in linear form,

(5) y = a n^,

in which r refers to ''renewable nature,'' supposed to be the only
production factor. In this case the sustainability criterion takes the
form:

;6) 1 a (e'^ -l)n^dt>0 (i = h^-f), or

o

7)K-f>0.

f n is included, which means that the environment of life is also
aken into account, then social welfare {w) is:

'^) w=<^ {y,n^) => w = '^(n^,nj.

The rate of degeneration (k) of the direct environment of life is rarely
jubject to compensation. Let the maximum degeneration rate (k*)
:onsidered to be acceptable be equal to the minimum rate that is
"easible. Then the sustainability criterion is:

9) \-f>vk\

Adhere the parameter v represents the weight of environmental deg-
'adation in the social welfare function. This means that technologi-
:al progress must outweigh the sum of time preference and a term
"eflecting the degeneration of the environment of life. If n^ is not
ncluded, and y = pn^, the criterion is:

oo

10) jpd(e'^ - l)n^ dt>vk* (j = h^-d-f), or

o

W) h^-d-f>vk\

92 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

This is valid if "exhaustible nature" is supposed to be the only pro-
duction factor. In this situation technological progress must also
outweigh the depletion of nature, as well as the terms indicated in
Equation 9.

Finally, I want to consider the case where all aspects of nature are
relevant. The rate of population growth (g) and its weight (2) in the
welfare function are also included. If the production and the wel-
fare functions are linearized, the sustainability criterion then is:

(12) J (e" - l)n^ dt +ajd (e'^ - l)n^ dt>vV + zg,

(a>0) (i = h^-f;j = h^-d-f),

with the magnitudes/, d and h being in hundredth of percent (lO^^).
Unfortunately, this equation can not be expressed as simply as Equa-
tions 7 and 11. The left term of Equation 12 is a "compound"- of
Equations 9 and 11.

The crucial political question is whether nature-preserving tech-
nological development will offset the effect of time preference, of
the depletion of nature, and of population growth. (5)

V. Economic Cybernetics

Analyzing the character and the functioning of the
efficiency-oriented system, one must keep in mind that in the chaos
of economic data various systems can be conceived. My point of
departure is the problem formulated in the exordium of this essay.
The model under discussion does not only represent a theory about
decisions of economic actors under given circumstances, but the
attention is also directed towards the various types of conditions
under which decisions take place. This is the question which has
also been raised by Gustav Schmoller (7) and, nowadays, by Nicho-
las Georgescu-Roegen (1).

A. The Composition of the System

The center of the efficiency-oriented system is formed by a sys-
tem of decisions of economic actors. This decision system refers to
the formation and application of means of production; it contains
within itself a system of institutions and a system of institutes that
maintain it. Economic actors, the institutes concerned, consist not

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 93

only of consumption and production households, but also of insti-
tutes that indirectly contribute to the allocation of the factors of pro-
duction. Basic institutions are the consumption and production
households' striving for efficiency, from their specific point of view,
under given circumstances. This basic behavior is affected by other
institutions.

Institutions are realizations of (sometimes conflicting) aims of
economic actors. Thus, the system of efficiency-oriented institutions
rests on a system of preferences of economic actors. However, these
preferences are related to circumstances, e.g., the levels, structures
and developments of technology, population, and natural resources,
including environmental quality. Therefore, the decision system
concerned also needs to contain sets of data in these areas.

B. A Multifarious Way of Thought

On the crucial question in economics of how to analyze the above
complexes of phenomena, the last word has not yet been spoken.
Yet some points are clear enough. It is in the line of economic tradi-
tion to reflect on the economic decision system with the help of
welfare theory, including property rights theory. Thinking prima-
rily in these terms, one can state that the influence of institutional
change manifests in the modification of decision functions of eco-
nomic actors and in extending existing optimization units by spe-
cial functional relationships and additional constraints. In the wel-
fare theory system, institutions can be internalized by including fac-
tors which exert influence on the basic behavior of consumers and
producers and on the optimization behavior of other actors in the
economic system.

On the one hand, the use of human and natural resources is a
necessary condition for production. On the other hand, degrada-
tion of capacities of natural resources is the result of the process of
production and consumption. Thus, institutions are related to re-
sources along two lines. Furthermore, it must be realized that, in a
sense, also man himself is a part of "nature." Depending on the
type of subsystem under consideration, thought is of a specific na-
ture. Logic has either a welfare-economic, a politico-ethical, a bio-
logical, or a physical character.

94 /./. Krabbe: Institutional Conditions for Efficient Sustainable Development

C. The Purposefulness of the System

The social aims function (Equation 1) presented in the first sec-
tion of this essay must be understood empirically. It reflects eco-
nomic actors' ideas of efficiency, exercised through the institutional
system under specific environmental circumstances. These ideas
may differ from actor to actor; the weight of any idea depends on
the structure of the system and the actor's place in it.

In the system various types of interdepend ency can be conceived.
First, there are interdependences between the rational, the biologi-
cal and the physical spheres. Second, there are interdependencies
within these spheres. Interdependency in the rational or ethical
sphere is such, that actors condition each others' decisions. Institu-
tions are rooted in the rational sphere, and, through it, also in the
biological and physical spheres.

Although the system contains a clear biological component, as a
whole it must not be considered an "organism." However, there are
some similarities with organic systems. Both types of systems are
characterized by interdependencies, and by a certain purposeful-
ness, to which various elements contribute. Therefore, the use of
organically oriented terms, such as "evolution," must not be rejected
on a priori grounds.

VI. Final Remarks

It is possible to maintain that, in social intercourse, efficiency is
the result of a political process in which various types of institu-
tions play a part. This efficiency system can be reflected in terms of
welfare theory, placed into a broader theoretical framework. Induced
technology and its main component "capital" can be considered as
a subsystem. In a system of laissez faire the rate of interest might
have a negative impact on nature. This must be corrected through
various institutional measures affecting producers' and consumers'
decision patterns. For this purpose, sustainability criteria can be
formulated, indicating that technological development must offset
time preference, the depletion of nature, and population growth.

This model of institutional adaptation reflects environmental as-
pects of European and of North American economies' institutional
frameworks that have evolved over the last few decades. The model
is meant to serve further developments on this point, both in the
political and the analytical fields.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 95

References

1. Georgescu-Roegen, N. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Kapp, K.W. The Social Costs of Private Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1950.
Krabbe, J.J. "Individueel en Collectief Nut." Diss. Wageningen, Netherlands:

Mededelingen Landbouwuniversiteit, 1974.
"Nature in Pigouvian Oriented Economics," in National Income

and Nature: Externalities, Growth and Steady State. Eds. J.J. Krabbe and

W.J.M. Heijman. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1992.
5 "Quantifying Sustainability: the Entropy Approach," in Issues of

Environmental Economic Policy. Wageningen Economic Studies 24. Eds.

W.J.M. Heijman and J.J. Krabbe. Wageningen, Netherlands: Pudoc, 1992.

6. Noort, PC. van den. "Het vraagstuk van de optimale beleidskeuze voor de
Europese landbouw," in Economic en Landbouw. Eds. A.A.P van Drunen,
et al. The Hague: Vuga, 1983.

7. SchmoUer, G. Grundriss der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre, erster Teil. Leipzig:
Duncker & Humblot, (1900) 1908.

Sombart, W. Der moderne Kapitalismus, dritter Band. Munich and Leipzig:

Duncker & Humblot, 1928.
Tinbergen, J. On the Theory of Economic Policy. Amsterdam: North-Holland,

1975.

IUHHltMiiimwiiiw^Ba

Growth as a Prerequisite
for Sustainability

P.C. van den Noort

A highly developed economy cannot adopt a zero growth situa-
tion. According to chaos theory, in such a developed economy there
must be a continuous process of inventions and innovations in or-
der to prevent a collapse of the existing socioeconomic structure.

I. A Biological Analogy

In economics we are used to biological oriented concepts, e.g.,
the growth of population, of production and of national income.
There is currently concern about these growth processes; we fear
there will be a collapse if growth continues unchecked and that
mankind will go the way of the dinosaurs or of the mammoths.
Zero growth, therefore, seems to be an ideal policy goal for society,
since it apparently offers the only escape from further plundering
of our planet and from total disaster.

Recently, a diametrically different view has emerged. It holds that
it is zero growth and zero innovation that are to be feared, because
they would lead to immediate disaster. "Zero growth" involves three
problems or dangers. The first one is the problem of the distribu-
tion of production, i.e., the partition of the "national pie." During
previous affluent periods, growth made these problems easier to
deal with since most of us could feel or see an improvement in our
standard of living, even without changes in the distribution of in-
come. Hence, less conflict was experienced than had been encoun-
tered in other times, when more for one meant less for others. The
discords between farmers and landowners and between workers
and capitalists are well known examples.

In a zero-growth scenario, many of these old conflicts would re-
turn. With less income, and with greater antagonism about the dis-
tribution of income, there would be less willingness to make sacri-
fices for improving the environment and nature. This is also the
second concern or danger. We may say, therefore, that a highly de-
veloped economy requires some growth to face the challenges of

Q7

98 P.C. v.d. Noort: Growth as a Prerequisite for Sustainability

serious problems arising from the distribution of wealth and from
the environment.

A small part of growth arises from capital accumulation, but most
is derived from increased productivity. It is here that we see the
third danger. Production cannot be limited to existing levels with-
out destabilizing society. It looks simple. We have enough, why not
stop at this level? Perhaps this might be possible in a much simpler
society; in such a world we need not to curb production. However,
in the real world, if we were to limit production to a no growth
pattern, we would witness a collapse of our socioeconomic system
and destroy our children's future, thereby achieving the very effect
we wish to avert.

A. Logistic Growth

Growth may be expected to become restricted; growth tends to
decrease with the attainment of higher levels of production. The
typical level of production (Y) depends on its logistic growth pat-
tern over time (t). This can be formulated as:

(1) Y.^, = kY, - bYj.

Economic development depends on the coefficients k and b,
where k is the rate of growth and b is indicative of the resistance to
worsening conditions or of the vulnerability of the industry in ques-
tion. The higher the value of k, the more competitive the industry
will tend to be. By setting y = Y(b/k) we obtain the standard logistic
growth curve:

(2) y, = ky,-kyj

in which y varies between 0 and 1 and k between 0 and 4. The logis-
tic curves derived from Equation 2, for different values of k, are the
simple parabolas depicted in Graph a of Figure 1 . As the value of k
increases from 2.5 to 4.0, for example, the parabola steepens but its
form does not change very much. This implies that no significant
differences exist between these four situations.

However, the time series exhibited in Graphs b, c, d, and e of
Figure 1 convey completely different situations, ranging from the
very stable to the purely chaotic, i.e., small differences may cause
enormous consequences. These time series y^ are generated from
Equation 2 for different values of k, assuming a given value of

YJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994

99

0 10 203040500 10 203040 50

FIGURE 1
Logistic Graph

3 < y^^Q < 1 (e.g., beginning with y^ = 0.04, or any other value), de-
picting dramatically different behavior patterns which depend on
the precise value of k. (3) For example, a very stable situation is
derived when k = 2.5, Figure lb. The situation is less stable but still
'egular when k = 3.15, Figure Ic. "Wilder fluctuations" are observed
or k = 3.55, Figure Id, and "perfect" or "complete" chaos as k = 4,
i^igure le.

In other words, instability results when k > 3; the greater the value
3f k, the greater the instability. When k > 3.8, we speak of "chaos"
md define (mathematically) "complete chaos" at the limiting value
3f k = 4. Manifestations of Equation 2 can be observed in nature,
:echnology, and the economy, in the form of S-shaped or sigmoidal
:urves as depicted in Figure 2. (1; 2; 7; 9)

100

PERCENT
100.0

P.C. v.d. Noort: Growth as a Prerequisite for Sustainability

/J Canili

/ Rlilwiyl

^ Roidi

i

/ / /

1136 i

1-

SS VCItl

,/

55 YMH /

1

;,

l/""

i / /

1 1 1 1 " r^) ^ ==f=

=^

1 1 1

1 r"~^i

t 1 1 1 1 h-

t 1

1
1

2000 YEAR

nCURE 2

Growth of Infrastructure in the U.S.A.

(Percent saturation length)

B. Logistic Evolution

In nature one can observe mutations. As a consequence, new types
with higher k-coefficients sometimes emerge in a population and
replace older ones. Similar processes also occur in the economy, but
we prefer to speak of these in terms of inventions and innovations
instead of mutations. The fundamental idea, however, is the same.
The k-value of some production processes may increase.

C. Instability

Because of this rise in the k-value, our destiny changes without
us immediately being aware of it. For k > 3.2 we observe instability
in the former stable sigmoid curves and these fluctuations intensify
with increasing values of k. (As shown above, for k = 3.15 regular
fluctuations are observable. Figure Ic, but higher values of k lead to
less "regularity" and increased instability.) When k = 4, there is
complete "chaos," as previously defined. Instability is dangerous,
because competitors might exploit the situation and conquer the
market; the larger the k-value the greater the danger, as shown in
Figure 1.

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 101

In reality we might not always see this instability. Sometimes the
situation might look very stable, even though k is rather high. For
example, a stream of new inventions and innovations could enable
newcomers to grow whereas older firms in the industry might suf-
fer a setback. In this scenario, streams of new inventions and inno-
vations may produce stable growth patterns for an industry as a
whole.

II. Vitality

We can say that a population is viable if it has high vitality. This
vitality depends on the degree of growth, the level of maximum
production or carrying capacity, the degree of competition, the num-
ber of mutations, the resistance to disadvantageous conditions, and
stability. The concept of viability can also be applied to various forms
of production or industries, though it is difficult to take full account
of the many aspects involved, because of their different dimensions.
It is a problem of comparing like with unlike. We can overcome this
problem by using index numbers, and weighting each of the as-
pects in accordance with their "importance" to viability.

The vitality of a population or of a production process (industry)
depends on aspects such as size and stability. We know that both,
size (quantity) and stability, depend on the value of k (are functions
of k), but also that they cannot be added directly. This can be re-
solved by using an index number of vitality, such as:

(3) N^ = w * quantity + (1-w) * stability,

where w is defined as the number of competitors.

Stability is especially important if k is high and there are no mu-
tations (or inventions and innovations). This becomes increasingly
important as the number of competitors, w, increases. We can com-
bine all these aspects in the Newell index (6):

(4) J.J _ hw (k-1) (2.6 - k) + (1-hw) logk.

k

Log k reflects the growth of the population (or of production).
The resistance to deteriorating conditions is equal to the b-coefficient
in Equation 1; it is a function of 1 /k and, therefore, k is the denomi-
nator. Stability is indicated by (k-1) (2.6-k). If k has a value between
1 and 2.6, the population (or production process) is very stable.

102

P.C. v.d. Noort: Growth as a Prerequisite for Sustainability

0. 5 -

FIGURE 3
Newell Index for h = 0

However, this is not the case for other values of k. There are two
values for h, e.g., h = 1 if there are no inventions and innovations.
For h = 0, indicative of an abundance of inventions and innova-
tions, the resulting Newell index is exhibited in Figure 3.

The rising curve in Figure 3 depicts a picture of the traditional
idea of evolution. We have climbed this mountain of evolution. Many
now believe we have ascended enough; we should stop now and
stay put. We no longer need ever-increasing growth curves or ac-
celerating inventions and innovations. In other words, we should
accept zero growth. But opting for zero growth and /or zero inno-
vation would have a most unexpected and undesirable effect.

If h = 1 the situation is not stable for high values of k and be-
comes more unstable as the number of competitors (w) increases.
As Figure 4 shows, the "mountain" of Figure 3 caves in, when h = 1
(no inventions or innovations). Only for w-values smaller than 0.2
are positive values of N still observed. That is the case if there are
almost no competitors who will try to take advantage of the situa-
tion. In nature we will sometimes find such a situation in what we

Yiest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994

103

N 1

FIGURE 4
Newell Index for h = 1

call "living fossils." For example, the stromatolites in Australia did
not change over the last 500 million years because of lack of compe-
tition. We call them Methuselahs; Ward (10) described such crea-
tures - they are rather rare.

Lack of inventions and innovations will lead to instability and
this may prove to be fatal for the population. As indicated above,
this can be observed by setting h = 1 in Figure 4; the mountain caves
in because part of the index N falls below zero. This, in essence, is
representative of the extinction of that mode of production. Only
those modes of production which experience low k values survive;
the others become extinct like dinosaurs. There is one exception: for
low w-values (no competition). Figure 4 shows that some high
k-value populations may survive. This explains why companies
attempt to corner the entire market (no competitors) or try to inno-
vate all the time. Innovation is very important; without a stream of
inventions and innovations the economy caves in. This can be illus-
trated on hand of statistical data from Schumpeter, Griibler,
Silverberg and Van Duyn, (6) see also Figure 5 below.

104 P.C. v.d. Noort: Growth as a Prerequisite for Sustainability

III. Competition

Competition plays an important role in the vitality of industries.
There are various types of competition. Some are already operating
in the phase of "ideas" or in the planning phase, others emerge once
there are real products or technologies. Rivalry between innova-
tions will develop and one will usually win out but will then face
competition from other products and services. Various battles may
influence the rate of growth. We may even expect revolutionary
changes.

From the studies of Kuhn (4) and Mulkay (5) we know that the
acceptance of new ideas is a complicated process in which "revolu-
tions" in the power structure of the scientific community play an
important role. Hence, we not only have to deal with "stoppages"
in the process, but also with "goes," both depending on the psycho-
logical and social factors that govern the acceptance of new ideas in
science, industry and government. These revolutions may play an
important role in the explanation of the Kondratieff or "long wave"
cycles of economic expansions and contractions. They tend to have
a wave length of between 40 to 60 years, which can be observed for
the U.S. and Europe from 1750 on. Kondratieff cycles can be de-
fined for the periods of 1782-1845, 1845-1891, 1892-1948 and from
1948-1993 (the latter is highly speculative). One must also expect
some periods of conservative policies (what Kuhn calls "normal
science") which may ultimately result in h = 1, causing the whole
process to grind to a halt.

The actual and predicted rates of innovation in the U.S. from 1800
to the year 2050 is depicted in Figure 5. (2) It can be observed that
this rate is not constant. There are clearly high and low periods cor-
responding to the long waves of Kondratieff cycles in the economy
(i.e., long-term business cycles of between 40-60 years duration).

In other words, interruptions in the innovation process have dra-
matic effects on the economy. One may imagine of what might hap-
pen if the processes of invention and innovation came to a halt. Some
people might think that this is not a real option, but, unfortunately,
it still is an important factor in some political theorizing.

The process of progress also has disadvantages. First, there are
victims of revolutions and of competition. Second, systems will tend
to become potentially more unstable. This may result in more cartel

Vlest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 105

Percent

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 2050 Year

FIGURE 5
Rate of Innovation in the U.S.

policies, nnore agricultural price policies, more social safety mea-
sures, and even more subsidies to industries. All of these can only
be paid for if the system continues to function. If it comes to a halt,
many of these social niceties fade away because national income
decreases. Massive direct subsidies may even result in industries
disappearing. For example, if the value of k were to increase from
2.6 to 3.4 (with a gift or subsidy), without inventions, innovations,
or structural change (h = 1), total disaster would result - see Figure
4. These theoretical considerations are in accordance with the expe-
riences of declining industries, such as shipbuilding, mining, tex-
tiles and steel in the Netherlands and other West European coun-
tries. (8)

IV. Conclusion

Those who innocently advocate zero growth or zero inventions
and innovations tend to overlook the importance of instability. If

106 P.C. v.d. Noort: Growth as a Prerequisite for Sustainability

we want sustainability, we must, of course, prevent potential disas-
ters as indicated in Figure 4, and, therefore, must try to ensure an
unfailing stream of inventions and innovations. If there is no such
stream, the most developed part of the economy will collapse, with
disastrous consequences for society as a whole. Thus, growth and
innovation do not run counter to sustainability To the contrary,
without growth and innovation there will be no sustainability. Even
the absence of inventions and innovations for short periods of time
would have negative consequences (depressions). Hence,
sustainability would be impossible to be achieved if society were to
adapt zero growth or zero innovation policies.

Acknowledgement

The author expresses his appreciation to Professors I. Prigogine,
R.M. May, P. Colinvaux, PA. Vroon, and J.J. Krabbe for their inter-
est in his work.

References

1. Begon, Michael, et al. Ecology. 2nd ed. London: Blackwell Scientific, 1990.

2. Gmbler, Arnulf. Rise and Fall of Infrastructures. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag,

1990.

3. Hall, Nina, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. London: Penguin, 1991.

4. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1970.

5. Mulkay, M.J. The Social Process of Innovation. London: Macmillan, 1972.

6. Noort, PC. van den. Chaostheorie en Evolutie. Delft, Netherlands: Eburon, 1993.

7. Peitgen, Heinz-Otto, et al. Fractals for the Classroom. New York: Springer- Verlag,

1992.

8. Voogd, Christophe de. De Neergang van de Scheepsbouw. Vlissingen, Nether-

lands: Den Boer, 1993.

9. Vroon, PA. De Wolfsklem. Baarn, Netherlands: Ambo, 1992.

10. Ward, Peter Douglas. On Methuselah's Trail. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1992.

Sustainable Development:
Redefining Economic Policy Goals

Michael Spyrou

Sustainable development (SD) has become a fashionable catch-
word; it is the major theme of numerous conferences and publica-
tions. International organizations, such as the World Bank and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
have adopted the concept of SD for the preparation and evaluation
of economic development plans. It is becoming the development
paradigm of the 1990s. (11 p. 607) "The National Commission on
the Environment Report," Choosing a Sustainable Future, was pub-
lished in 1993, the same year a new President moved into the White
House. (14) This new administration appears to be sympathetic to
the ideas of sustainable development.

It appears that the concept of SD enjoys broad-based support from
individuals, environmental groups, private and public institutions,
and also from an environmentally conscious public. Some elements
3f the attractiveness of the concept of SD are its underlying themes
3f justice, equity, economic efficiency, and environmental integrity
:26, p. 14)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of SD, focus-
ing on economic development, and to review applicable policies.
This treatise consists of four parts. It first deals with the genesis,
evolution and the various meanings and values which define SD.
secondly, an attempt is made to identify and to describe the major
assumptions upon which sustainable developmental policies are
3ased and formulated. The emerging economic policies, values and
nstruments, used to redefine economic goals, are examined in the
:hird section. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the
prospects of the application of SD policies, i.e., the obstacles and
strategies needed to make SD successful.

I. Genesis, Evolution, and Definitions of SD

The genesis and widespread discussion on SD took place because
)f concentrated efforts by many individuals, as well as public and
private organizations which were, and still are, trying to find policy

109

110 M. Spyrou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

guidelines and rules "that will put the environment into the center
of economics" and into the heart of development considerations.
(26, p. 13)

The popularization of the concept of SD was made possible with
the 1987 "Brundtland Commission Report," Our Common Future.
(25) The ideas, views, and prescriptions for SD expressed in this
report, were developed over a three year period - after the commis-
sion went through a "broad base of analysis, learning, and debate."
(12, p. 155) Also, the Brundtland Report represents the culmination
of a decade-long debate on the issues related to environmental de-
struction and economic development. The discourse was instituted
primarily by the United Nations, carried out through various pro-
grams and international conferences. The most noticeable of these
were UNESCO's "Man and the Biosphere Program," the "World
Conservation Strategy" (adopted in 1980), and the "Conference on
Conservation and Development: Implementing the World Conser-
vation Strategy," held in Ottawa, Canada, in 1986.

According to Michael Young, the debate on SD is a matter of
"policy integration," based on the "emerging interest in 'environ-
mental economies'." The world has finally realized that it had to
search "for new ways to understand the non-linear linkages between
the environment and the economy." (26, p. 13)

Sustainable Development, as Peter Jacobs and David A. Munro
point out, (10, p. 20) involves responses to five general needs and
requirements:

a) integration of conservation and development;

b) satisfaction of basic human needs;

c) achievement of equity and social justice;

d) provision for social self-determination and cultural diver-
sity; and

e) maintenance of ecological integrity.

The core idea and challenge of SD is based on the notion of inte-
grating conservation and development, "reflecting the awareness
that people and nature are interdependent and that there are many
different, acceptable, ways of using nature." (10, p. 20)

The attempt to link conservation ideals and development is not
new. Its roots go back to the genesis of the conservation movement
whose principles were well articulated by one of its pioneers, Gifford

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 111

Pinchot. He emphatically stated that "conservation stands for de-
velopment, the use of the natural resources ... for the benefit of the
people who live here now." Pinchot went on to say that "conserva-
tion stands for the prevention of waste." Hence, if waste can be
controlled in all directions, resources can be preserved, thus extend-
ing their life. It "is a simple matter of good business" and "we shall
have deserved well of our descendants." Pinchot, also, advocated
that "natural resources must be developed and preserved for the
benefit of the many, not merely for the profit of the few." (18, pp.
42-50)

What is evident in Pinchot and, of course, in the views of all those
who embraced the conservation movement, is that through proper
resource management and the efficient use of resources, environ-
mental protection can be complementary, and not necessarily an-
tagonistic, to economic growth and development. The themes of
justice, economic efficiency, and environmental integrity, which form
the core of the debate on SD, are evident in Pinchot's thoughts on
conservation. Unfortunately, the debate on "the notion that eco-
nomic growth and development are compatible with environmen-
tal preservation and that the two should be sold as a 'package' has
to this day received relatively little analytical attention." (16, p. 59)

It needs to be mentioned that a distinction exists also between
the terms SD (sustainable development) and the more familiar
"growth" (as in economic growth), "economic development," and
"sustainable growth." For Herman Daly and John Cobb economic
growth or economic development refers only "to quantitative ex-
pansion in the scale of the physical dimensions of the economic sys-
tem." (6, p. 71) Economic development, however, "is only one part
of the total development of society ... its quantitative dimension is
associated with economic accumulation ... and its qualitative di-
mension is associated with technological and institutional change."
(2, p. 101)

Development, as in SD, implies the "total development of soci-
ety." It "depends on the interaction of economic changes with so-
cial, cultural, and ecological transformations ... its qualitative di-
mension is multifaceted, and is associated with ensuring the
long-term ecological, social, and cultural potential for supporting
economic activity and structural change." (2, p. 103) For example,
Edward Barbier includes in the objectives and goals of sustainable

112 M. Spyrou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

economic development the reduction of poverty through the provi-
sion of "lasting and secure livelihoods that minimize depletion,
environmental degradation, cultural disruption, and social insta-
bility." (2, p. 103)

Beyond the broad goals of SD, as outlined above by Barbier, there
exists no single and acceptable definition of SD. Young sees the
attempt "to present a single definition" as being "counter-product-
ive," because "the retention of a diverse range of approaches" and
"definitions of the most appropriate ways to achieve sustainable
development" will "continue to evolve and adapt." (26, p. 13) How-
ever, the definition offered by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow seems
to be clear and rigorous:

If sustainability means anything more than a vague emo-
tional commitment, it must require that something be con-
served for the long-run. It is very important to understand what
that something is: I think it has to be a generalized capacity to
produce economic well-being. ... A sustainable path for the
economy is thus not necessarily one that conserves every single
thing or any single thing. It is one that replaces whatever it
takes from its inherited natural and produced endowment, its
material and intellectual endowment. (24, p. 29)

In a similar manner, R. Repetto sets the goal of sustainable de-
velopment as a development strategy that manages all assets, natu-
ral resources, and human resources, as well as financial and physi-
cal assets for increasing long-term wealth and well-being. (19, pp.
10-12) What Solow and Repetto are saying is that economic
well-being and the quality of life are derived and maintained
through the existence of a capital stock. This capital stock is made
up of both man-made capital (plant and equipment) and natural
capital (natural resources). It is in the context of Solow's and
Repetto' s discussions that we proceed to the following section of
the paper.

II. Basic Assumptions of Sustainable Development

The preceding examination has indicated that we must rethink,
and expand on the meaning and value attached to economic devel-
opment. The analysis also suggests that we must add new indica-
tors and ways of measuring well-being. In order to do this, concrete
and well-defined assumptions or premises have to be made. These

^Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 113

are essential for meaningful analyses leading to the formulation of
policies and the setting up of instruments, which are required to
make SD operational and successful. An acceptable set of assump-
tions will facilitate in reaching a broad consensus on how to achieve
sustainability. This set of assumptions is drawn from both the physi-
cal and the human environment.

A. Assumption One

Human welfare depends on the availability of a capital stock
derived from both a man-made capital stock and a natural capital
stock. (6, p. 72; 16, p. 599; 24, p. 29) Man-made capital includes
familiar items, such as machinery, factories, and the infrastructure.
'Economists formalize this by saying that capital is contained in
the production function which links inputs - capital, labor, technol-
ogy - to the output of goods and services." (17, p. 599) The natural
capital stock, usually ignored by many economists, is defined as
the "the nonproduced means of producing a flow of natural re-
sources and services." (6, p. 72) According to Pearce, the natural
capital stock serves economic functions in four ways (17, p. 599):

a) A supply of natural resource inputs to the economic
production process - soil quality, forest and other bio-
mass, water, genetic diversity, and so on.

b) A means of assimilating waste products and residu-
als from the economic process - oceans and rivers as
waste receiving media, and so on.

c) A source of direct human welfare through aesthetic
and spiritual appreciation of nature, and

d) A set of life support systems - biogeochemical cycles
and generic ecosystem functioning.

How we handle and manage this capital stock poses a crucial
question. The answer might be found in the interpretations of in-
come and capital, provided by Sir John Hicks. He said that "the
purpose of income calculations is to give people an indication of
the amount which they can consume without impoverishing them-
selves," and that "the practical purpose of income is to serve as a
guide for prudent conduct." (9, p. 172)

As Daly and Cobb observed, the "central defining characteristic
of income is sustainability" which serves as a guide to how much

114 M. Spi/rou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

one can spend before impoverishing himself. The same concept of
income holds true for communities, regions, countries, and the world
community as a whole. In order to achieve the Hicksian income, it
is necessary to "keep capital intact" - defined "as a stock that yields
a flow of goods or services." As was mentioned above, it is made
up of two categories, i.e., man-made and natural capital. (6, p. 72)

Natural capital was ignored by many economists, believing that
"humanly created capital is a near-perfect substitute for natural
resources and, consequently, for the stock of natural capital that
yields the flow of these natural resources." (6, p. 72) However, SD,
especially strong sustainability, requires that both the humanly cre-
ated capital stock and the natural capital stock be maintained "in-
tact separately, on the assumption that they are complements rather
than substitutes in most production functions." (6, p. 72) Also, Pearce
sees an augmented or constant natural capital stock as "the only
route to sustainability." (17, p. 604)

These premises, advanced on the basis of assumptions made
about the natural capital stock, are consistent with the themes of
equity, efficiency, and resiliency, which underlie the concept of SD.
They also justify the importance given to environmental consider-
ations in formulating policies and instruments for achieving SD.

B. Assumption Two

The economic process is subject to the entropy law, the second
law of thermodynamics. Entropy is called the process in which "ev-
ery time energy is transformed from one state to another, some of
its available energy to do work is lost." (23, p. 50) The recognition of
the relationship between the entropy law and economic activity was
discussed extensively by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his work
The Entropy Law and Economic Process. (8) Within the economic pro-
cess of extraction, production, and consumption, low-entropy natu-
ral resources flow into the production stage, where they are trans-
formed into products by labor and equipment with the help of en-
ergy. Thus, economic activity converts energy from a low entropy
state (entropy that occurs at slow evolutionary rates in nature) to a
high entropy state (entropy that occurs at very rapid rates of pro-
duction processes). (23, p. 54)

According to Georgescu-Roegen, the entropy law is a natural
law "which recognizes that even the material universe is subject to

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 115

m irreversible qualitative change." (8, p. 8) The fact remains that
'man's economic struggle centers on environmental low entropy,"
:hat "environmental low entropy is scarce," and that the economic
process is solidly anchored to a material base which is subject to
lefinite constraints." (8, p. 56) This fact recognizes an important
?oint in economics, namely that "the entropy law is the taproot of
economic scarcity" (8, p. 8) It is estimated that the continuous stream
3f consumer products and services depletes terrestrial energy
jources "at a rate 100,000 times greater than they are being created
n nature." (23, p. 54)

Along this line of thinking, the "industrial metabolism" frame-
tvork of analysis offers an

understanding of the environmental impacts of the rapid use
of energy employed by humankind's pursuit of economic
well-being. ... Just as living organisms have metabolic processes
for transforming the energy they import from their environ-
ment into life maintaining processes, economies can also be
viewed as metabolic because they extract large quantities of
energy-rich matter from the environment and transform it into
products. (23, p. 54)

Whereas in the natural world the metabolic process is "balanced
and self-sustaining, in the economic system it is grossly out of bal-
ance with its environment." (23, p. 55) Energy is transformed into
wastes at all points along the industrial metabolic process, with the
greatest waste occurring at the point of consumption. Ayres is of
the opinion that consumption is "naturally dissipative." (1, p. 26)
"Most foods, fuels, paper, lubricants, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides,
cosmetics" and other products "are discarded as waste after a single
use. ... Many of these products are very difficult and expensive to
recycle," so "people use too many of them," and, more often, they
do not "use them again." (23, p. 55)

Z. Assumption Three

Kenneth Boulding sees the earth as a "system of systems," made
Lip of a number of subsystems - the economic subsystem is only
3ne of them. (3, p. 202) The "earth's subsystems should support
'ather than supersede one another;" survival of the planet earth
'depends on the delicate interaction between the various subsystems
:hat compose it." (23, p. 44) This assumption implies that ecologi-

116 M. Spyrou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

cal systems, such as land, and natural resources maintain economic
ones. "It is dangerous to assume that economic activity does not
influence the capacity of ecological systems to maintain that activ-
ity." (26, p. 34) Sustainability, therefore, is determined by the earth's
carrying capacity: the amount of economic activity it can withstand
within the limits of the ecosystem." (23, p. 126) Because the earth
has a limited carrying capacity, according to Milbrath:

Maintaining the integrity and good function of its ecosystem
should be the most fundamental value in the value structure
of a sustainable society. Without a viable ecosystem, life can-
not be sustained, society cannot function, and it will be impos-
sible to realize quality in living. (13, p. 35)

Ecological thinking provides the framework for developing an
integrated and holistic view of the economic process. "Wholeness
helps people to remember that survival depends on successfully
interacting with other living subsystems on the planet, because the
whole cannot survive if its parts are destroyed." Furthermore, whole-
ness helps people understand, "perceive and attend to the relation-
ships with other elements of the environment." (23, p. 130)

D. Assumption Four

"The maintenance of a livable global environment depends on the
sustainable development of the entire human family." (21, p. 169)
Environmental degradation is very often caused by poverty, because
the poor - particularly the populations of Third World countries
depend heavily on the natural resource base for their survival. For
example, the dependence on fuelwood in many countries of Africa
and Asia causes severe damage to this "natural capital stock," bring-
ing about other environmental problems, such as deforestation, de-
sertification, soil erosion, and pollution. "Poor people often have no
choice but to opt for immediate economic benefits at the expense of
the long-run sustainability of their livelihoods." (2, p. 103)

Poor people in their struggle to survive are driven to doing
environmental damage with long-term losses. Their herds over-
graze; their shortening fallows on steep slopes and fragile soils
induce erosion; their need for off-season income drives them
to cut and sell firewood and make and sell charcoal; they are
forced to cultivate and degrade marginal and unstable land."
(5, p. 7)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 117

This eloquent description of the relationship between poverty,
environmental degradation, and underdevelopment exemplifies a
major concern of sustainable economic development. It suggests
that it is imperative to ensure that basic human needs, such as food,
shelter, health care, education, employment, as well as a clean envi-
ronment, are met.

III. Policy Goals and Tools

As the above discussion points out, there is a need for a new
economic paradigm and new goals to be formulated in order to make
SD applicable and successful. A paradigm can be defined as a belief
structure or ideology, composed of concepts, values and percep-
tions, shared by the members of society. Goals encompass visions
of what new paradigms mean and how they can be instituted. In
this context, tools or strategies provide more concrete information
about the implementation of new paradigms and goals.

A. Policy One: ''Resource Accounting"

The concept of a natural capital stock, as discussed above, has
generated new avenues for addressing and assessing economic ac-
tivity. The resulting new economic paradigms call for the proper
"pricing" of the environmental costs of production (21; 24); re-
source accounting (2; 19); and the development of a "Gross Ecologi-
cal Product" (GEP) to replace the GDP (23, p. 90)

According to Whitelaw and Niemi, the most powerful economic
tool for instituting SD is "open market prices." The price of a prod-
uct or service should reflect the value of everything we give up to
produce it, i.e., "the value of our use of the item" or service - "the
demand side," and "the value of what we had to give up to make
the item" or service - "the supply side." (24, p. 29) For example, the
cost of producing a truckload of logs needs to include not only the
cost of labor, of chainsaws, of fuel, but it must also take into account
the costs of preserving or maintaining forests and the watershed,
the costs of losing commercial fishing, the increased costs of water
filtration, the costs implied to the loss of the natural habitat for those
who consider the owl, and the beauty of the mountain as a part of
the overall quality of life, to mention some.

Resource accounting necessitates adjustments in how national
ncome accounts are set up. The traditional way is to record only

118 M. Spyrou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

the income derived from the harvest of natural resources, such as
from timber, minerals, and fishing. The declining natural resource
capital stock and the deteriorating environmental quality are not
yet incorporated in national income accounting, (2, p. 107) Hence,
a new paradigm has to consider the costs inflicted by environmen-
tal degradation and the "depreciation" of natural capital stock, to
be reflected in a modified national income accounting system. This
would provide a more realistic picture of national economic wel-
fare and, in turn, give greater impetus for the formulation of pre-
cise socioeconomic policies promoting SD.

In support of resource accounting, Daly and Cobb (6) as well as
Stead and Stead (23) advocate the development of a "Gross Eco-
logical Product" (GEP) to replace the traditional GDP as an indica-
tor of economic growth and development. Calculation of the GEP
is to be based on the Hicksian income concept, described earlier.
First, the net domestic product (NDP) is derived by subtracting from
GDP standard depreciation costs for the man-made capital stock.
However, NDP does not take into account the depreciation of the
natural capital stock (DNC), or of defensive expenditures (DE), de-
fined as the income to be spent for protection from the ecological
side effects of production. The Hicksian income approach would
subtract DNC and DE from NDP. Because of the technical and po-
litical difficulties involved in instituting such an accounting sys-
tem, few countries (e.g., Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Norway
and Sweden) even consider the possibility of developing a GEP

Certainly, the task of achieving the above mentioned objectives
is by no means an easy one; it is a tremendous and daunting chal-
lenge. Nevertheless, it is essential for a sustainable world economy.
We must change, i.e., modify or replace existing socioeconomic in-
stitutions with new ones; the aforementioned approaches facilitate
this task.

B. Policy Two: "Greening of Businesses"

The term "green" implies ecological sustainability; for something
to be considered "green" it must meet five basic criteria (7, p. 6) :

a) It does not harm the health of people or animals.

b) It does not harm the natural environment.

c) It does not consume a disproportionate amount of energy
or resources.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 119

d) It does not cause excessive amounts of unusable wastes.

e) It does not harm endangered species.

Of course, it is almost impossible to achieve perfection in all five
criteria, thus "greening" should be understood as a process of reach-
ing an ideal situation for developing a "green" economy. Already
consumers, industries and other institutions have become involved
in the "greening" process. The role of the business community is of
paramount importance, especially that of industry. On the one hand,
industry is a major force in promoting economic activity and wealth.
On the other hand, it also generates significant environmental prob-
lems.

The intention of the business community to be more environmen-
tally sensitive and active is exemplified in the statement made by
Edgar Woodland, chief executive of DuPont, who introduced the
phrase "corporate environmentalism" in 1989. (20, p. 168) He pos-
ited that businesses no longer consider environmental quality as a
burden for business but rather view it as a "vital part of a company's
competitive advantage." (20, p. 168) As a result, a number of pro-
grams and instruments designed to promote the "greening" of busi-
nesses have been developed and put into practice. Below is a sample
of some of these programs and instruments:

1. The emergence of green products and green consumers. Many com-
panies began introducing products that meet many, if not all, of the
requirements of being defined as "green," e.g., unbleached coffee
filters, products made of recycled paper, and non-toxic household
cleaners, to mention some. (7, p. 79) Major companies like Wall-Mart,
MacDonalds, and Procter and Gamble are making concerted efforts
to reduce waste in their retail practices. "Green consumers," inten-
tionally buy green products, "use them as long as possible, and re-
cycle the wastes." (23, p. 146) Moreover, green consumers tend to
take an active role against non-green companies through boycotts
and investment strategies.

2. The introduction of the product life-cycle analysis. In order for prod-
ucts to be identified as green they undergo a thorough analysis from
"cradle to grave," - to test their recyclability, safe packaging, and
absence of toxins, and so on. (23, p. 146) The results of such analy-
ses encourage the full recycling of materials, the saving of energy,
and the reduction of pollution. For example, steel produced from

120 M. Spyrou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

scrap reduces air pollution by up to 85 percent, cuts water pollution
by as much as 76 percent, may eliminate mining wastes, and con-
serve about 1.5 barrels of oil for each ton of steel. (4, p. 182) Pro-
grams for product life-cycle analysis and the "labelling of products
as green" exist in many industrialized countries. For example,
Germany's "Blue Angel Program" provides seals for products con-
sidered to be "green." Canada has its "Environmental Choice Pro-
gram," Japan the "Eco-Mark," and the "Green Seal" and "Green
Cross" are promoted in the U.S. All of these programs certify envi-
ronmentally safe products.

3. The dematerialization of the production process. This process is
designed to reduce the volume of raw materials and energy needed
to produce added value. (20, p. 160) The purpose of this program
is not only to increase efficiency in production but also to conserve
resources and to lower pollution levels.

4. The shift from a linear to a circular approach in the production and
consumption cycle. Circular production is likened to an ecosystem.
"In an ideal world, the flow of materials from extraction ... manu-
facturing to use and disposal would ensure that the waste products
could be reinserted into the system as raw materials" in some way
or another. (20, p. 177) Today, the production /consumption cycle
still tends to be linear in that products are produced and consumed
without regard for environmental efficiency.

5. The Polluter-pays principle (PPP). This concept has been devel-
oped and implemented by the member countries of the OECD, in
their attempt to introduce flexible, efficient, and cost-effective mea-
sures to control pollution and environmental degradation. The PPP,
as defined by OECD member countries, stresses that the "polluter
should bear the cost of measures to reduce pollution ... to ensure
that the environment is in an acceptable state." (15, p. 27) The PPP
principle is consistent with the idea that sustainable development
can be promoted and /or achieved if "prices carry information about
the ecological and social truth of resource use and consumption."
(26, p. 30)

IV. Sustainable Development: Tendencies and Prospects

The preceding analysis of SD is by no means complete. The dis-
cussion rather tried to provide a framework in which the concept of
SD is to be viewed and understood. The scope of SD was outlined

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 121

in three parts. The first one outHned the Hnkage of the conservation
movement and economic development. This Hnkage indicates that
SD is part of the traditional anthropocentric environmentalism,
which differs greatly from the views of the so-called "new ecolo-
gists." These "new environmentalists" would like to supplant
anthropocentrism with "ecocentrism." The latter views "the human
as just another species in the natural web, having no special claim
to the resources of the earth, certainly no claim to control or exploit
them, and decidedly no right to threaten their very continuation ..."
(22, pp. 288-89) The "new ecologists" derive their ideas and values
from green politics, ecophilosophy, native spiritualism, and social
ecology. (22, p. 288) How the traditional environmentalists and the
new ecologists interact or confront each other will affect the future
path of sustainable development (SD).

The second part suggested that we need to broaden and rethink
the way we view and measure the quantity and quality of natural
resources. The linkage of economic activity to the entropy law, i.e.,
the need to incorporate aspects of the preservation of the natural
capital stock into environmental costs and in the decision making
process, represents both a challenge and a dilemma for reshaping
socioeconomic policies and goals.

Finally, the description of some of the new policies and instru-
ments to implement SD, indicate that we have entered a new era in
economic and environmental planning. We still need to develop
new policies, refine existing ones, and further evaluate already de-
veloped instruments, to make SD operational. Moreover, there are
many obstacles to be overcome - political, social, cultural, and philo-
sophical.

However, there is some common ground emerging from all of
the fuss and discussion on sustainable development. The fact is that
"SD" has generated a dialogue of much greater depth than any other
previous environmental concept. The legacy of SD probably will be
o serve as a vehicle for leading the world into a new industrial/
economic revolution - the "eco-revolution." (20, p. 180) It will be a
'evolution that will treat the environment not only as a factor of
production (like labor and capital) in the economic production /con-
jumption cycle but it will also enhance the prospects of all people
laving access to a secure and sustainable livelihood.

122 M. Spyrou: Redefining Economic Policy Goals

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Humanizing the Workplace
for Increased Productivity
and Worker Satisfaction

Cheryl Sink Rice and Donadrian L. Rice

If all good people were clever
And those that are clever were good,
This world would he nicer than ever,
]Ne dream that it possibly could.
Alfred North Whitehead

American business may well feel a gun has been put to its collec-
tive temple in this day of rapidly changing technology, increased
global competition and dramatic changes in the workplace. In Au-
gust of 1993, the Associated Press issued a preliminary report of a
five year study of American workers (national sample of 3,381),
conducted by the "Families and Work Institute" and commissioned
oy fifteen companies and foundations, to determine how workers
feel about their jobs. Only 35 percent of this sample rated salary as
the primary reason for taking their particular job. In contrast, 65
percent stated that "open communications" attracted them to their
:urrent positions.

Society is experiencing increasing charges of sexual harassment
as well as extreme and dramatic instances when dissatisfied em-
ployees have returned to places of prior employment and murdered
"ormer co-workers (as was the case with a 31 year old postal worker
tvho in Royal Oak, Michigan, on November 14, 1991, killed five
costal employees, wounded four others and then shot himself),
rlence, it comes as no surprise that employers, managers, adminis-
:rators and supervisors are behooved to create healthy, humane
A^orkplaces where occupational stress will be eliminated or reduced.

Psychologist Robert Hagan, director of the Tulsa Institute of Be-
\avioral Sciences, following 25 years of survey research in indus-
rial organizational psychology, found the tyrannical boss to be the
najor cause of stress in the workplace - as experienced and ex-

125

126 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

pressed by the workers he had studied. Hagan further observed
that American productivity is significantly reduced due to this fac-
tor. (9, p. 42)

The relationship between worker and employer or supervisor has
an interesting history and will be briefly outlined in this article as a
preamble to the discussion of a unique blending of a psychological
(Neurolinguistic Programming) and a sociological approach (using
the Values and Life Style System). The authors propose this to be an
effective means to better humanize the workplace and, thereby, to
increase worker satisfaction and productivity.

I. Overview of the History of Employer-Employee Relations

Upon perusing the history of employer /employee or manager/
worker relations, we find this to be an ageless issue. We could begin
earlier, but let's go back 1,500 years to St. Benedict and his Benedictine
Rule, regarding the decision making structure of the monastery. He
stated that:

As often as any important business has to be done in the mon-
astery let the abbot call together the whole community and
himself set forth the matter. And, having heard the counsel of
the brethren, let him take counsel with himself and then do
what he shall judge to be most expedient. Now the reason we
have said that all should be called to council, is that God often
reveals what is better to the younger. Let the brethren give their
advice with deference and humility, nor venture to defend their
opinions obstinately; but let the decision depend rather on the
abbot's judgement, so that when he has decided what is the
better course, all may obey. (18, p. 25)

One thousand years later, Machiavelli, known for his less than
compassionate advice on how leaders should make and implement
decisions, wrote:

For there is no other way to guard oneself from flatterers than
by letting men know that you will not be offended by being
told the truth; but when everyone is able to tell you the truth,
you lose their respect. Therefore a wise prince should adopt a
third means, choosing wise men from his state, and only to
those should he allow the freedom to speak truthfully to him,
and only concerning those about which he asks, nothing else.
But he should ask them about everything, and listen to their
opinions, and afterward deliberate by himself, in his own way;

YJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIl, 1994 127

and with these councils and with each one of his advisors he
should act in such a way that everyone may see that the more
freely he speaks, all the more he will be acceptable; aside from
these he should not want to hear any others, he should carry
' through what was decided and be firm in his decisions. (11, p.
199)

The righteous-minded monk (vs^ho founded an order of Catholic
priesthood based on the "golden rule," a concept found in one form
or another in all of the world's major religions) and the man whose
principles of leadership are decidedly amoral, if not immoral (whose
name is synonymous with the philosophy that craft, deceit and
unscrupulous cunning are justified if they will get the policy imple-
mented) - surprisingly, these two men agree that the process of
policy making should be a social process with input from others to
be solicited and to be considered.

With such diametrically opposed positions agreeing on this one
issue, how is it that we still have debates over the need for so-called
"participative management" in today's society? Part of the answer
may be found in a brief overview of the history of the relationship
between workers and management during the later part of the nine-
teenth century - the age of the craftsman. As Vroom and Jago note:

Many [present day] managers would be shocked to learn that
just about a century ago many workers had far more control
and influence than they [the managers] have today. The pre-
vailing issue in the journals of that time was not the nourish-
ment of participative management but rather the reestablish-
ment of management authority. (20, p. 8)

The carpenters, glass blowers, typographers, and ironworkers,
for example, often were highly skilled autonomous craftspersons
who would hire their own apprentices and assume complete con-
trol over the work process in their respective industries. "The
craftsman-contractor was often more highly paid and possessed a
degree of control vastly exceeding that of many higher-level man-
agers in modern corporations." (20, p. 9)

Although this form of industrial organization had some obvious
benefits for the workers, managers and owners occasionally would
find themselves in a less than advantageous situation. The
craftsman's interests on occasion became more important than the
company's. For example, the craftsman-contractor's hiring practice

128 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace '

might have been limited by who in his family and circle of friends
was available for work. Or, it would have been determined by the
craftsman that the rate of work could never exceed so many pieces
per hour, no matter that the crew was capable of producing more,
or that the company needed more.

The workers who worked under the craftsman-contractor sys-
tem were essentially powerless and had little job security unless
they were family members, of course. "The costs [of this type of
organizational structure] were continued exploitation of the vast
majority of workers and the obscuring of the lines between employ-
ers and employees in the workplace." (20, p. 9)

In 1911, the work of Frederick W. Taylor seemed to have the solu-
tion to the challenges which managers and owners had been facing.
In his book. Scientific Management, Taylor (19) devised methods to
remedy the practice of workers restricting output for selfish inter-
ests and also for setting realistic production levels. In addition, Tay-
lor determined that a distinctive division of labor was needed (thus
taking much of the omnipotent control from the crafts-
man-contractor). Here we had the beginning of time-motion stud-
ies, assembly line work, and the worker-manager-owner hierarchy
of control. Thanks in part to Frederick Taylor and his "scientific
management" concept, managers and owners were able to gain com-
plete control of production.

The problem with "Taylorism," i.e., with a time-motion, assem-
bly line definition of work and the workplace, was and is the result-
ing alienation of the worker. In his criticism of capitalism, Karl Marx
(12) noted, as early as the mid 1800s, that the historical progression
from a feudal to a capitalistic economy would and was resulting in
a worker who was alienated from his or her work in a myriad of
ways, some of which are: 1) Separation from the product, i.e., in no
way is the product owned by the worker, and in the case of assem-
bly line work, a worker does not have the satisfaction of creating
the product from start to finish. 2) Workers are in competition with
one another and, therefore, are deprived of a sense of community.
3) Workers are seen as a commodity to be bought. 4) And, workers
are alienated from the act of working in that they do not have a
voice in how the production process is to be organized - work often
has become too repetitive, tedious, and routine. (12, pp. 166-76)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 129

Although writing about worker aUenation more than sixty years
before Taylor's "scientific management" method of organizing the
workplace came into practice, Marx presented a credible descrip-
tion of the malaise that can and does overtake workers if they are
deprived of self-expression, creativity, initiative, and personal re-
sponsibility in their places of work.^

It is not surprising then, that after a number of years of the prac-
tice of time-motion analyzed work activities and divisions of labor
in the workplaces of the United States and Western Europe, as pre-
scribed by Taylor's concept of "scientific management," a new com-
ponent in our brief overview of the social processes in the work-
place received notoriety. The work of two social scientists refocused
attention on the human element in the workplace. Elton Mayo, then
on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, provided a philo-
sophical basis for the necessity of worker participation. His books.
The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (14) and The Human
Problems of an Industrial Civilization (13), demonstrated not only the
alienating potential but also the resulting social and human costs of
this development.

A second component to a humanizing counterbalance of Taylor's
scientific management movement," supplementing Mayo's (and
others) writings, is to be found in the psychological investigations
of Kurt Lewin of the University of Berlin. (10) Lewin broke new
ground by focusing his attention on motivation. His motivational
concepts are concerned with the purposes that underlie behavior
and the goals toward or away from which behavior is directed. As a
result of the works of Mayo and Lewin, during the 1950s and 1960s,
behavioral scientists began focusing attention on management's
responsibility to involve workers in decision making processes. Since
then, corporations, such as Westinghouse, General Motors, Xerox,
and others, have recognized the value of employee input. (20)

While the gains made in the area of participatory management
have been admirable and have gone a long way toward humaniz-
ing the work environment, an essential component, communica-
tion, deserves additional attention.

Lee lacocca, in his autobiography (5), says that motivation is ev-
erything; the way to motivate people is to communicate with them
in their own language. Interestingly enough, lacocca is intimating
that communication is perhaps different for everyone. At the same

130 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

time, it is at the nucleus of almost everything we do. Learning how
to communicate effectively is a skill that can be learned by anyone
willing to put forth the effort.

In today's corporations, large and small, a different attitude pre-
vails among employees that demands managers or leaders who are
competent in the delicate process of understanding others. The
one-dimensional approach to managing or giving orders and hav-
ing workers blindly following them is, without a doubt, a thing of
the past. Today, the most successful manager is one who recognizes
the workers' own actualizing interests over blind loyalty to the firm.
The challenge is to allow a working situation in which the employee
feels a sense of productive personal autonomy.

II. Neurolinguistic Programming

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is the study of the struc-
ture of subjective experiences. According to Dilts, Grinder, Bandler,
and DeLozier, (3) it attempts to examine the correlates between what
we experience as the external environment and our internal experi-
ence, i.e., sensory representations of that experience at the neuro-
logical level. Neurolinguistic Programming was created by Richard
Bandler and John Grinder (1) as they studied human behavior and
organized its components into specific patterns of behavior, based
on the individual's naturalistic processes to generate behavioral
change. Dilts, et. al., (3) view behavior as the result of neurological
processes. They analyze behavioral change as entailing a three-point
program involving one's representation of the present state of be-
havior, desired outcome or target behavior, and the actions required
to move the individual from the former to the latter.

Likewise, business organizations face a present state, a desired
state, and the necessary resources to take them from the present to
the desired state. Each person or employee of the organization rep-
resents a specific resource to the effective functioning of the organi-
zation as a whole. At the same time, each person within the organi-
zation has a specific set of resources that contributes to his or her
own individual operation.

At its most fundamental level, humanizing the workplace neces-
sitates an effective mode of communication in order to tap these
resources. Moreover, it requires an understanding that communi-
cating is multimodal. That is, it needs to be recognized that body

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 131

language, voice inflection, word selection, and content are all indi-
cators of communication. NLP provides a conceptual framework
and techniques that address these multimodal aspects of commu-
nication. NLP techniques revolve around four basic attributes of all
communication.

The first attribute is based on a presupposition of NLP that the
meaning of any communication can be determined only by the re-
sponse that is received. In other words, when you communicate
with someone you expect a certain response. However, the person
to whom you are communicating may not interpret your commu-
nication in the way you intend it. If you determine that you are not
getting the response you wanted based on your observations, then
it is up to you to vary your behavior until your intended meaning is
conveyed.

Realizing that the most important resources of any business are
the people that run it, being able to organize and deal with people
effectively becomes the principal task of almost every executive,
supervisor, manager, administrator, etc. The way that the commu-
nicator conveys the communication to each individual will influ-
ence the course of the interaction. Part of this process is establishing
rapport. Rapport, which is derived from the French verb "rapporter,"
meaning to bring back or refer, is translated in English to mean a
relation of harmony, conformity, or accord. This meaning indicates
the importance of rapport to communication. In fact, it is the most
important aspect in any interaction.

The greatest part of establishing rapport is often accomplished
nonverbally. Techniques such as pacing the person's strategies and
other behaviors, picking up his or her vocabulary, mirroring and
feeding back his or her voice tonality and tempo, facial expressions,
posture, and gestures all serve to help establish rapport more quickly
which can be crucial in the workplace. As suggested by Hyler Bracey,
in hi3 Managing from the Heart (2), people in leadership or manage-
rial positions need to demonstrate caring and empathy as well as
competence and confidence. NLP techniques, such as those de-
scribed above, assist in developing that kind of empathy.

The second attribute of NLP is flexibility; it means having choice
in the communication interaction. In their book. Frogs into Princes,
Bandler and Grinder (1) point out that if you have only one choice
in responding, you are a robot. If you have two choices, you have a

132 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

dilemma. If you have three choices, you have flexibiUty. The more
flexible you are, the more you are able to adjust your behavior in
order to get the desired response. Each time we use a tone of voice,
make a gesture, or write a report, we are communicating in a selec-
tive and directional way. The difference is that by using NLP we
can become more aware of what we are doing in eliciting the re-
sponse we are getting from others.

Communication is a circular feedback system in which responses
elicit responses. Behaviors elicit behaviors, and words elicit words.
The manager or leader of an organization with the most flexibility
will have the most influence. Being flexible means being respon-
sive to change and being adaptable. In the communication process
you can have flexibility in words, thinking, perception and behav-
iors. Anyone involved in working directly with others will have
more success in their interaction when they are able to exhibit flex-
ibility. The potential for more powerful responses lies in increased
choices.

A third attribute is sensory acuity. When communicating, how
does one know that the communication was received as intended?
Of course, if you elicit the desired response you would assume that
the communication process was successful. But what if there was a
different response? Would that imply a failed attempt at communi-
cating? On the contrary, another principle of NLP is that there are
no failures in communication, only responses that give you feed-
back about your communication process. Sensory acuity allows you
to become aware of changes in others so you can recognize how
your communication is being received. The verbal portion of our
communication constitutes only one aspect of the entire process of
communication. Sensory acuity involves being aware of the non-
verbal aspects of communication such as skin color changes, minute
muscle changes, lower lip changes, changes in breathing, eye posi-
tion, and tonal and tempo qualities of the voice. By paying atten-
tion to the systematic and recurrent behaviors that people go through
as they communicate, it is possible to index sensory specific re-
sponses to any communication.

The fourth attribute is an NLP premise that people tend to com-
municate and process information through using at least one of the
five senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory and olfactory.
One of these senses is dominant in each individual. For effective

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 133

communication, it is important to discover the other person's pri-
mary sense modality. For instance, people who are visual tend to
see the world in pictures and are inclined to speak in a visual meta-
phor. Individuals who are auditory tend to be more selective about
the words they use. They have more resonant voices and their speech
is slower, more rhythmic and measured. People who are more ki-
nesthetic react primarily to feelings. Their voices tend to be deep
and their words often are slow which reflects a tendency toward
contemplation while speaking. Gustatory and olfactory modalities
are usually grouped with kinesthetic.

Everyone has elements of all five modes, but most people have
one system that dominates. Communication becomes easier when
you translate your speech into the dominate sense modality of the
person with whom you are talking. Hence the phrase, "I see what
you mean," will be very meaningful to a visually oriented person,
while "I hear you" or "that rings a bell" will be understood clearly
by one who is auditory. "I grasp what you mean" or "I feel good
about that" will let a kinesthetic individual know that his or her
position is understood.

The NLP techniques mentioned above are only a sampling of the
communication skills managers and other leaders of organizations
can develop in order not only to communicate more effectively, but
to give individuals and groups the tools with which to develop per-
sonal and interpersonal skills and to generate attitudes which are
most productive in the particular circumstances. Other areas of NLP,
not covered in this section, convey findings on the connection be-
tween eye movement and thought processes, the use of metaphor
in bringing about understanding and change, and its emphasis on
modelling to enable the transfer of skills from outstandingly effec-
tive performers to others not operating at the same level.

III. Values and Life Style Typology

The NLP approach offers techniques for workplace leaders to
better relate to workers on a physical and psychological level. The
situation in America's organizations may be as Daniel Kagan states:

. . the biggest threat facing U.S. business today is the incompetent
manager, most notably the one who displays narcissistic tenden-
cies." (7, p. 42) This would be a manager who demonstrates inflex-
ibility at several levels: inability to change when the situation calls

134 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

for (even demands) change, unresponsitivity to the communicative
style of others, and insensitivity to attitudes and values that may
and will differ from her or his own attitudes and values.

Since St. Benedict's and Machiavelli's times, many volumes have
been written about management styles. The debate still seems to
center over the question of whether it is best to assume that the
worker should be treated as a recalcitrant child needing constant
supervision and instruction or whether he or she should be treated
as a responsible, creative, self motivated adult, needing no supervi-
sion, capable of self direction. Stephen Jenks echoes the thoughts of
many who have studied organizational management when he
writes: "There is a growing consensus that no one management or
leadership style is correct." (6, p. 447) The nature of the task (that is,
whether it is routine or needs much creative thought), the expertise
of the leader, the constraints of time and locality, and finally, the
attitudes and needs of the subordinates - all of these should be con-
sidered in determining the appropriate nature of the
worker-manager relationship. The relationship between workplace
and worker is reciprocal. Sociologist Melvin Kohn observed in an
article entitled, "Unresolved Issues in the Relationship between
Work and Personality," that "... the empirical evidence is that job
conditions not only affect but also are affected by personality ..." (9,
p. 43).

An effective communicator not only will follow the techniques
of NLP, but also will become sensitive to the attitudes and values
that make up the personalities of the persons with whom he or she
works, after initially becoming aware of his or her own fundamental
values and beliefs. A means of understanding the values and lifestyle
preferences of ourselves and others is offered by Arnold Mitchell in
his Values and Life Style typology. (15) Adapting the "needs
hierarchy" of the psychologist Abraham Maslow, Mitchell developed
a sociological typology of Americans based on their values. Building
on Maslow's five sequential stages of psychological needs - survival,
security, belonging, esteem and self-actualization (this final stage
denoting full psychological maturity), Mitchell proposed nine
American profiles. In his book. The Nine American Lifestyles (15), he
presents the Values and Life Styles (VALS) typology, a schema
resulting from his work at the Stanford Research Institute.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 135

Also incorporating the "inner" and "outer" directed concept of
social character/ described by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and
Revel Denney, in The Lonely Crowd (17), Mitchell divides adult Ameri-
can values and attitudes into nine comprehensive categories. (The
reader is referred to Tables 1 and 2 for details of the demographics
and attitudes of theses nine subgroupings.) These nine "lifestyle"
subgroupings and their four general groupings are as follows:

Need-Driven Groups

1. Survivor

2. Sustainer

Outer-Driven Groups

3. Belonger

4. Emulator

5. Achiever

Inner-Directed Groups
6. 1-Am-Me

7. Experiential

8. Societally Conscious

Combined Outer- and Inner-Directed Groups

9. Integrated

The VALS typology has received more consumer and advertis-
ing oriented research than academic attention, having been widely
applied in commercial and advertising settings since its publica-
tion. "The impact of VALS has been widespread and dramatic ...
Many companies have used VALS ... Among the many clients SRI
International lists are the New York Times, Penthouse, Atlantic
Richfield, Boeing Commercial Airplane Co., American Motors and
Rainier National Bank." (8, pp. 404-5) It seems appropriate to as-
sume that a typology which gives businesses and advertisers in-
sight into the values and attitudes of people to whom they want to
sell products, also is an effective typology from which a manager,
supervisor, or administrator may gain insight into the personalities
of workers whom he or she supervises, and, in doing so, may better
communicate with them.

The workplace is composed of people who are likely to incorpo-
rate the values of one of these nine categories. Understanding the

136

C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

TABLE 1
Demographics of Lifestyle

US

Racial

Educational

Income

Marital

VALSType

Populatioo
(Percent)*"

Median Age

CooipoaitioQ
(Percent)

Politici
(Percent)

Level
(Percent)

Residence
(Percent)

Level

Status
(Percent)

Sex
(Percent) |j

Survivon

4

66*

White-72
Black-26'
Hispanic-2

Democrats- 60

Cooaervative"

53

Majority

12tfairvle

and below

79

city-48

suburbs

33

Poverty

widowed
50

Female~77 1

7

33

While-64

Black-21

Hispuc-13

[>eaiocral>-50
IndepeodcDts

41

Middle of the

raad-4g

Majority

9d>-12lh

grade

69

city-47
niral-33

Lower

Married-

49
Divorced

21

Female- 55

Democrat-49

Beloogen

35

52

White-95
Black-3

Republican-23
Conservative -

Majority
9th-12th

rural -51*

Lower

Married

Female-

Hispanic-2

46

Middle of the

road-44

grade
64

city-2S*

Middle

77

68

Democit-4g

9th-12th

Married -

Emulator!

9

27

White^-79
Black -13

Indepcndent-
39

gTde--62
1-3 yean

city-50*
uburiM-

Middle

57
Divorced

Female-

Hispanic 6

Middle of die
road--6

college-23

37

15

Single-

23

47

9lh-12th

Achieven

22

43

While-95
Black-2*

Republican-
58*

grKle-30
1-3 yean
coUege-27

subufbe-
49

Upper

Middle

and

Married-

83*

Femslc-
40

Hispanic- 1*

Conservative
66

college

graduale--

18

city-30

Upper

I-am-Mc't

5

21*

White^-91
Black-3

Independent-

48

9th-l2th
grade-38

city-47
suburbs

Lower

Single-

Fcmale-

Hispanic-4

IJberl-52

1-3 yean
college-50*

33

Middle

98*

36

1-3 yean

Married-

Expericxitiaii

7

27

White^-91
Black-2*
Hispanic- 1*

litdependent--

55

Ubetal--4

college-29

college

gnduate--

26

city-46

suburiis

33

Middle

53

Single-

28

Female-
55

Married

Societally
Conscious

9

39

Whit^-86
Blacks-7
Hispanic-1*

Independent

57

Liberml-53

graduate
school" 39

city-2
rurl-32
suburbs

27

Middle

to
Lower
Upper

70
Divorced

16
Single-

8

Female-
52

IntcfialolB

2

Presunuibly

majority >

35"

Presumably
largely
white**

see tert**

presumably
majority
1-3 yen
coUegeor

college
graduate**

**

Middle
to

Upper

presumably

majority
married**

presumably
slightly

male**

Source : Summarized from Arnold Mitchell, The Nine American Lifestyle, (15, pp. 279-81)
Notes : *Highest or Lowest (or tied) of all groups.
**Not enough data available.
*While the rest of this table is based on Mitchell, this category is based on Kahle, et al. (8).

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994

TABLE 2

Attitudes of Lifestyle

(percent)

137

Survivors

Sustainers

Belongers

Emulators

Achievers

l-am-Me's

Experiential:

Societally
Conscious

Sample
Average

Feel most people
are honest

54

58

82

62

83*

68

79

73

76

Am rebelling
against things

68

58

47

48

33*

38

38

44

44

Think greatest achieve-
ments are ahead

61

82

59*

89

68

99*

94

83

73

Feel things are changing
too fast

91*

87

82

69

59

51*

53

61

69

Family is most impor-
tant thmg to me

93

86

97*

91

95

78

86

86

92

TV is my main
entertainment

65*

61

57

52

42

31

28*

33

47

Feel it is important to
be a part of a group

75*

73

71

64

58

74

53

47*

64

Agree social status
is important

51

77

45

49

47

78*

40

31*

47

Get great deal of satis-
faction from job

33*

33*

75

38

77*

58

67

72

67

Strongly agree financial
security is important

68

76*

54

55

55

49

47

38*

53

Source : Summarized from Arnold Mitchell, The Nine American Lifestyles. (15, pp. 282-87)
Notes : *Highest or lowest (or tied) of these lifestyle groups.

values and attitudes specific to each of the VALS subcategories will
enable people in positions of leadership to better understand those
whom they are attempting to lead, particularly if those values and
attitudes are different from their own.

A. Need-Driven Groups

Although the majority of the Survivor subgroup is unemployed
Dr employed only sporadically, it is helpful to begin our discussion
Df the Values and Life Style groupings here. The daily life of indi-
i^iduals who are need-driven is focused on just getting through the
lay with food and shelter. The television is a major focus of their
ives. Poverty forces them into patterns that are quite different from
he majority of Americans. They are of the opinion that life, in gen-
eral, and people, in particular, are to be mistrusted. They feel in
:onstant rebellion with society at large; it is a society that has not

138 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

benefited them, yet they see others Uving a Ufestyle they beheve
they are barred from. Many of the Survivors are born, Hve and die
in what seems to them to be inescapable poverty. Their values may
be called conservative and conventional, but for many this is para-
doxically coupled with a tendency to rebel against traditional so-
cial values. This is sometimes expressed in criminal behavior, drug
use, and sexual behavior which disregards the natural consequences
of that behavior. Television is an important aspect of daily life be-
cause it offers an affordable means of escape. A large number of
this group are elderly, often widows, or head of a single parent
household. Many are from racial minority groups, particularly blacks
and Hispanics. (Mitchell's statistics indicated 13% were Hispanic,
21% were black.) In comparing the subgroups. Survivors and
Sustainers, Mitchell writes:

Psychologically, Sustainers are more advanced than Survivors
in that they ask much more of their world. They do more plan-
ning, are more self confident, and expect more of the future
than Survivors. At the same time, like Survivors, they are not
trusting of people, they are unhappy, and in particular they
often feel left out. Although many are unemployed, it is clear
that they seek work and place enormous importance on finan-
cial security. Many Sustainers will move up to Belongers, or
more likely. Emulator levels in the years ahead. (15, p. 8)

B. Outer-Directed

The Outer-Directeds compose the majority of middle America,
about two thirds of the adult population of the United States, ac-
cording to Mitchell's research (see Tables 1 and 2). This group is
made up of Belongers, Emulators, and Achievers. The majority of
American workers would fall in the Belonger category, while many
of the managers, supervisors, or administrators would fall into the
Achiever category. The majority of magazine, television and news-
paper advertising is directed at these three subgroupings; they are
the ones most frequently found in the workplace.

The values of the Belongers can be equated with conventional,
traditional middle class values. These folks are home and family
oriented. They believe strongly in the notion that the more you work,
the more you will be rewarded. Their loyalties are to church, fam-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 139

ily, employer and the nation. They are trusting, want to fit in, and
long to do their duty to God, family, job, and country.

Belongers are the people for whom soap operas and romance
magazines are created to fill their emotional needs ... People
brought up this way tend to be puritanical, conventional, de-
pendent, sentimental, nostalgic, mass-oriented, outer-directed,
xenophobic. [They are Archie Bunker types; denizens of K- and
Wal-Marts Home Interiors, Amway, Avon, and TupperWare
sellers; members of the bowling league, softball team, square
dance club; Bud, Miller, and maybe Coors beer drinkers, but
nothing foreign.] Belongers see safety in numbers; they think
it is important to be an insider; alikeness, togetherness, and
agreement are important measures ... Tolerance for ambiguity
is low ... Prefer to follow rather than lead ... 'Should' and 'ought'
are dominant words. (15, p. 10)

Although Emulators are in the outer-driven category, their char-
acteristics are markedly different from the Belongers. "Emulators
are intensely striving people, seeking to be like those they consider
richer and more successful than they are ... They are also
hard-working, supportive of contemporary social trends, and fairly
successful." (15, p. 11)

One can imagine what a juicy focus they are of the advertising
dollar. This group has completed college or technical school, is gen-
erally in their twenties. Often the Emulator stage is a transitional
stage between Belonger and Achiever, although some Emulators
^et stuck in a lifestyle of deception - trying to look like a "success-
iil" achiever, attempting to mislead others' perception of them by
conspicuous consumption, following the whims of fashion with no
anchor of self-respect or real self-confidence. Unlike the Belongers,
they are not satisfied with the status quo.

The final subgroup of the Outer-Directed category is the Achiever.
In 1983, Mitchell had determined that a little less than one fourth of
the U.S. adult population fits into this category, and more recently,
in 1991, Novak and MacEvoy (16, p. 105) proposed that 27 percent
of American adults were Achievers. It is a category characterized as
a hard working, successful group, which includes professionals such
is doctors, lawyers, CEO's, financially successful athletes, entertain-
rs, and artists. An overview of their values would indicate an em-

140 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

phasis on self-confidence, self -direction and self -fulfillment (finan-
cial success being only one means of fulfillment). According to
Mitchell's 1983 study (15), 94 percent rated themselves as "very
happy,'' and, contrary to popular belief, this group had the fewest
divorces (83 percent were married). Of all the subgroups, they were
the most trusting of others (perhaps indicating that they were the
most trustworthy?) and the most supportive of government and
national issues. The demographics of this subgroup include: a me-
dian age of early 40s, 2 percent black, 95 percent white, and 33 per-
cent college graduates, many of whom had gone on to graduate
school. Regionally, the majority were in the West with the fewest in
the South.^ Achievers are socially and politically conservative, sec-
ond only to Belongers.

C. Inner-Directed Groups

The Inner-Directed category includes the subgroupings I-Am-Me,
Experientials, and the Societally Conscious. Perhaps most unlike
the Emulators, as a group, the Inner-Directeds focus on internal
forces, not external ones.

This extends to attitudes toward job, personal relationships,
spiritual matters, and the satisfactions to be derived from ev-
eryday pursuits. Inner growth - some-times sought through
the great Western religions or analytic [i.e., therapeutic] tech-
niques, but often through transcendental meditation, yoga,
Zen, or other Eastern spiritual practice [so called 'New Age'
practices] - is central to many of the Inner-Directeds. Most seek
intense involvement in whatever they are doing; the second-
hand and vicarious are anathema. (15, p. 15)

These may become involved in anti-nuclear plant demonstrations,
or act as consumer advocates; they may join Green Peace or Am-
nesty International. From their perspective, their social status comes
from the degree of involvement in popular avenues of social and/
or personal change. The postwar baby boomer generation went
through this stage as a group. Inner-Directeds usually are well edu-
cated, come from comfortable middle class backgrounds, and are
politically independent. They are neither necessarily Democrat and
most likely not Republican, though many come from the typically
Republican homes of their Achiever parents. It is the affluence of

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 141

their upbringing that allows them the latitude of being
Inner-directed.

The sub-category I-Am-Me represents a transitional stage from
an outer-directed lifestyle to an inner-directed. This stage generally
starts in the late teens and is completed by the early thirties. Most
are students. It is a time of contradictions and excesses: "... I-Am-Mes
are both contrite and aggressive, demure and exhibitionistic,
self-effacing and narcissistic, conforming and wildly innovative."
(15, p. 17) I-Am-Mes are less attuned to social issues than the Soci-
etally Conscious, but they may take a strong stand on an issue. An
enthusiastically active group, the I-Am-Mes take interest in going
to cultural events, playing physically demanding games, joining
health spas, and generally having an active social life.''

Experientials are so named because a major focus of their lifestyle
is to "boldly go where no one has ever gone before," at least not
many, anyway. This lifestyle contradicts most aspects of the
Belonger's style of living. Personally independent, they are "... more
activist and mission-oriented. But for now its not things that count,
but emotion." (15, p. 19)

Most are in their late twenties, willing to try about anything once.
They are relatively well paid technical and professional workers,
tending to be politically liberal. These are the organic food raisers
and users, ecologically minded, open to the use of alternative meth-
ods of healing and alternative religious practices (i.e., outside of the
udeo-Christian tradition of the United States). They are the back-
packers, well-to-do motorcycle riders, bungee jumpers, hang glider
liers, and experimenters with drugs. Compared to the I-Am-Me,
this subgroup is less self-centered, less self-indulgent, demonstra-
bly more confident, and less sensitive to peer pressure.

The Societally Conscious subgroup lifestyle puts emphasis on
current social, national and international events and ideas. "The
ocus of the inner-directedness drives of some 13 million Ameri-
cans is not rejection of other lifestyles (as the I-Am-Mes) or intense
personal experience (as in the Experientials) but concern with soci-
etal issues, trends, and events." (15, p. 20) The average age is nearly
forty. There is a high rate of political activism and involvement in
ecological concerns for this middle and upper income
"thirty-something-years-old" Societally Conscious subgroup. The

142 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

traditional station wagon is replaced with a Jeep Cherokee, recy-
cling is done at some financial and time expense, labels are read on
food products, and excess salt, sugar, and fat in food products are
avoided.

Societally Conscious persons are serious and outspoken about
their beliefs, perhaps ridiculing cigarette smokers or boycotting
Exxon for what they see as Exxon's irresponsibility in cleaning up
the Alaskan coastline after the Valdez catastrophe.

D. Combined Outer and Inner Directed Group

The Integrateds derive their name because they fuse the values of
both the outer-directed and inner-directed groups. Few in number,
usually over thirty-five years of age, they are able to see both sides of
an issue. They exude a sense of inner calm, demonstrating no need to
impress others, but nevertheless quietly impressing them. SRI Inter-
national researchers had estimated Integrateds to make up about 2
percent of the population. Because their number is small, Mitchell
spoke of Integrateds in terms of assumptions of characteristics one
would expect them to have by categorical definition; for example:

Our sense is that Integrated people adapt easily to most con-
ventions and mores but are powerfully mission-oriented on
matters about which they feel strongly. They are people able
to lead when action is required and able to follow when that
seems appropriate. They usually possess a deep sense of what
is fitting and appropriate. They tend to be open, self assured,
self expressive, keenly aware of nuance and shadings, and of-
ten possessed of a world perspective. (15, p. 23)

Integrateds combine characteristics of Achievers and the Soci-
etally Conscious, but are politically less conservative than Achiev-
ers and less liberal than the Societally Conscious. They are socially
appropriate in a vast variety of situations and make excellent diplo-
mats, CEO's, teachers, professors, statesmen /women, lawyers and
physicians.

IV. Conclusion

Psychologists and sociologists have well documented the need
for more effective communication within the working environment.
(2; 4; 8) From the disciplines of psychology and sociology come the
means to implement effective communication practices. This paper

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 143

has proposed that a basic understanding of NeuroHnguistic Pro-
gramming (NLP) practices, coupled with an understanding of the
values and attitudes of contemporary workers will enable an em-
ployer and administrator to create a working environment in which
employees experience a sense of being valued and concomitantly
demonstrate a willingness to be as productive as possible.

This is a better means to address racial, sexual, and ethnic diver-
sity in the workplace than the currently popular methods of pre-
scribing interactions based solely on stereotypic racial, sexual, eth-
nic, or other characteristics. The strength of this perspective is that
it combines the physical and psychological elements of ways people
effectively communicate with an understanding of the individual
life styles, attitudes and values of the people with whom one is com-
municating.

By expressing an understanding of the individual life styles, atti-
tudes, and values of the people one supervises, employees are more
apt to behave like partners. This sense of partnership is financially,
socially, and politically desirable for both the employer and the
employee as well as for society as a whole. The current trend to-
ward multiculturalism and diversity in the workplace can only lead
to a Balkanization among employer and workers. However, devel-
oping insight and skills in understanding the psychological and
social factors that motivate and guide behavior, as discussed above,
could lead to common interests not only among employees, but also
between employers and employees. When there are commonalities
among employer and employee, a sense of partnership prevails and
productivity increases.

Notes

1 More recently, Kai Erickson (1990) termed these conditions in the work-
place "alienogenic." These are conditions in which a worker experiences a viola-
tion of his or her humanity.

2. Although Mitchell borrowed the expression "inner-directed" from Riesman,
their uses differ. Riesman's use implies a degree of self-awareness.

3. Remember Mitchell's findings were published in 1983 and have not been
rephcated as extensively since then.

4. In this way they are the opposite of the distrustful, withdrawn,
just-making-it-from-one-day-to-the-next Survivor.

144 C.S. Rice and D.L. Rice: Humanizing the Workplace

References

1. Bandler, Richard and Grinder, John. Frogs into Princes. Moab, UT: Real People

Press, 1979.

2. Bracey, Hyler. Managing from the Heart. New York: Dell, 1990.

3. Dilts, Robert; Grinder, John; Bandler, Richard and DeLozier, Judith.

Neurolinquistic Programming.Vol 1. Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications,
1980.

4. Erikson, Kai and Vallas, Steven Peter, eds. The Nature of Work: Sociological

Perspectives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

5. lacocca, Lee. lacocca, An Autobiography. New York: Bantam Books, 1983.

6. Jenks, Stephen. "Effective Settings for Making Organizations Humane and

Productive," in Making Organizations Humane and Productive: A Hand-
book for Practitioners. Eds. H. Meltzer and Walter R. Nord. New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 1981, pp. 439-51.

7. Kagan, Daniel. "Unmasking Incompetent Managers," Insight, 21 May 1990,

pp. 42-44.

8. Kahle, Lynn R.; Beatty, Sharon E. and Homer, Pamela. "Alternative Measure-

ment Approaches to Consumer Values: The List of Values (LOV) and
Values and Lifestyle (VALS)," Journal of Consumer Research, 13, Decem-
ber 1986, pp. 405-9.

9. Kohn, Melvin L. "Unresolved Issues in the Relationship Between Work and

Personality," in The Nature of Work: Sociological Perspectives. Eds. Kai
Erikson and Steven Peter Vallas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1990, pp. 36-68.

10. Lewin, Kurt. Resolving Social Conflicts, Selected Papers on Group Dynamics

(1935-1946). New York: Harper, 1948.

11. MachiavelU. The Prince. New York: Collier, 1938.

12. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. Eds. J.B.

Bottomore and Maximilien Ruel. London: Watts, 1963.

13. Mayo, Elton. The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York:

Macmillan, 1933.

14 The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1945.

15. Mitchell, Arnold. The Nine American Lifestyles. New York: Macmillan Press,

1983.

16. Novak, Thomas and MacEvoy, Bruce. "On Comparing Alternative Segmenta-

tion Schemes: The List of Values (LOV) and Values and Life Styles
(VALS)," Journal of Consumer Research, 17, June 1990, pp. 105-9.

17. Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1950.

18. St.Benedict. The Rule of St. Benedict. Trans. Abbot J. McCann. Westminister,

MD: Newman Press, 1952.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences. XXXII, 1994 ,45

19. Taylor, Frederick W. Priucipks of Scientific Mauagctent. New York: Harper's,

'' 'Tren^ H^ mf!' ^"'"'- "" """" ''''''"'^^- ^"^'ewood Cliffs. N,:

I

Income Taxation and Justice

Richard F. Fryman

One aspect of justice or humaneness in a society concerns fair-
ness in taxation. A society cannot be considered just or humane if it
is widely perceived that the tax system or important specific taxes
are levied unfairly.

In discussing justice in taxation, horizontal and vertical equity
need to be considered. Horizontal equity, with respect to an income
tax, is concerned with the fair treatment of taxpayers with equal
incomes. A widely accepted "rule" is "equals should be treated
equally." Vertical equity deals with the fair treatment of taxpayers
with different incomes. The "rule" here is, "unequals should be
treated unequally."

This paper will consider certain aspects of vertical and horizon-
tal equity of the federal personal income tax and how these two
concepts of equity or humaneness are affected by the progressive
or graduated rates of the tax.

I. Progressive, Regressive, and Proportional Taxes

A progressive tax may be defined as one where the tax rate rises
as taxpayer income rises. That is, with a progressive tax high in-
come taxpayers pay a higher rate than those with lower incomes.
By contrast, with a regressive tax, the rate falls as income rises. A

Tax as

Percent

of Income

Progressive Tax

Proportional Tax

Income

FIGURE 1
Progressive, Regressive, and Proportional Taxes

147

148 R.F. Fryman: Income Taxation and Justice

proportional tax takes the same percentage of income from every-
one regardless of income. Figure 1 illustrates a progressive, a re-
gressive, and a proportional tax.

With its rising or graduated marginal tax rates for higher taxable
income brackets, the federal personal income tax is an example of a
progressive tax. In contrast, most sales taxes are regressive when
tax payments are compared to income. The reason is that high in-
come consumers tend to save a higher percentage of their income
than others. To the extent that a person saves his income, it is ex-
empt from a sales tax. Thus high income consumers, by saving more,
can exempt a higher percentage of their income, thereby making a
sales tax regressive. An example of a proportional tax is the portion
of the federal payroll tax (1.45 percent) for financing Medicare. All
workers pay the same 1 .45 percent of their wages regardless of their
total wages (effective 1994).

From the point-of-view of vertical equity, which is more just or
humane: a progressive, a regressive, or a proportional tax? This is a
normative question for which there is no correct answer. As with all
normative questions, the answer is a matter of opinion; it involves
a value judgement.

Although there is no correct answer, there has been much discus-
sion and debate concerning the relative justice or humaneness of
progressive, regressive, and proportional taxes. As discussed by
Richard A. and Peggy B. Musgrave (2, pp. 228-31), in the 1940s and
1950s the discussion centered around the satisfaction or "utility" a
person gains from additional dollars of income. If additional dol-
lars of income add less satisfaction or utility to a rich man than to a
poor man, shouldn't an income tax take proportionately more dol-
lars from the rich man so as to make his "sacrifice" or "hurt" from
taxes the same as the poor man's? The problem is that there is no
way to measure the satisfaction or utility of additional dollars or
income to either taxpayer.

Probably more important, unlike a specific product with one or a
few uses, income is "infinitely versatile" in the sense that a person
has a wide choice as to how additional dollars are to be used. Hence,
a person's utility from an additional dollar may vary widely, de-
pending on what he or she does with it. Even if the utility gained
from additional dollars declines as a person's income rises, this does
not necessarily imply that progression will bring about equal "sac-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 149

rifice" or "hurt/' If there is not a great difference in the added (mar-
ginal) utility or satisfaction gained by added dollars from a high
income vs. a lower income person, then equal "sacrifice" or "hurt"
from a tax could be achieved by a proportional or even a regressive
tax. Only if the last dollar of income gives "much" less satisfaction
or utility to the high income than the lower income person is there a
clear case for progression under the "equal-sacrifice" approach.

Over the years, the prevailing opinion concerning equity in taxa-
tion seems to have evolved that it is futile to try to prove something
scientifically that is essentially a normative question, i.e., a matter
of opinion or values. This is not to say that the debate concerning
the justice or humaneness of progressive vs. regressive vs. propor-
tional taxation is unimportant. Indeed, probably the most impor-
tant policy questions are those concerning opinions and values; but
it must be recognized that the latter are not subject to scientific proof.

The controversy continues, to this day, concerning which is most
just or humane: a progressive, a regressive or a proportional tax.
There is especially a lot of discussion concerning the relative fair-
ness of progressive vs. proportional taxes. For example, some ar-
gue that if Ms. A's income is exactly double that of Mr. B's, her tax
payment should also be exactly double his; this occurs with a pro-
portional tax. Others take the position that tax rates should be pro-
gressive so that Ms. A's taxes should be more than double Mr. B's.

To settle the issue for a particular tax, a collective value judgement
leading to a collective decision concerning tax rates must be made by
the people directly or through their elected representatives.

II. Brief History of the Personal Income Tax

Although the U.S. temporarily levied a personal income tax dur-
ing the Civil War and later in the 1890s, our present federal income
tax system dates back to 1913. In that year, the 16th Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution was ratified, allowing a federal income tax to
be levied without apportioning the tax among the states by popula-
tion. Hence, in 1913, under President Woodrow Wilson's Adminis-
tration, a federal income tax was enacted. Congress' collective value
udgement at that time was that the most humane or just way to
:onfigure the tax would be to have a large personal exemption and
graduated rates. The personal exemption for the 1913 income tax
ame to $3,000, with rates ranging from one percent on the first

150 R.F. Fryman: Income Taxation and Justice

$20,000 of taxable income to seven percent on amounts exceeding
$500,000. (1, pp. 2, 224)

During the first year of the tax, less than one percent of the popula-
tion had incomes high enough to be subject to any tax liability at all.
Thus, the 1913 income tax was exclusively a "rich person's" tax; the
$3,000 personal exemption was the primary factor in making the tax
progressive by exempting all but those considered very "well to do."

Although rates were raised, brackets added and exemptions re-
duced during WWI, the federal personal income tax did not be-
come a universal tax until WWII when Congress set the exemption
at $400 and marginal rates at all time highs ranging from 23 to 94
percent. In 1945, 98 percent of those employed were subject to the
tax. (2, p. 320)

Since WWII, the trend has been to reduce marginal tax rates and
to increase personal exemptions and standard deductions. For ex-
ample, the famous tax cut proposed by President Kennedy in 1963
and passed in 1964 under President Johnson, reduced marginal rates
to between 14 and 70 percent, with the exemption set at $600. The
large tax cut in 1981, under President Reagan, further lowered rates
to between 11 and 50 percent.

In 1986, the top marginal rate was further cut and the exemption,
standard deduction, and tax brackets were indexed for inflation. By
1992, the personal exemption had risen to $2,300, the standard de-
duction for a married couple came to $6,000, and the tax rates, for a
married couple filing jointly, were as shown in Table 1 .

TABLE 1

Taxable Marginal

Income Tax Rate

$0 - $35,000 15 percent

35,001 - 86,500 28

over 86,500 31

President Clinton's deficit reduction package, passed in 1993,
reversed the downward movement in rates affecting high income
taxpayers by adding two brackets. Thus, in 1993, including index-
ing for inflation, the standard deduction for married couples and
the personal exemption amounted to $6,200 and $2,350, respectively,
with the tax brackets, as exhibited in Table 2. (3, p. 572)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 151

TABLE 2

Taxable

Marginal

Income

Tax Rates

$0 - $36,900

15 percent

36,901 - 89,150

28

89,151 - 140,000

31

140,001 - 250,000

36

over 250,000

39.6

III. Horizontal Equity Problems Caused by Graduated Rates

The federal personal income tax today contains five marginal tax
brackets, as depicted in Table 2, making it a progressive tax. Whether
or not this has achieved vertical equity or humaneness still is a matter
of opinion. It appears, however, that the existence of graduated rates
has created several "horizontal equity" problems. As noted, hori-
zontal equity is concerned with the fair or humane treatment of dif-
ferent taxpaying units having the same income, given the widely
accepted "rule" that for the sake of fairness "equals should be treated
equally."

With a graduated rate income tax there are several common cir-
cumstances where horizontal equity appears to be violated. Hori-
zontal equity problems of a graduated rate income tax include:

1. Fair treatment of married couples vs. single individuals.

2. Fluctuating incomes.

3. Effects of inflation.

A. Fair Treatment of Married Couples vs. Single Individuals

Under the federal income tax, a single individual will pay more
in taxes than a married couple with the same taxable income and,
therefore, is subject to a "singles penalty." Ironically, there exists
also a "marriage penalty" in that if an unmarried man and woman
both earn about the same income, their combined income tax will
be higher if they get married than if they stayed single. These situ-
ations arise directly from the graduated rates under the federal in-
come tax. An example can best illustrate the fairness problem. Sup-
pose a hypothetical graduated rate income tax has the rate sched-
ule as defined in Table 3.

152

R.F. Fryman: Income Taxation and Justice

TABLE 3

Taxable Income

$0- $20,000

over 20,000

Marginal Tax Rate
15 percent
20

Assume that there are three households as shown in Table 4. Each
household has a taxable income of $40,000: $20,000 each for Mr. and
Mrs. Wallace; $40,000 for Mr. Johnson and zero for his wife; and
$40,000 for the unmarried Ms. Roberts.

There are three basic ways to treat married couples vs. single in-
dividuals under a graduated rate income tax, as depicted in Table 4.

TABLE 4

Methods of Taxing Married Couples vs.

Single Individuals Under a Graduated Rate Income Tax

Taxable Income
Rate Schedule for Methods 1-3 $0 - $20,000

over $20,000

Marginal Tax Rate
15 Percent
20 Percent

Taxable Income
Methods of Taxation

Mr. & Mrs. Wallace

Mr. Mrs. Total

$20,000 $20,000 $40,000

Mr. & Mrs. lohnson
Mr. Mrs. Total

$40,000 0 $40,000

Ms. Roberts

Total

$40,000

1. Tax total income
of taxpaying unit:

$7,000

$7,000

$7,000

2. Tax each indiv-
idual separately:
Tax

$3,000 $3,000 $6,000

$7,000

0

$7,000

$7,000

3. Tax couples as if in-
come were earned
equally (income
splitting):
Tax

$3,000 $3,000 $6,000

$3,000

$3,000

$6,000

$7,000

4. Actual treatment
under Federal
Personal Income

Tax (1992 Rates):

$6,553

$6,553

$8,419

5. Flat rate tax
(15 percent):
Tax

$6,000

$6,000

$6,000

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 153

With the first method, the total taxable income of each taxpaying
unit would be taxed. Each unit, with a $40,000 total taxable income,
would pay $7,000 (.15 x 20,000 + .20 x 20,000 = $7,000). At first look,
this seems fair; each taxpaying unit has a total taxable income of
$40,000 and each pays taxes of $7,000. However there is one im-
portant problem. If Mr. and Mrs. Wallace had been single, each with
a taxable income of $20,000, both of them would have been subject
to the 15 percent marginal bracket for taxes of $3,000 each or for a
total of $6,000. Upon marriage, their combined taxable income would
be $40,000, placing them in the higher marginal bracket and mak-
ing their total taxes $7,000 rather than $6,000 - a marriage penalty
of $1,000. It can be argued that such a penalty is unjust.

Under the second method in Table 4, each individual is taxed
separately on his or her portion of the unit's total income. In this
case the Wallaces would pay $3,000 each (.15 x $20,000) for a total of
$6,000. The marriage penalty is eliminated since $6,000 would be
their total tax, married or single. Therefore, the tax under this method
would be "marriage neutral." But note that the Johnsons and Ms.
Roberts would pay $7,000 rather than the Wallaces' $6,000. This is
because with a total taxable income of $40,000, half is taxed at 15
percent and half at 20 percent. Is it just that the Johnson's pay more
than the Wallace's simply because Mr. Johnson earned all the
couple's income whereas half was earned by each spouse for the
Johnson's? Is it just for Ms. Roberts to pay more than the Wallaces?
Many would say no.

Under the third method in Table 4, the couples are taxed as though
their income were earned equally by each spouse, regardless of how
it was actually earned. Hence, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson's taxable in-
come would be split among them and taxed accordingly even though
Mr. Johnson actually earned it all. Under this method, each couple
with, the same total taxable income would pay the same tax. This
>eems fair so far, but look at Ms. Roberts. Since she is not married
)he cannot split her income with anyone. As a result, half of her
ncome is taxed in the lower and half in the higher tax bracket for a
otal tax of $7,000 - a $1,000 singles penalty. Again, this can be ar-
gued to be unfair.
The U.S. essentially followed Method 2 until 1948 - tax each in-
ividual separately on their actual income earned. Court rulings
eld, however, that in states with "community property" laws.

154 R.F. Fryman: Income Taxation and Justice

couples could split their incomes for income tax purposes thereby
reducing their federal income taxes. Rather than see many states
overhaul their property laws solely for federal income tax reasons.
Congress decided to make "income splitting" available to couples
in all states. Thus, Method 3 of Table 1 was instituted. As shown,
this results in significantly higher taxes for single individuals than
married couples enjoying the same taxable income.

To reduce this "singles penalty," Congress, in 1969, instituted a
change which still permitted married couples to split their incomes
for tax purposes, but single individuals were taxed under a sepa-
rate rate schedule. Although this schedule, for single taxpayers, re-
duced but did not eliminate the "singles penalty," it introduced a
"marriage penalty." If two persons both earn income before mar-
riage, their total taxes will rise upon marriage.

Method 4 in Table 4 shows what the actual treatment of the three
households would be under the federal income tax using 1992 rates.
The two couples would pay the same amount of tax, $6,553. But
note that Ms. Roberts, not being able to split her income with any-
one, would pay $8,419 - $1,866 more than either couple, even though
her $40,000 taxable income is the same as their's. Also observe that
for the Wallace's, each spouse having a taxable income of $20,000,
their taxes would have been $3,004 each for a combined total of
$6,008 if they had not been maried. Upon marriage their total taxes
would increase to $6,553, resulting in a "marriage penalty" of $545.

Suppose we had a flat rate tax of, say, 15 percent. Method 5 in
Table 4 indicates the results. Each of the three households would
pay $6,000 in income taxes. Both the Wallaces and the Johnsons
would pay the same tax whether they were married or not and re-
gardless of the amount of income which each spouse earned.

With only one tax bracket, the combining or splitting of income
cannot place a household in a different bracket. Hence, there would
be no marriage penalty Likewise, since all households - married or
single - would be taxed at the same rate, there would be no singles
penalty. Households with equal taxable incomes would pay equal
taxes.

B. Fluctuating Incomes

Another horizontal equity problem, created by graduated rates
under the federal personal income tax, concerns the amount of tax

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 155

paid by people with fluctuating incomes vs. those with stable in-
con\es. If two households have equal incomes over a three year pe-
riod, for example, but one earns all or most of the three year total in
one year, while the other earns the same amount in each of the three
years, the household with the fluctuating income will pay a higher
total tax. This is due to the fact that in high income years, the house-
hold with a fluctuating income is taxed at a higher marginal tax
rate.

TABLE 5

Federal Income Tax Treatment of Households with

Fluctuating vs. Stable Incomes

Yearl

Year 2

Year 3

Total

Couple A

Taxable Income

$30,000

$30,000

$30,000

$90,000

Income Tax*

4,504

4,504

4,504

13,512

Couple B

Taxable Income

$90,000

0

0

$90,000

Income Tax*

20,659

0

0

20,659

* 1992 Rates

Again, an example can best make the point. In Table 5, two mar-
ried couples, A and B, have equal incomes of $90,000 over a three
year period. Couple A has a stable taxable income of $30,000 per
year and pays $4,504 in federal income taxes in each of the three
years, or a total of $13,512. Couple B, on the other hand, with the
same three year total taxable income of $90,000 pays total taxes of
$20,659 all in one year - $7,147 more than Couple A. This is because
all of B's taxable income is earned in one year, placing the couple in
a higher marginal tax bracket than Couple A. It can be argued that
it is unjust for these two couples to pay different total taxes over a
three year period even though their taxable incomes are the same
over that time span. Note that before its elimination in 1987, the
federal income tax contained an averaging provision that would
have reduced the taxes somewhat for Couple B in Table 5. With a

Ilat rate income tax, the two couples would pay exactly the same

156 R.F. Fryman: Income Taxation and Justice

C. Effects of Inflation

Suppose an individuars taxable income rises in one year by an
amount just large enough to keep pace with inflation. Although this
person's purchasing power or real income has not increased, he or
she may And that his or her income tax as a percent of income has
increased. This would occur with an "unindexed" income tax since
the increase in nominal income would result in a higher percentage
of that individual's taxable income being subject to his or her high-
est marginal bracket. Many would argue that it is not fair for a
person's tax rate to rise if his or her purchasing power has not. The
federal personal income tax has been partially indexed for inflation
by having income tax brackets widened each year by the same per-
centage as the inflation rate and similarly applying the inflation fac-
tor to the standard deduction and personal exemptions. This pre-
vents a person from being pushed into a higher marginal tax bracket
if his or her real income has not increased. There exists no index-
ation, however, for capital gains or for interest earned or paid.

IV. A More Humane Method of Making
an Income Tax Progressive

From the above discussion, it may be concluded that the gradu-
ated rate federal personal income tax may or may not result in ver-
tical equity, i.e., fair treatment of persons with different incomes,
depending on one's value judgement. However, graduated rates
create certain horizontal equity problems, including fair tax treat-
ment of couples vs. single individuals, fluctuating incomes, and ef-
fects of inflation. It is the author's value judgement that progres-
sion is desirable in an income tax from an equity point of view. But
due to significant horizontal equity problems, brought about by
graduated rates, one can argue that it would be more equitable to
bring about progression by a flat rate tax combined with a large
personal exemption and standard deduction rather than by gradu-
ated rates. A flat rate tax with an exemption and standard deduc-
tion is progressive due to the fact that a given exemption and stan-
dard deduction remove from taxation a larger portion of a low in-
come family's income than that of a high income family. Again, an
example can illustrates this. Consider four families, each consisting
of two adults and two children:

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 157

Family "A": Adjusted Gross Income (AGI - income before
personal deductions and exemptions) is $14,000
(approximately the poverty line in 1992).

Family "B": AGI of $37,000 (approximately the median fam-
ily income in 1992).

Family "C": AGI of $74,000 (approximately double the me-
dian family income in 1992).

Family "D": AGI of $148,000 (approximately four times the
median family income in 1992).

TABLE 6
Example of Progressivity of a Flat Rate Income Tax

Family A

Family B

Family C

Family D

Adjusted Gross Income
Less Standard Deductions
Less personal Exemptions

6,000
8,000

$14,000
$14,000

$37,000
$14,000

$74,000
$14,000

$148,000
$14,000

Taxable Income
Tax Rate

0
.20

$23,000
.20

$60,000
.20

$134,000
.20

Income Tax
Tax /Income

0

0

$4,600
12.4%

$12,000
16.2%

$26,800

18.1%

Assume that a $2,000 personal exemption is provided for the tax-
payer, his or her spouse, and for each dependent child. Also, as-
sume that the standard deduction is $6,000, taken by all four fami-
lies, and that a flat rate tax of 20 percent of taxable income exists.
Table 6 shows the results. Each family deducts $6,000 for the stan-
dard deduction and $8,000 ($2,000 x 4) for four personal exemp-
tions, making total deductions of $14,000 from AGI. This $14,000
represents a much larger percentage of AGI for a low income fam-
ily than for a high income family. In fact, in this example, the $14,000
deduction is 100 percent of Family A's AGI but only 9.46 percent of
the $148,000 AGI for Family "D." This means that the flat rate tax of
20 percent applies to none of Family A's AGI but to 90.54 percent of
Family D's. Thus, the fixed deduction for all families makes the flat
[rate tax in this example progressive. The family at the poverty line
>ays 0 percent of AGI in federal income taxes. Family B with a me-
dian income pays 12.4 percent. Family C, 16.2 percent, and the "rich
family," Family D, pays 18.1 percent. Using this method, a tax on a

158 R.F. Fryman: Income Taxation and Justice

family with a $1 million AGI would be $197,200 or 19.7 percent of
AGI.

Hence, as this example demonstrates, even though the tax is a
flat rate of 20 percent, it is actually progressive, ranging from 0 per-
cent of AGI for families below the poverty line and approaching 20
percent for high income tax payers. This is not as progressive as a
steeply graduated rate income tax would be, but it is, nevertheless,
progressive. And, of course, whether or not a moderately progres-
sive tax is as fair or humane as a steeply progressive levy is a matter
of opinion, as was the case with regard to the question of whether
or not any progression at all is equitable. It should be noted that a
flat rate income tax could be made more progressive by broadening
the income base to include the now exempt interest income on state
and local bonds, benefiting mostly high income taxpayers. Also, in
the example of Table 6, phasing out the standard deduction and /or
personal exemptions for high income families would make a flat
rate tax even more progressive.

V. Conclusion

The main advantage of a flat-rate personal income tax, from an
equity or humaneness point-of-view, is the avoidance or minimiza-
tion of horizontal equity problems which are encountered with
graduated rate taxes. As noted above, the problem of how to fairly
treat married couples and single individuals, having the same in-
come, is caused by graduated rates. Income splitting may place a
couple in a lower marginal tax bracket, while combining incomes
can move it into a higher bracket. With a flat rate tax, combining or
splitting incomes cannot move people into different brackets; there
is only one bracket.

Individuals with fluctuating incomes pay more taxes over a
multi-year period with a graduated tax rate than persons with the
same total income but evenly earned. Again, with a flat rate tax
evenly earned or fluctuating income earners would pay the same
amount in taxes if their incomes over any time span were equal.
Furthermore, with a flat rate tax, inflation could not push a tax-
payer into a higher marginal tax bracket since there would be only
one bracket.

A flat rate tax would also, very likely, be simpler than a gradu-
ated rate tax. For one, there would be no need to have separate rate

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIl, 1994 159

schedules for couples, single individuals, and heads of households,
as now is the case. Secondly, yearly adjustments in tax brackets
would become redundant. Third, calls for complicated preferential
treatment of long-term capital gains would be less justified.

In conclusion, a graduated rate income tax may bring fairness or
equity between people with different incomes (vertical equity), de-
pending on the evaluator's opinion. However, such a tax also re-
sults in various equity problems between persons with equal or
nearly equal incomes (horizontal equity). A flat rate income tax
avoids or at least minimizes horizontal equity problems and is ac-
tually progressive, though not as progressive as a tax with steeply
graduated rates.

Which then is more fair or humane, a graduated rate income tax
or a flat rate income tax? The answer is, of course, a matter of value
judgement. However, it is evident that for the sake of equity or hu-
maneness, one should consider very carefully both the horizontal
and vertical equity aspects of an income tax.

References

1. Goode, Richard. The Individual Income Tax. Washington, DC: The Brookings

Institution, 1964.

2. Musgrave, Richard A. and Musgrave, Peggy B. Public Finance In Theory and

Practice. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1989.

3. U.S. House of Representatives. Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993,

Conference Report of the Committee on the Budget. Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.

Financial Institutions and Community
Reinvestment: The Social Responsibility to
Lend to the Nation's Poor Communities

David Boldt

During the 1970's, community activists accused banks and other
financial institutions of engaging in discriminatory lending prac-
tices. Many of these institutions were criticized for refusing to lend
to or limiting the volume of loans to businesses and households in
minority and poor neighborhoods (called "redlining"). Hoping to
discourage such practices. Congress, with the strong support of the
Carter Administration, enacted legislation in the late 1970s includ-
ing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. The CRA re-
quired Federal banking regulators to encourage banks and savings
and loan associations to meet the credit needs of the local commu-
nities in which they are chartered. This legislation was strength-
ened in 1989 as a response to a perception of continued discrimina-
tory lending practices by financial institutions and as a way to in-
crease the credit flow to poor neighborhoods. The passage of the
CRA, along with subsequent amendments, established a principle
that banks and savings and loans have a social responsibility to serve
the credit needs of local communities. The government's role, as
regulator, was to "guide" these private depository institutions to-
ward achieving the social goal of a "fairer" distribution of lending
among various neighborhoods.

Discussion continues today as to the effectiveness and burdens

associated with the CRA. Banks, particularly smaller institutions,

complain about the high economic cost associated with CRA

compliance. In addition, many critics note that depository

institutions are unfairly burdened relative to other less-regulated

[financial institutions which do not have to be concerned about

ommunity reinvestment objectives. CRA supporters would like the

egulators to more rigorously enforce the Act and to push for more

ctual lending by banks to low income communities. Responding

o concerns of both bankers and community activists, the Clinton

dministration has proposed that enforcement of the Act be

161

162 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

modified to increase the incentives for more lending by banks to
low income communities. An additional goal of President Clinton's
plan is to modify regulations to reduce the time and effort financial
institutions have to devote to CRA compliance. During late 1993,
Federal banking and thrift regulators conducted hearings around
the country to elicit comments from financial institutions and
community advocates concerning possible changes in the CRA.

The Clinton Administration has also recommended that the Fed-
eral Government directly increase funding for community economic
development by establishing a nationwide system of community
development banks. Such a proposal represents a sharp departure
from government policy in the 1980s, a period marked by a decline
in Federal support for cities and community economic development.
In the President's view, achieving the goal of a higher standard of
living in our inner cities and poor rural communities will require
some sort of direct government funding. His proposal calls for us-
ing government funds as a base for leveraging additional private
financing to encourage "socially-based" investment.

This paper will be divided into three main sections. Part I will
provide a historical overview of the CRA. Part II examines current
issues related to community reinvestment such as the recent evi-
dence on discrimination in bank lending and the financial burden
the CRA imposes on depository institutions. President Clinton's
proposals for easing the burden of the CRA as well as creating a
system of community development banks are also addressed in this
section. In the final part of the paper, the CRA and other commu-
nity investment initiatives will be discussed in light of the social
goal of increasing the flow of credit to low income communities.

I. Community Reinvestment Act: Historical Background

A. Legislation and Regulations

The passage of the CRA as part of the Housing and Community
Development Act of 1977 formally established that regulated bank-
ing institutions have a social responsibility to provide financial ser-
vices to all the neighborhoods which are in their service communi-
ties. Specifically, the CRA required that financial institutions serve
the deposit and credit needs of the communities in which they are
chartered to do business, consistent with their safe and sound op-
eration. To encourage financial institutions to serve all neighbor-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 163

hoods, particularly low and moderate income areas, Federal regu-
latory agencies were expected to take into account such activity when
evaluating an institution's request for a new branch, a merger with
another institution or any other expansion of its operation requir-
ing regulatory approval.

The legislation was vague in its details about the specific actions
to be taken by depository institutions to ensure compliance with
the CRA. No quotas requiring a minimum level of lending to low
income communities were established. Financial institutions were
not automatically sanctioned for failing to meet CRA obligations.
The "requirements" of the Act were directed at regulatory agencies.
These agencies were directed to "encourage" financial institutions
to "meet the credit needs" of low income communities. Regulators
were only required to take into account an institution's record of
serving its entire community when reviewing an application for an
expansion. On the basis of an unsatisfactory CRA evaluation, the
regulator could deny such an application.

After conducting public hearings in 1978, the four Federal agen-
cies that were supervising institutions covered by the CRA - the
Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (now
the Office of Thrift Supervision), the Comptroller of the Currency
and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - adopted uniform
regulations and examination procedures on CRA enforcement. (13,
p. 252) The documentation requirements associated with the CRA
were quite modest. Depository institutions were required to:

1) Formulate a "CRA Statement" which among other things
delineates the communities it serves and lists the principal
types of credit it offers.

2) Maintain a file of public comments on its CRA performance.

3) Display a notice in the lobby of each of its offices indicat-
ing the availability of the CRA statement and the public
comment file.

To evaluate an institution's performance in satisfying the CRA,
le Federal agencies decided upon twelve criteria. These criteria
iclude an institution's willingness to meet with community groups

ascertain credit needs, to market its services to low income com-
mnities, to participate in local economic development programs

164 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

and to make government subsidized loans to small businesses and
households. In addition, the geographic distribution of credit ap-
plications, extensions of credit and loan denials is also considered
in the CRA evaluation. Upon completion of a CRA review, the ex-
aminer from the regulatory agency is expected to discuss the writ-
ten evaluation with management and to assign a performance grade
to the institution. Neither the written evaluation nor the institution's
CRA grade was made available to the public prior to July 1, 1990.

B. Implementation of the CRA in the 1980s

During the 1980s, the CRA evolved into a highly effective as well
as controversial piece of legislation. Although the CRA did not elimi-
nate redlining practices in lending, the Act made it increasingly
important for depository institutions to direct attention to their low
and moderate income neighborhood lending patterns. What made
the CRA effective was not the specificity of the legislation nor the
stringency with which the Federal regulatory agencies enforced the
Act, but the impact the Act had in "empowering" community
groups. Prior to the passage of this Act, community groups, such as
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
(ACORN), could do little to influence the credit decisions made by
depository institutions. Over time, depository institutions, especially
those anticipating any change in their charters, were required to
enter into dialogue with community groups that expressed concern
about the "fairness" of a financial institution's credit decisions. Vari-
ous factors enhanced the bargaining position of community groups
with regards to the CRA. For one, during the 1980s, interstate bank-
ing activity accelerated as more and more states opened up their
markets to out-of-state banks. In addition, many states made it easier
for banks to open new branches. Requests for a new branch or a
merger between financial institutions subjected the institutions to
close regulatory scrutiny regarding their commitment to local lend-
ing. The number of challenges raised by community groups to ac-
tions based on poor CRA performance accelerated during this pe-
riod as more institutions requested regulatory action. In one ex-
ample, ACORN was able to hold up the purchase of Southwest
Bancshares by New Orleans-based Hibernia Corporation for sev-
eral months due to its challenge of Hibernia' s performance under
the CRA. (12, p. 76)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 165

The availability of detailed home lending data, as required by
the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMD A) of 1975, also greatly
aided community groups in their attempt to document discrimina-
tory lending behavior on the part of banking institutions. The
HMD A, as amended in 1989, calls for lenders to record the race, sex
and income of applicants for all mortgage loans including loans
denied and withdrawn on a geographical basis. Such information
is made available to the public and is widely used to assess the
mortgage lending patterns of financial institutions. Over time, com-
munity groups, such as ACORN, became much more sophisticated
using this HMDA data as well as more effective in their campaigns
in getting banks to agree to expand their lending to low or moder-
ate income areas.

The CRA was surprisingly "successful" in its first decade, con-
sidering that the original legislation was vaguely written and that
subsequent enforcement of the Act has generally been lax. As of
early 1988, virtually all banks (about 97 per cent) were given satis-
factory or better grades by regulators for their CRA performance.
In addition, of the more than 40,000 applications for regulatory ac-
tion submitted by depository institutions to Federal agencies from
late 1979 to early 1988, only 8 were denied based on a poor CRA
performance by the applicant. (10, p. 145) Robert C. Art (1, pp.
1121-34) noted, in his review of the CRA's first decade, that the Fed-
eral Reserve was particularly lax in its enforcement and retained a
strong ideological resistance to the goals of the legislation.

Although rarely effective in convincing Federal regulators to deny
an application for an expansion, challenges by community groups
did have a significant impact on depository institutions. Such chal-
lenges generally resulted in some delay in the approval of an appli-
cation for expansion or in some negotiated settlement between the
financial institution and the community group. From its inception
until mid 1990, an estimated $7.5 billion was committed by finan-
cial institutions as part of these CRA negotiations to home mort-
gages, small business and other loans to predominantly low income
borrowers. (11, p. 3)

C. CRA Amendments of 1989

As Congressional hearings held in 1988 documented, many ad-
vocacy groups and legislators concerned about community rein-

166 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

vestment, were quite critical of aspects of the CRA and its imple-
mentation. Regulatory agencies were extensively criticized for what
was perceived as generally lax enforcement of the original legisla-
tion. (5, pp. 143-45; 6, pp. 307-9) Empirical evidence of mortgage
lending practices in cities such as Atlanta, Boston and Cleveland
also revealed a continuing pattern of differential lending based on
the racial composition of neighborhoods. (2, p. 3) For example, white
and high income neighborhoods received more mortgage loans per
household than minority or low income neighborhoods. This gap
narrowed, but was still present, when such factors as mortgage de-
mand and lending risk were taken into account. In a study of mort-
gage lending in Atlanta, banks and savings and loan associations
extended 2 and 1 /2 times more loans to predominately white neigh-
borhoods than to mainly black communities, even after controlling
for income and property sales activity. (8)

Concerns about weak enforcement of the CRA, along with em-
pirical evidence supporting the view that discrimination in lending
continued despite the CRA, helped convince the Congress of the
need to strengthen this legislation. What also prompted action were
solvency problems faced by financial institutions (particularly sav-
ings and loans) which ultimately required action by Congress to
"bail out" insured depositors. Thus in 1989, as part of the "Finan-
cial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act," the CRA
was amended. Legislation such as the CRA became increasingly
viewed as a price which regulated financial institutions must pay
for their public charter as well as for legislative support for using
taxpayer dollars to protect insured depositors.

The amendments to the CRA in 1989 were actually quite mini-
mal, involving only two modifications of the original legislation.
First, a summary of the written evaluations of an institution's CRA
review were now required to be made available to the public. Sec-
ondly, the amendments also established a new common system of
grading to be used by regulators in evaluating an institution's CRA
performance. After examination by a regulatory agency, one of the
following grades would be assigned: "outstanding," "satisfactory,"
"needs to improve," or "substantial noncompliance." Like the writ-
ten evaluations, these grades would also be made available to the
public.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 167

Making public the CRA written evaluations and ratings was ex-
pected to push financial institutions to take the goals of the Act more
seriously. Now even a banking organization that had no expansion
plans would have its CRA performance revealed to the public. Ulti-
mately it was hoped that this change would give financial institu-
tions the incentive to increase the amount of lending to low income
communities. Making the evaluation process more public was also
expected to put pressure on the regulatory agencies to be more thor-
ough and stringent in their grading.

II. Community Reinvestment: Current Issues

A. Evidence of Discrimination in Lending in the 1990s

Recently published studies by the Federal Reserve have provided
strong evidence that discriminatory practices in lending continue
to persist in the 1990s. Using data on home loans available as a re-
sult of the 1989 amendments to the HMD A, the Federal Reserve
found that black and Hispanic loan applicants were denied credit
in greater proportion than white applicants, even within the same
income class. For example, in 1991, 23.2 per cent of high income
black applicants (120 per cent above the median family income in
their metropolitan area) were denied conventional mortgage loans
compared to a denial rate of 9.7 per cent for high income whites.
For lower income blacks (less than 80 per cent of median family
income), the loan denial rate of 48.2 per cent far exceeded the 31.5
per cent rate for whites. (3, p. 812) These results were based on over
6.5 million home loan applications processed in 1991. This pattern
of higher rejection for minority home loan applications was similar
to what the Federal Reserve uncovered using 1990 HMDA data. (4,
p. 872)

Federal Reserve researchers note the limitations associated with
using HMDA data. For example, no information is collected on fi-
nancial characteristics which also influence a lender's decision
whether or not to approve a loan, such as an applicant's work his-
tory, credit history or level of debt. In order to determine if leaving
out these variables biased the results, the Federal Reserve Bank of
Boston undertook an additional study of financial discrimination
in the mortgage market. In this study, the Federal Reserve matched
HMDA data with additional characteristics such as credit history,
loan-to- value ratio, debt burden and census information for a sample

168 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

of home loan applications in the Boston area. This more complete
model was employed to test whether race was a significant factor
in the lending process once neighborhood and financial character-
istics were taken into account. These researchers found that minor-
ity applicants (blacks and Hispanics) have on average a 60 per cent
higher denial rate than whites, controlling for financial and neigh-
borhood differences. (16, p. 2) The overall impact of existing em-
pirical research has been to convince the Federal Reserve and other
regulatory agencies to shift their focus on the CRA from a debate
about whether discriminatory practices are occurring to the devel-
opment of initiatives that will help remedy the problem. (3, p. 812)

B. Burden of the CRA

Complaints about the CRA have accelerated since the passage of
the amendments to the Act in 1989. A major reason for the increased
controversy surrounding the CRA is that Federal regulators, par-
ticularly the Federal Reserve, began to more aggressively enforce
the CRA in the 1990s. For example, in 1992, 10 per cent of grades
assigned to financial institutions were less than satisfactory ("needs
to improve" or "substantial noncompliance"), up considerably from
the proportion of unsatisfactory grades given prior to the 1989
amendments. (13, p. 258) Making a portion of the examination re-
port as well as the institution's overall CRA grade available to the
public has strengthened this legislation and undoubtedly increased
the time and effort regulators and financial institutions have de-
voted to CRA issues.

In a review of the CRA published in 1993, Jonathan R. Macey
and Geoffrey R Miller discuss numerous criticisms of this legisla-
tion and its subsequent implementation. According to these critics,
community reinvestment legislation such as the CRA negatively
impacts the "safety and soundness" of financial institutions (15, pp.
318-22), encourages unproductive expenditures on public relations
and documentation (15, pp. 330-33), places depository institutions
at an unfair disadvantage relative to nonbank institutions (15, pp.
312-13) and implicitly results in a form of government "credit allo-
cation." (15, p. 295)

Government agencies have also examined the impact regulations
have on financial institutions. During 1992, the Federal Financial
Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC), a consortium of Fed-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 169

eral depository institution regulators, conducted hearings and re-
viewed available evidence to determine whether regulations such
as the CRA have imposed unnecessary costs on depository institu-
tions. As indicated in their 1992 study on regulatory burden, the
FFIEC found the CRA to be the most burdensome or costly con-
sumer protection legislation imposed on depository institutions. (9,
p. C-4) In addition, the CRA was the most often criticized regula-
tion by representatives of financial institutions in the hearings held
by the FFIEC. Specific complaints include the "excessive" documen-
tation requirements, the "subjectivity" of the CRA examinations,
the high cost of compliance especially for small banks and the fact
that nondepository financial institutions such as mutual funds and
insurance companies are not subject to the CRA. (9, p. III-42)

Based on an extensive review of existing empirical studies, the
FFIEC estimated that the cost of all regulations imposed on banks
was between $7.5 and $17 billion in 1991. (9, p. C-15) This estimate
does not include the opportunity cost associated with required re-
serves held by the Federal Reserve. In a recent study funded by the
Independent Bankers Association of America (IBAA), the account-
ing firm Grant Thornton found that the CRA was the most expen-
sive regulation imposed on the banking system (not counting re-
serve requirements or deposit insurance). Grant Thornton estimated
a multibillion dollar CRA-related cost for the entire banking sys-
tem. In addition, results of this study indicate that smaller banks
are burdened with a higher CRA cost to net income ratio relative to
larger banks. (14, p. 21)

Supporters of the CRA contend that banks and regulators have
exaggerated the cost of compliance. In addition, representatives of
community organizations have argued that the ratings given by
regulators to institutions have been too lenient. Supporters of the
CRA believe that left to their own initiative, depository institutions
would continue to discriminate against low income and minority
applicants. (9, p. III-42) For all of these reasons, community organi-
sation groups want regulators to strictly enforce this act.

Based on the empirical evidence and testimony presented in the
992 hearings, the FFIEC recommended changes in the CRA and its
enforcement. Suggested changes included: a) reviewing documen-
ation requirements to demonstrate compliance with CRA, b) re-
varding institutions with satisfactory ratings with less frequent
I

170 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

examinations and exemptions from challenges to expansions or
mergers, and c) creating exemptions to the law for small rural insti-
tutions or banks not specializing in consumer /mortgage loans. (9,
p. III-41) Legislative attempts to exempt certain banks from CRA
requirements have not been successful to date. (18) The Clinton
Administration and Federal regulators are currently considering
ways to ease the burden the CRA imposes on depository institu-
tions.

C. The CRA and the Clinton Administration

In the Summer of 1993, the Clinton Administration unveiled its
own initiative concerning community lending. The President 's plan
involves two main aspects. First, the Administration is proposing
that regulators modify how they enforce the CRA. Secondly, the
Administration is asking Congress to provide funding to support
lending by financial institutions known as community development
banks. (17, p. 1856)

The regulatory changes President Clinton has proposed for the
CRA are designed to increase the incentives for actual lending by
banks as opposed to expenditures on public relations or documen-
tation. As proposed, banks will be required to demonstrate compli-
ance in three categories: lending in their service area, investment in
community projects and providing bank services. Under current
regulations, depository institutions must document their compli-
ance with the CRA in twelve areas. During the Fall of 1993, bank
and thrift regulators held public hearings to get input from the public
on these proposed changes in the CRA. Mr. Clinton's goal is to imple-
ment new CRA regulations by January 1, 1994.

President Clinton's community development lending initiative
represents an attempt to involve the Federal Government directly
in increasing the availability of credit to low income communities.
As detailed in July 1993, the Administration proposed providing
$385 million as "seed money" for community lending organizations
whose primary mission is community development. Such institu-
tions include community development banks, minority-owned
banks, credit unions and community development corporations. The
Federal seed money is meant to provide the initial capital to help
establish these institutions and as a base to attract other sources of
funds.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 171

The Administration's proposal agrees with the perspective that
expanding banking services to low income communities will require
some sort of government financing. Depository institutions (most
of them at least) are profit-oriented businesses. For various reasons,
lending to communities inadequately served by depository institu-
tions is likely to be less profitable than other types of activity. (19,
p. 4) The lack of a secondary market for community development
loans means that these loans must be held by the lenders. Many of
these loans are also smaller than conventional loans and must be
accompanied by some sort of technical assistance such as market-
ing research or bookkeeping training to increase the likelihood of
repayment. Many borrowers in low income communities may also
not have the collateral or credit history expected in conventional
lending arrangements. The perceived high risk of lending in such
situations limits the impact of mandates such as the CRA. Thus the
Clinton Administration acknowledges that achieving the social goal
of increasing the flow of funds to small businesses, home mortgages
and community revitalization projects in low income neighborhoods
will require some direct government support.

III. Community Reinvestment: What Lies Ahead?

The CRA passed in 1977 without much debate or opposition (13,
p. 252); it has undoubtedly performed a valuable function. Many
banks and savings and loan associations have initiated a number of
creative outreach and lending programs to increase the flow of credit
and supply of bank services to low income communities. (13, p. 262)

Despite its successes, the CRA is highly controversial. Depository
institutions (mainly community banks) have raised legitimate con-
cerns about the costs associated with CRA compliance. A drawback
of the CRA, which limits its effectiveness, is that it only applies to
depository institutions. Historically, depository institutions have
served local markets. Since the 1930s, the banks have also enjoyed
the Federal Government's deposit insurance safety net. Legislators
have felt that it is appropriate to impose community reinvestment
requirements on these "protected" institutions. As a "payback" for
savings and loan bailout legislation, the Congress attached amend-
ments to the CRA in 1989 enhancing the impact of this Act.

However, during the past 10 to 15 years the financial industry
has changed significantly. More and more depositors are placing

172 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

their funds with mutual funds and other financial intermediaries.
Banks are no longer exclusively "local" financial institutions. Merg-
ers between banks have also become commonplace. Requiring only
banks to be concerned about community reinvestment does place
these institutions at a competitive disadvantage relative to other
institutions. It does seem appropriate, based on a "level playing
field" argument, that the CRA be expanded to cover other financial
institutions such as mutual funds, pension funds, finance compa-
nies and insurance companies. In addition, expanding the CRA to
include a broader array of financial institutions will potentially in-
crease the volume of credit channeled to low income communities.
In a paper published in 1993 by the Economic Policy Institute, Jane
W. D' Arista and Tom Schlesinger argue that nondepository finan-
cial institutions should also be bound by the community invest-
ment demands of the CRA. This recommendation is part of a broader
proposal to standardize regulations for all financial institutions with
a goal of reducing the cost advantages nondepository institutions
currently enjoy over banks. (7, p. 3)

The Clinton Administration believes that the CRA, as it now
stands, imposes an unfair burden on depository institutions. Al-
though there has been no official recommendation to broaden the
CRA to cover non-depository institutions, the Administration has
suggested that other changes be made to the CRA. Upon comple-
tion of the public hearings held during the Fall of 1993, Federal regu-
lators are expected to issue new regulations with the intent of eas-
ing the burden of the CRA. A likely result is that banks will be able
to reduce the effort devoted to public relations and documentation
but will be expected to increase the actual lending to low or moder-
ate income neighborhoods.

The second aspect of President Clinton's plan, the creation of a
system of community development banks, represents a significant
change in government philosophy regarding the provision of credit
to poor neighborhoods. During the 1980s, the executive and legisla-
tive branches of government failed to support a direct Federal role
in community lending programs. With the virtual withdrawal of
Federal support, the 1980s witnessed a decline in funds for cities
and community development. Many responsibilities have been
shifted to lower levels of government or to business. Passage of the

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 173

President's community banking plan will, in a modest way, help
establish a private-public partnership in lending to low income com-
munities. Details of the plan are still being worked out. A likely
point of contention will be Mr. Clinton's proposal to create a new
network of institutions whose exclusive focus will be on commu-
nity development lending. Many established financial institutions
object to this aspect of the plan arguing they can achieve commu-
nity lending objectives more effectively than new institutions.

Evidence of continued discriminatory lending practices on the part
of banks suggests the continued need for community reinvestment
regulations such as the CRA. The Clinton Administration's proposal
for a system of community development banks reflects a belief that
the CRA alone will not solve the problem of inadequate credit avail-
ability in certain communities. Although the President's proposal is
modest in financial terms, $385 million over the 1994-98 period, it is
important symbolically as it represents a return of the Federal Gov-
ernment to a direct involvement in community development.

The financial support of the Federal Government for community
economic development is essential if our social goal is to reduce
poverty, create jobs and improve the housing stock in our low in-
come communities. The Federal Government's role under this pro-
gram is to provide seed capital to private community banking insti-
tutions. The program appears to combine the advantages of deci-
sion making at the local level with the realization that social goals,
such as increasing the flow of capital to certain communities, can-
not be achieved without a financial commitment on the part of gov-
ernment. This complementary approach to stimulate lending in the
nation's poorest communities, a less burdensome CRA plus Fed-
eral financial support for community-based lending, represents a
hopeful alternative to the current policy.

References

1. Art, Robert C. "Social Responsibility in Bank Credit Decisions: The Commu-

nity Reinvestment Act One Decade Later," Pacific Law Journal, 18, July
1987, pp. 1071-1139.

2. Avery, Robert B. "Making Judgments About Mortgage Lending Patterns,"

Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, 15 December
1989.

174 D. Boldt: Financial Institutions and Community Reinvestment

3. Canner, Glenn B. and Smith, Dolores S. "Expanded HMDA Data on Residen-
tial Lending: One Year Later," Federal Reserve Bulletin, 78, November 1992,
pp. 801-24.

4 "Home Mortgage Disclosure Act: Expanded Data on Residential

Lending," Federal Reserve Bulletin, 77, November 1991, pp. 859-81.

5. Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Community Reinvest-

ment Act, Senate Hearing 100-652, 22-23 March 1988.

6. . Provisions Aimed at Strengthening the Community Reinvestment Act,

Senate Hearing 100-905, 8-9 September 1988.

7. D' Arista, Jane W. and Schlesinger, Tom. The Parallel Banking System. Wash-

ington DC: Economic Policy Institute, 1993.

8. Dedman, Bill. "The Color of Money," Atlanta Constitution, 1 May 1988, p.

A15.

9. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC). Study on Regula-

tory Burden. Washington D.C.: 17 December 1992.

10. Fishbein, Allen J. "Implementation and Enforcement of the Community Re-

investment Act of 1977," Community Reinvestment Act, Hearings before
the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (Senate Hearing
100-652), 22 March 1988, pp. 143-65.

11. . "Satisfying Your Examiner & Satisfying Your Community Are

Not Always the Same," ^46^4 Bank Compliance, Autumn 1990, pp. 2-5.

12. Foust, Dean. "Leaning on Banks to Lend to the Poor," Business Week, 2 March

1987, p. 76.

13. Garwood, Griffin L. and Smith, Dolores S. "The Community Reinvestment

Act," Federal Reserve Bulletin, 79, April 1993, pp. 251-67.

14. Independent Bankers Association of America (IBAA). "The Cost to Commu-

nity Banks," Independent Banker, 43, March 1993, pp. 20-22.

15. Macey, Jonathan R. and Miller, Geoffrey P. "The Community Reinvestment

Act: An Economic Analysis," Virginia Law Review, 79, March 1993, pp.
291-348.

16. Munnell, Alicia H.; Browne, Lynn E.; McEneaney, James and Tootell, Geoffrey

M.B. Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data, Working Pa-
per No. 92-7, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, October 1992.

17. Taylor, Andrew. "Clinton Plan Would Fund Community Lenders," Congres-

sional Quarterly, 51, 17 July 1993, pp. 1856-58.

18. Thomas, Paulette. "Bush's Plan to Relax Community Lending Law and Help

Inner Cities Are on a Collision Course," Wall Street Journal, 21 July 1992,
p.A14.

19. Wells, F. Jean and Jackson, William. Community Development Lenders: Policy

Options and the Track Record, Report 93-483E. Washington D.C.: Congres-
sional Research Service, 11 May 1993.

Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship
in the Context of Social Market Economics

Siegfried G. Karsten

A socioeconomic system which integrates "free enterprise and
entrepreneurship" within the framework of a "social market
economy" has both meaning and vahdity in that it would address
socioeconomic challenges facing society in general and the busi-
ness sector in particular. The adoption of such a paradigm could
result in broadening the middle class, rising standards of living,
and a healthier entrepreneurial system by strengthening its com-
petitiveness.

The model of a social market economy provides for a "functional"
free enterprise system, which not only accommodates economic
growth and change but which also makes allowance for human dig-
nity and freedom, integrating economic principles with concepts of
order and justice. It specifies certain "general," "structural," and
"regulating" principles to facilitate a competitive free enterprise
system with a compatible social policy.

This paradigm of a socially responsive market economy, i.e., of a
free enterprise system, combines individual initiative with social
progress. It provides for a framework within which entrepreneurs
and citizens would be encouraged to coordinate their own interests
with those of society.

I. Meaning and Validity

For a socioeconomic paradigm to possess meaning and validity,
in Rogin's terms, it must focus on how people and businesses per-
ceive and conduct their "ordinary business of life," as Alfred
Marshall would say. (22, p. 1) Any valid and meaningful economic
model must, therefore, reflect socioeconomic reality Furthermore,
in order to remain viable, it continuously needs to adapt itself to
changing socioeconomic conditions. (5, pp. 116, 130-31; 2, p. 222)

The best available criteria for evaluating whether socioeconomic
theories and policies are "meaningful" or "valid" were defined by
Leo Rogin in terms of "strategic factors" and "implementation," re-
spectively First of all, an economic paradigm must be relevant to

177

178 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneur ship

the socioeconomic order in which it is appUed, i.e., it needs to reflect
the conditions at the time and place in question. Therefore, for an
economic model to have "meaning" it must address socioeconomic
issues or challenges which are of concern to people and entrepre-
neurs, as strategic factors. Its chances for implementation determine
whether or not such a model possesses "vahdity." (31, pp. 1-13)

Private enterprise and entrepreneurship are part of a wider cul-
ture. They do not exist in a vacuum but are conditioned by human
aspirations as well as by socioeconomic, cultural, political, and en-
vironmental factors. A free enterprise system which sticks to pas-
sive positions with regard to social challenges or rigidly insists on
maintaining the status quo will find itself increasingly out of step
with changing socioeconomic conditions. That is, in order to have
long-term viability, a meaningful private enterprise system needs
to take into consideration society's social interests and the interre-
lationship between ethics, laws, government, and public policy.

The ethical challenge of a contemporary free enterprise system
and of entrepreneurship can be spelled out in terms of distortions
between economic and ethical norms in the public and private sec-
tors, ideological prejudice about common welfare, and imbalances
in the principle that "government should govern as little as pos-
sible but not do as little as possible." (26, pp. 336, 363)

The paradigm of a "social market economy" postulates that eco-
nomic disorder is not the inevitable result of the market system nor
of the environment. It is caused primarily by people who attempt
to manipulate the market for their own advantage but to the
long-term disadvantage of society in general and of the business
sector in particular - manifesting in interventionism and distor-
tions of price relationships. For Eucken and the adherents to social
market economics, the answer is to be found in a "functional" mar-
ket economy which also responds to those problems for which the
market mechanism does not provide satisfactory answers, as men-
tioned above. (29, p. 266)

II. Economic Record

John Maynard Keynes' publication of his General Theory in 1936 had
a similar impact on economics as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
Keynes took issue with the natural state assumption of
"self-equilibrating, full-employment stability and social harmony" of

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 179

the classical and neo-classical schools. Furthermore, as he demonstrated,
income rather than the interest rate is the main economic parameter.

In Keynes' perception, the major fault of the U.S. economy could
be defined in terms of its inability to provide full employment and
an equitable distribution of income. (18, pp. 254, 372-74) He thought
that depressed economic conditions have a tendency to linger and
to moderate only gradually An activist government economic policy,
therefore, is called for to assist in mitigating, curing, and also in
preventing economic downturns. This necessitates a proper balance
between supply-side and demand-side policies.

The general public, most politicians, and, perhaps even econo-
mists tend to identify Keynes' suggested demand management of
the economy primarily with increased government spending to
supplement private expenditures for consumption and investment.
Certainly, that has been the major manifestation of demand man-
agement of the economy since World War II. However, another as-
pect of Keynesian economics is that deficits should not be used as
the main tool of economic policy, except during recessions. More-
over, serious attempts should be made to balance the budget over
the course of a business cycle.

Misconceived political opinion in the U.S., however, has ignored
the successful thrust of these policies. Real GDP, in 1987 dollars,
increased from $1,419 billion in 1950 to $3,776 billion in 1980, i.e.,
by an average 5.54% per year. By 1992 real GDP had risen to $4,923
billion, reflecting average annual increases of 2.53% from 1980 to
1992. Table 1 exhibits a declining trend in the average annual rates
of growth in real per capita GDP since the 1960s. (37)

Real per capita disposable income (1987 dollars) grew from $6,190
in 1950 to $12,005 in 1980, i.e., by 94% or by 3.13% per year on the
average. By 1992 it had reached $14,221, showing average increases
of 1.54% per year from 1980 to 1992. Similarly, real per capita con-
sumption increased from $5,742 in 1950 to $10,746 by 1980, i.e., by
2.90% per year, and to $12,974 in 1992 or by 1.73% per year during
the 1980s and early 1990s. Whereas during the three decades from
1950 to 1980 real per capita disposable income grew faster than con-
sumption, e.g., 3.13% vs. 2.90% per year, this was not the case in the
1980s and early 1990s: 1.54% vs. 1.73%, respectively, pointing to
excess consumption during that period and insufficient investment
n plant and equipment as well as in the infrastructure.

180

S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

TABLE 1
Selected Economic Statistics

1950-59

1960-69

1970-79

1980-92

1

. Average Annual Ratios or Rates of Change

Real Per Capita GDP -1987$

2.45%

3.01%

1.90%

1.10%

Nonresidential Net Investment

as a Ratio of GDP

3.10%

3.50%

3.65%

2.66%

Non-farm Business Productivity

2.64%

2.42%

1.32%

.87%

Ratio of After-Tax Profits

to Stockholders' Equity

n.30%

11.15%

12.84%

11.47%

Ratio of After-Tax Profits

to Sales

4.96%

4.92%

4.90%

4.27%

Personal Savings as a Ratio
of After-Tax Personal Income

Real Per Capita National Wealth
(Net Worth) -1987$

Net Investment in Plant and
Equipment

After-Tax Profits

Federal Education Expenditures

Federal R&D Expenditures

6.82%

6.71%

7.75%

6.08%

2.49%

2.08%

1.49%

II

Average

Annual Per

Capita

Real Dollars

1987$

$276

$446

$564

$474

$482

$784

$722

$737

$12

$57

$157

$143

$108

$220

$184

$216

(1953-59)

(1980-91)

Sources: Data based on the 1991, 1994 Economic Reports of the President; Survey of Current Business,
December 1992 and July 1993, and the Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. 1993. The above statis-
tics are presented primarily as an indication of the direction of changes or trends.

One of the Reagan Administration's basic assumptions, about
producers' and consumers' basic behavior patterns, did not materi-
aUze. It was beUeved that tax cuts would induce businesses and
people to save and to invest more. As the President's Economic Re-
port graphically illustrates (37, 1992, p. 263), and as Table 1 depicts,
the economy has experienced a declining trend in real net fixed busi-
ness investment as a ratio to GDP over the last twelve years. Real
per capita net investment in plant and equipment was actually lower
in the 1980s and early 1990s than in the 1970s. Average annual rates
of change in non-farm business productivity also were lower in the

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 181

1980s and early 1990s than in the previous three decades. Although
average annual real per capita after-tax profits were somewhat higher
in the 1970s, they were lower than in the 1960s - see Table 1. Simi-
larly, the average annual ratio of after-tax profits to sales was lower
during the 1980s and early 1990s than in the decades from 1950 to
1980. Although the average annual ratio of after tax profits to stock-
holders' equity was not too different from that of the 1950s and 1960s,
it was significantly below that for the 1970s.

The average percentages of disposable personal income saved
were significantly smaller in the 1980s and early 1990s than in the
preceding three decades. Another statistic, the rate of increase in
real per capita national wealth, was lower during the last twelve
years than in the 1960s and 1970s - see Table 1.

As Table 2 reveals, the federal government's deficits and interest
payments, as percentages of GDP, display a rising trend over the
last three decades and were significantly higher in the 1980s than in
the 1970s and 1960s. Despite the Reagan Administration's stated
objective to downsize the federal government, the ratios of both
federal revenues and expenditures to GDP were higher in the 1980s
and early 1990s than in the 1970s and 1960s.

TABLE 2

Selected Federal Budg

et Statistics

(Average Annual Ratios)

1960-69

1970-79

1980-92

Real Federal Deficit as a Percent
of GDP -1987$

.22%

1.74%

3.73%

Real Federal Interest Payments as
1 Percent of GDP -1987$

1.23%

1.43%

2.92%

'ederal Government Receipts as
I Percent of GDP

1960: 18.9%
1965: 17.9%

1970: 19.3%
1975: 18.6%

1980: 20.4%
1985: 19.5%
1990: 20.0%
1992: 19.6%

"ederal Government Outlays as
Percent of GDP

1960: 18.2%
1965: 17.7%

1970: 20.6%
1975: 23.0%

1980: 22.6%
1985: 24.0%
1990: 23.0%
1992: 24.2%

jjources: Data based on the 1991, 1992 Economic Reports of the President and the Survey of Current
Business, August 1993.

182 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

Although compHcating factors come into play, which are beyond
the scope of this article, the empirical evidence indicates that the
American economy performed significantly better, on the average,
from 1950 through 1980 than since 1980. Analysts at the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York concluded that "on balance, changes in
U.S. fiscal policy since the early 1980s have been detrimental to the
growth potential and long-run economic performance of the
economy." (1, p. 2) It appears that economic growth, business spend-
ing for plant and equipment, and savings were greater with higher
and not with lower tax rates for corporations as well as for indi-
viduals. Contrary to the Reagan and Bush Administrations' assump-
tions, government revenues, as a percent of GDP, had not increased
as expected in response to lower tax rates, resulting in the largest
peacetime deficits and buildup of the national debt. Hence, the U.S.
could actually be operating below, and not above, its optimal tax
rate that the Laffer Curve theory communicated in support of the
tax cuts of the 1980s.

The above statistics further lend credence to arguments that
American society is rather under-taxed and that insufficient invest-
ment in the nation's infrastructure as well as in its people nega-
tively affects not only private investments in productive capacity
but also government revenues. Moreover, as Herbert Stein observed,
a higher tax rate, which would have reduced the government defi-
cit, would have led to higher investment spending. Furthermore,
assuming a given tax rate, reducing government spending does not
necessarily increase the rate of economic growth. "Everything de-
pends on what the government expenditures are for." (33, p. 15)
David Stockman, then Director of the Office of Management and
Budget, is now of the opinion that the root of the problem (struc-
tural deficits) is to be found in the "July 1981 frenzy of excessive
and imprudent tax cuts which shattered the nation's fiscal stabil-
ity." In essence, the country had been left to handle expenditures of
the 1980s with a revenue base of the 1940s. (34)

Congressional Budget Office data (38, p. 52) indicate negative
growth rates for average after-tax family incomes for the period
from 1977 through 1989 for the first three quintiles of the income
distribution: -10.4%, -10.0%, and -5.2%, respectively. Positive growth
rates of 2.2% and 9.4% are registered for the top two quintiles. For

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 183

the 91-95th and 96-99th percentiles, income rose by 14% and 24.4%,
respectively; 102.2% for the top one percent of the distribution.

Partly as a result of these developments, the distribution of in-
come has become less equal since 1968, a trend which accelerated
during the 1980s. For example, "the share [of income! received by
the lowest quintile rose from 5.0 percent in 1947 to 5.7 percent in
1968, and then fell to 4.6 percent in 1990. The share for the highest
quintile fell from 43.0 percent in 1947 to 40.5 percent in 1968 before
rising to 44.3 percent by 1990." (37, 1992, p. 124)

One may get different numerical results depending on the types
of data and adjustments made, which are beyond the scope of this
paper. However, these and similar trends led the Census Bureau to
conclude that whereas 71 percent of the people could be classified
as living in middle-income class households in 1969, by 1989 that
was only the case for 63 percent of Americans. (35)

These developments point to a narrowing of the real income base
for 60 to 80 percent of the population, on which the economy, the
business sector, government, and people depend upon - for a bet-
ter standard of living, for greater profits, and for greater govern-
ment revenues and less government expenditures, especially in the
area of income maintenance.

When the distribution of income becomes more unequal, i.e., as
a greater proportion of all incomes is concentrated in a smaller seg-
ment of the population, the base of consumer demand is narrowed
and economic growth is curtailed, as indicated above. U.S. News
and World Report concluded in an article: 'Tt is time we faced up to
the fact that something enormous and unattractive is happening to
what we still imagine to be a middle-class nation." (4, p. 56) This is
also of concern to the business sector. William Woodside, CEO of
American Can Company, remarked: "... over the longer term, I don't
think that democratic institutions can survive a two-tier economy
comprising the very rich and very poor, and that's what we are rap-
idly becoming." (32, p. 60)

III. Underlying Premises

The conventional U.S. socioeconomic model in essence assumes
that an efficient socioeconomic system is not only brought about
but also maintained by a more or less self-equilibrating enterpris-
ing market mechanism. The latter is thought to assure a dynami-

184 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

cally growing economy by encouraging self-interest, entrepreneur-
ial activity, inventions, and innovations.

The principle of laissez faire or of the free enterprise system was
essentially born out of the concern for people and the recognition
that economic utility can never dispense with justice. The objec-
tives of any socioeconomic paradigm are virtually the same and
may best be stated in Marshall's words: "... the wellbeing of the
whole people should be the ultimate goal of all private effort and
public policy." (22, p. 47) Or, as Erhard Eppler observed, a socioeco-
nomic system only possesses validity if it offers people as much
freedom and self-determination as feasible, satisfies as many of their
needs and wants as possible, and safeguards for future generations
conditions for a high quality of life. (6, p. 128) Differences may arise
in how to achieve these ends, not in the ends themselves.

The desire for economic security, for protection from economic
calamity which is beyond the individual's control, i.e., for a life in
dignity is universal. The basic questions which any economic sys-
tem must address are: (a) How can the socioeconomic system pro-
vide humanizing work? And, (b) how well can society care for those
who cannot help themselves? (25, p. 1)

As is increasingly recognized, economic growth per se is neither
sufficient nor does it alone bestow strength and vitality on the
economy. A dynamic society grows through continuous experimen-
tation - not only in terms of technological advancement and inno-
vation but, most importantly, with regard to new socioeconomic
and institutional processes. The lessons which the 1980s so far have
taught us is that socioeconomic policies need to incorporate greater
balance between private interests and public purpose.

Walter Eucken, chief architect of the paradigm of a social market
economy, believed that economic forces without the guide of a "func-
tional" institutional framework do not evolve by themselves for the
welfare of the people, except for those in positions of dominance.
He recognized, as many others do, that monopoly power and spe-
cial privileges are sought by the major participants in the economic
process. Unrestrained laissez faire tends to evolve into economic
power, concentrated in monopolies and oligopolies, threatening not
only freedom but also the efficient allocation of resources. ( 9, pp.
60-62; 10, pp. 3-7)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 185

Contemporary institutional arrangements, e.g., monopoly power
exercised by business, industry, and labor, and the way fiscal and
monetary policies are influenced by special interest groups, inter-
fere with the market to effectively resolve questions of unemploy-
ment, inflation, and economic growth. Hence, there is no assurance
that prices continue to function as efficient allocation and rationing
devices, encouraging greater intervention by the government in the
economy Other issues, such as health care, education and training,
the infrastructure, the environment, poverty, fairness in taxation, a
more equal distribution of income, to mention some, are beyond
the reach of the market. Therefore, according to Eucken, the evolu-
tion of a functional market economy, as the guarantor of freedom,
human dignity, and justice, cannot be left to chance but must be
consciously guided. (8, p. 34)

Ethical, economic, political, and social issues are all intercon-
nected. People tend to favor a socioeconomic system which would
provide for human freedom, justice, economic security, and efficient
economic processes to the maximum extent possible, in terms of
Rogin's "strategic factors." In other words, a healthy and dynamic
free enterprise economy needs to be complemented by an efficient
and humane public sector. Hence, a paradigm is called for which
infuses social and normative values into a socially-blind market
system in order to put a human face on a capitalistic socioeconomic
system.

These are in essence the underlying premises of a "social market
economy" (8, pp. 123-32, 182; 9, pp. 76-77; 16, pp. 175-77) defined as
a "functional" competitive market economy which approximates
perfect competition, integrated with a sound legal and institutional
framework. The essential characteristics of this model, as formu-
lated by Walter Eucken, are a flexible price mechanism, stable so-
cioeconomic policies, and a just order which enables man to live a
life in dignity (7, pp. 239-42)

IV. Fundamental Principles

The fundamental question facing society is how to make the U.S.
economy more competitive, i.e., how to bring about a better "func-
tional" competitive economy, as defined above. Six basic criteria,
I which are central to a successful social market economy, and which
to some extent are already applied in the United States, may need

186 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

to be re-emphasized in her socioeconomic policies, as a framework
for inter-personal and inter-institutional relations.

The principle of individual responsibility, the first criterion, lies
at the heart of both socioeconomic freedom and moral accountabil-
ity. It implies that within limits, self-interest may be socially and
economically beneficial. However, a narrowly practiced individu-
alism, without social concerns, is becoming increasingly less accept-
able. As pointed out above, unrestrained individualism may de-
generate into market structures of imperfect competition, making
the economy less competitive. Hence, individuals and institutions
are to be held accountable for actions which are detrimental to com-
petition.

The second principle, that of solidarity, expresses a reciprocal re-
lationship between individualism, society, and the environment. As
the U.S. Catholic Bishops indicate, the principle of subsidiarity calls
for consensus-building between labor, management, and govern-
ment, i.e., for solidarity. (25, pp. 145-46, 155-59)

It is in this area that much work needs to be done in the United
States to realize a greater degree of solidarity among the various
participants in economic processes. Regulatory reform, elimination
of special privileges, an incomes policy, industrial policy, and
co-determination between labor and management, and labor unions,
as long as these do not reduce the degree of competition, may be
moves in the right direction. (40, pp. 11-23)

The third criterion, that of self help, states that individuals need
to be motivated to change things which are in their power to change.
The aim is to wean people away from excessive reliance on the state
with the intended purpose to foster a higher degree of personal in-
centives and innovation. That is, policies are called for which stimu-
late private initiative. This suggests significant action in the form of
favorable regulation or substantive assistance for new entrepreneurs
as well as welfare reform.

Social welfare, i.e., the common weal, forms the fourth principle.
As the Bishops posit: "The dignity of the human person, realized in
community with others, is the criterion against which all aspects of
human life must be measured." (25, p. 15) As Marshall had exhorted
with his "economic chivalry," and Ted Turner suggested with his
"Ted Commandments," self-interest should not be considered only
in terms of profit maximization. The activities of business, labor.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 187

and government should be guided by what will improve the socio-
economic setting in general, together with concerns for the com-
mon good, notions of socially responsible behavior, and the idea of
"stewardship." (39, p. 273; 41)

More specifically, the common weal may be interpreted to en-
compass all aspects affecting social welfare, including the infrastruc-
ture, cultural policies, social security, public health, education, tech-
nological developments, to mention a few. In terms of Alfred
Marshall's redefinition of laissez faire, the "principle of common
welfare" encourages government "to do that work which is vital,
and which none but government can do effectively." That is, "the
function of government is to govern as little as possible; but not to
do as little as possible." (26, pp. 336, 363) However, the correct bal-
ance between "governing as little as possible but not to do as little
as possible" has not yet been found. Greater funding for the social
infrastructure, education, health care, the environment, for techno-
logical developments, etc. are needed to address that imbalance.

The fifth principle, that of a socially-caring state, encourages the
community to help those who cannot help themselves. Individuals
are to be encouraged to change things which are in their power to
change. However, social action is required to change causal factors
which are beyond the individual's reach, justifying what is referred
to as the social safety net.

The imbalances referred to under the fourth principle also apply
in this case which tend to manifest in homelessness, inadequate
access to health care, and poverty in the U.S. But, as Popper argues,
social institutions must protect the economically weak and, to safe-
guard freedom, unrestrained capitalism must give way to respon-
sible economic intervention." (28, p. 125)

As a last criterion one may add "industrial policy," although it
was included above under the second principle. Serious socioeco-
nomic challenges need to be resolved in the United States, espe-
cially with regard to international competitiveness. The long-term
solution is to be found in policies which will strengthen the produc-
tive potential of the economy A rational industrial policy, although
controversial in nature, could muster majority support from the
general public and the body poUtic. (17, pp. 155-64)

I A meaningful industrial policy cannot be divorced from fiscal or
monetary policies. According to Chalmers Johnson, it forms the third

188 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

leg in the triad consisting of fiscal, monetary, and industrial poli-
cies. The objective of an industrial policy is to increase overall eco-
nomic capacity and activity and not simply to rearrange the exist-
ing economic pie. As Johnson points out:

In a positive, explicit sense, industrial policy means the initia-
tion and coordination of governmental activities to leverage
upward the productivity and competitiveness of the whole
economy and of particular industries in it. Above all, positive
industrial policy means the infusion of goal-oriented, strate-
gic thinking into public economic policy. It is the attempt by
government to move beyond the broad aggregate and envi-
ronmental concerns of monetary and fiscal policy of the mar-
ket system. (15, pp. 7-8)

V. Constitution of a Social Market Economy

The paradigm of a social market economy shifts the emphasis
from unrestricted laissez faire to guiding the economy towards so-
cioeconomic goals. As Aba Lerner puts it, it is a change from quan-
tity to quality, to assist policy makers to broaden the middle class,
to maintain high employment, to control inflation, to restrict mo-
nopolistic power, and to encourage (discourage) socially beneficial
(harmful) activities. (20, p. 133) The mutation is from a pure
laissez-faire economy to a socially responsive free-market economy,
i.e., to capitalism with a conscience. Eucken and Ropke had at first
referred to it as "Smithianismus." (12, p. 10)

This paradigm encompasses both a doctrine of economic as well
as social philosophy. It is molded by "competition policy," charac-
terized by (a) individual freedom of action, from which efficiency is
derived; (b) a strong role for the state to preserve the prerequisites I
for a competitive system; and (c) to incorporate competition policy
into the body of law of the economic order of a free and open soci-
ety (24, p. 142)

Social market economics, therefore, advocates a "right order" in
economic relationships, in the interrelationship between capital,
labor, and government. It is to be achieved through a neutral mon-
etary policy, the elimination and control of monopolistic powers, a
functional price mechanism, an incomes policy, and stable fiscal and
monetary policies. This "order" is to facilitate solutions which are
economically and ethically justifiable and which enhance man's

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 189

opportunities for a "productive" and dignified life. (8, pp. 10, 21-22,
179) Eucken's "economic constitution" for a competitive social mar-
ket economy is defined in terms of eight "structural" and five "regu-
lating" principles. (8, pp. 160-77; 10, pp. 32ff)

A. The structural principles consist of :

1) Commitment of socioeconomic policies towards a competitive
social market economy. This principle, when narrowly applied to
the "commitment to competition," receives widespread approval
in the U.S. However, when it is considered in terms of
"socially-responsive competition," or infusing questions of "eco-
nomic justice" or the right to a "life in dignity" into a socially-blind
market mechanism, substantial prejudice needs to be overcome.

2) Primacy of monetary policy, to stabilize the value of money as
a necessary condition for a functionally competitive economy is re-
lated to the fifth regulating principle, calling for a "monetary
numeraire" in order to depoliticize monetary policy. This has not
been fully accepted or implemented in any country, including those
which have adopted this model. The overriding concern is that fis-
cal and monetary policies need to complement each other.

3) Open competitive markets, i.e., the elimination of restraints on
demand and supply, for both domestically and foreign produced
goods. It is in this area that the U.S. economy faces many challenges.
The greatest of these is to be found in reducing the political influ-
ence of "special interest groups." The latter, only too often, are able
to get laws passed and regulations instituted which reduce rather
than enhance competition. This type of legislation also tends to
encourage paper transactions for reasons of short-term profits in-
stead of long-term investments in productive capacity, as Keynes
lad warned when he contrasted "speculation" with "enterprise."
(18, pp. 158-63) These factors also influence the third regulating prin-
ciple, that "prices are to reflect all costs," in order to serve as effi-
cient allocation devices of scarce resources.

Possible remedies may be found in substantial tax reform. If cer-
tain economic activities are to be encouraged in the national inter-
est, then subsidies would address this more efficiently than tax ex-
penditures. Another measure is to limit the duration of election cam-
paigns and to substitute public for private financing. In the long
"un, this would enhance efficiency in economic as well as in politi-

190 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

cal processes, contribute to more efficient resource allocations,
greater competitiveness, and would cost businesses and the public
less, both in prices and taxes, than present practices.

4) Stable and predictable economic policies which are essential
for long-term decisions. This case is more serious, especially when
considered together with the fourth regulating principle of an "in-
tegrated countercyclical policy approach to reflect the interrelation-
ship of all problems."

The problem manifests itself in the magnitudes of budget and
trade deficits and the deceiving practices of moving budget items
off budget, manipulation of payment schedules, rosy economic fore-
casts, and using revenues collected under the trust funds to finance
general government expenditures, hiding the true magnitude of
these deficits.

This dilemma is further aggravated by the inability to separate
economic policy making from political processes. Politicians are not
primarily motivated by long-term considerations but by the
short-term pressures of the next election. As a result, all administra-
tions and Congresses have manipulated fiscal policies and tried to
influence monetary policies.

One underlying problem is that administrations, as well as Con-
gresses, have made forecasts with regard to the future performance
of key economic variables, revenues, expenditures, and deficits,
which are not objective but which are influenced by political goals.
The U.S. needs to institute a similar set-up as in Germany, where
analyses of economic conditions and forecasts is delegated to five
independent private economic research institutes. A consensus of
these analyses and forecasts is formed and serves as the basis for
policy decisions. (3, pp. 26-30) For example, the National Bureau of
Economic Research already performs a similar function as the offi-
cial arbiter of defining recessions and recoveries.

5) Private ownership of the means of production. Only a com-
petitive social market economy can effectively control property as a
basis of socioeconomic power and, therefore, make it tolerable.

6) Defining the freedom to enter contracts to increase competi-
tion and to restrict its abuses. This structural principle, and also the
next one, were elaborated under the first general principle of the
preceding section.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 191

7) Liability to be accountable for actions which are detrimental to
perfect competition.

8) Interdependence of all structural principles - applied in isola-
tion they lose their basic purpose and effectiveness.

B. The regulating principles address:

1) Reduction and control of monopoly power. If the latter cannot
be eliminated, the state is obligated to control and supervise mo-
nopolistic industries in such a manner that their prices approximate
those that would have existed under perfectly competitive condi-
tions. Regulatory pricing of natural monopolies may serve as an
example here.

The wider problem is that the enforcement of the antitrust laws
rests with the Justice Department and is, therefore, greatly influ-
enced by political factors and special interest groups. For reasons of
greater objectivity, better economic efficiency, and enhanced com-
petition, an independent agency needs to be created and be removed
as much as possible from political influence, as in Germany, to serve
as a watchdog empowered to bring the necessary legal actions to
eliminate or at least reduce monopoly power in the system. (24, pp.
152-54)

2) Incomes policy As was discussed above, a free market does
not by itself resolve many problems, including but not limited to
economic security, equity and justice in the distribution of income
and wealth.

Difficulties arise, however, with regard to ideological preconcep-
tions involving the "safety net" and an "industrial policy" In con-
trast to social market economists, conservatives, strengthened by
socioeconomic policies manifesting in budget and trade deficits, tend
to take the position that the market can be totally relied upon to
satisfactorily deal with questions of unemployment, poverty, hu-
man dignity, etc. Although no government has fully accepted such
a position, questions of a proper magnitude of the social safety net
have often been mired in prejudicial misconceptions. Recent debates
about national health insurance may serve as an example.

Instituting a national health insurance program would prove to
be very beneficial not only to society in general but to the business
sector in particular. Employers' costs for health benefits have risen
from around $500 per worker early in the 1980s to $3,968 in 1992. It

192 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

is estimated that "the average amount companies spend on health
care amounts to 45 percent of after-tax profits." Whereas the U.S.
spends about 12.4 percent of its GDP on health care, its major com-
petitors, Canada, Germany, and Japan, spend 9, 8.1, and 6.5 per-
cent, respectively - with better results, utilizing national health care
plans. Needless to say that our business and industry could invest
more, and become more productive and competitive if that burden
was reduced. (11; 13; 14)

The problem is magnified in that, from 1982 to 1989, the percent-
age of employees fully covered by employers' furnished insurance
dropped from 75 to 48 percent, for those with family coverage from
50 to 31 percent. At the same time employees' out of pocket ex-
penses for health insurance increased. (27) The Children's Defense
Fund reported that in 1990 more than 25 million children were not
covered by any health insurance although their parents were in-
sured by their employers. By the year 2000 about half of the chil-
dren may not be insured through their parents if present trends con-
tinue, if firms continue to exclude children from their health insur-
ance coverage. (23) The long-term implications are that workers'
productivity would tend to decline. It is not surprising that the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce at one time reversed its position in favor of
a national health insurance program, stating that all businesses
should be required to provide health insurance for their workers.
(36)

In the final analysis, free market rules need to be modified in that
social problems, especially poverty and unemployment, could en-
danger the so-called free enterprise system. Specific policies could
take the form of tax and regulatory reform to abolish special privi-
leges, which tend to distort market prices. The nation needs to set
up a "consensus-seeking mechanism" involving business, indus-
try, the financial community, labor, government, and consumers, to
address the long-term goals of American society and how to achieve
them - a form of incomes policy. It was practiced to a limited extent
under the Kennedy /Johnson Administrations. (16, pp. 178-79)

The ultimate solution to the policy-making process is to be found
in formulating a broad consensus among business, industry, labor,
the financial community, government, and consumers, with regard
to the long-term goals of the American society and how to best pro-
mote and achieve these goals.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 193

Other measures involve industrial policies as discussed above,
educational reform including free college tuition, repair and mod-
ernization of the social infrastructure, greater equality in the distri-
bution of income, affordable housing policies, actions to combat
poverty and homelessness, and better cooperation between labor
and management - "do make employees feel secure, enlisting all in
a search for better ways to get the job done," as W. Edward Deming
promoted in his seminars. (21)

The suggested actions would bring about a healthier, better edu-
cated labor force, improve social harmony and economic security,
increase labor productivity, and enhance the country's competi-
tiveness in world markets. They are justifiable as long as they do
not paralyze the "nerve centers of the price mechanism," according
to Ropke, i.e., increase competitive conditions and do not discour-
age long-term investment and productivity. (30, pp. 159-63)

The above outlined measures were put to a test in Germany after
World War II in varying degrees. Germany has to face many chal-
lenges and problems, especially brought about by the unification
with East Germany, which require substantive changes in her so-
cioeconomic policies. However, the words of Hartrich still seem to
hold that this experiment "has proven to be the greatest producer
of wealth, modern technology, and womb-to-womb social security
of any ideology or political system. ... It has produced capitalism's
'finest hour' - and inflicted the decisive defeat of Marxian social-
ism in the land of its birth." (12, pp. 4-5)

3) Prices are to reflect all costs and are to serve as true allocators
of scarce resources, discussed under the third structural principle.

4) An integrated countercyclical policy approach to reflect the
interrelatedness of all problems, e.g., unemployment, inflation,
growth, investment, environment, poverty, etc. Pressures from spe-
cial interest groups to deal with these in isolation are seen as the
primary source of socioeconomic instability, as was elaborated un-
der the fourth structural principle.

5) Establishment of a monetary numeraire to depoliticize and to
stabilize monetary policy (with the supply of money to be tied to a
basket of commodities). As was mentioned with regard to the sec-
ond structural principle, this has not been instituted in any eco-
nomic system.

194 S.G. Karsten: Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

It was Eucken's position that the "structural" and "regulating"
principles complement each other, and, therefore, need to be inte-
grated in a unified approach. If that were not possible, then the sec-
ond best solution would be found in increased state direction of
economic activities, with reduced personal and economic freedom.

V. Conclusion

This analysis suggests that socioeconomic challenges cannot be
satisfactorily resolved outside the framework of an efficiently func-
tioning economy. The "general," "structural," and "regulating" prin-
ciples of Eucken's "economic constitution" are oriented towards
establishing an efficient functional market economy. It takes a ho-
listic approach in treating the economy as an organic whole. Fur-
thermore, it takes account of man's desire for a life in freedom, dig-
nity, relative security, and for protection from circumstances beyond
his control. According to Miiller-Armack, a realistic socioeconomic
model has to consider not only economic but also social policy ob-
jectives. (19, p. 262)

The real economic factors which influence the well-being of people
are to be found in their values and expectations, the social safety
net, in socioeconomic structural changes, technological develop-
ments, economic fluctuations, tax policies, the distribution of in-
come and wealth, the magnitude and type of private and social in-
vestments, foreign trade relations, fiscal and monetary policies, and
politics.

These real economic factors are greatly affected by continuing
discontinuities in socioeconomic policies. Short-term interests of
politicians and special interest groups, imbalanced budgets,
non-complementarity of economic and ethical principles, and an
imbalance in the solidarity principle are critical contributing fac-
tors. This is greatly magnified by changes in administrations, often
times every four years. The challenge is how to depoliticize the eco-
nomic process.

Narrowly structured and ideologically tinted policies are becom-
ing increasingly less acceptable. Present social and political trends
call for vital economic growth through injecting new vitality into
the market system. This essentially has three implications, namely
greater equality in the distribution of income, the achievement and

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 195

maintenance of satisfactory rates of economic growth, and reduc-
tion of the federal budget deficit.

As Dahrendorf points out, economies are still oriented primarily
towards "stability" and "growth." If these do not materialize, all
kinds of problems arise. Not only are individuals' well-being af-
fected, but the social balance is called into question. (2, pp. 68-69)

Acknowledgement

The author is indebted to West Georgia College for a research
grant in support of this study.

P

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28. Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol.2, 5th ed. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1971.

29. Ropke, Wilhelm. "Das Deutsche Wirtschaftsexperiment, Beispiel und Lehre,"

in Vollbeschdftigung, Inflation, und Planwirtschaft. Ed. Albert Hunold.
Erlenbach-Ziirich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1951, pp. 261-312.

30. Roepke, Wilhelm. The Social Crisis of Our Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-

tion Publishers, 1992.

31 . Rogin, Leo. The Meaning and Validity of Economic Theory. New York: Harper &

Brothers, 1956.

32. "Seven Wary Views From The Top," Fortune, 2 February 1987, pp. 58-63.

33. Stein, Herbert. "Should Growth Be a Priority of National Policy?" Challenge,

29, March/April 1986, pp. 11-17.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXII, 1994 197

34. Stockman, David. "Grand Old Pinocchios," Atlanta Journal/Constitution, 9

March 1993, p. A9.

35. Teegardin, Carrie. "Census Says Middle Class on Decline," Atlanta Journal/

Constitution, 20 February 1992, pp. Al, A4.

36. "U.S. Chamber Reverses Position, Backs Mandatory Health Coverage," At-

lanta Journal/Constitution, 10 March 1993, p. CI.

37. U.S. President. Economic Report of the President. Washington, DC: Government

Printing Office, 1991, 1992, 1994.

38. "A Very Rich Dessert," U.S. News & World Report, 23 March 1992, pp. 52-53.

39. Walton, Clarence C. "The Connected Vessels: Economics, Ethics, and Soci-

ety," Review of Social Economy, 40, December 1982, pp. 251-89.

40. Wisman, Jon D. "Is There a Significant Future for Workplace Democracy?" in

Worker Empowerment. Ed. Jon D. Wisman. New York: Bootstrap Press,
1991, pp. 11-23.

41. Yandel, Gerry. "Newspaper Group Gets to Hear the Gospel According to

Ted," Atlanta Journal/Constitution, 27 October 1989, p. E2.

"iR^. -'-'^^'^Ht^. '^aii^#^'-''^'^'^4S^ft^^^

STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

k

Volume XXXII June 1994

The U.S. Economy in the Light of
Justice, SoHdarity, and Complementarity

An Interdisciplinary Perspective

edited by

Siegfried G. Karsten

I

This volume represents a somewhat rare undertaking in that it com-
piles varied efforts from distinct disciplines addressing a topic of com-
mon concern. It recognizes that people are prosperous, not as indi-
viduals, but as members of a prosperous society. This implies an in-
terdisciplinary approach to socioeconomic challenges, integrating
economics with other social and humanistic sciences in defining a
paradigm which best addresses the needs and aspirations of society
and of its people. The common theme that permeates the different
papers in this volume is that a meaningful private enterprise system
needs to take into consideration society's social interests, people's
desire for a life in dignity and freedom, and the interrelationship be-
tween ethics, law, government, and public policy, integrating economic
principles with concepts of order and justice. This mandates, in es-
sence, a socioeconomic system which offers people as much freedom
and self-determination as feasible, satisfies as many of their needs
and wants as possible, and safeguards for future generations condi-
tions for a high quality of life. In this context, competition needs to
take place within a framework of ethical economic behavior, of social
and economic justice, of human dignity and decency, and of commu-
nity and solidarity.

ISBN: 1-883199-04-2

/V^2&

+ZP 1637 995 33

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Marc J. LaFountain
editor

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STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Volume XXXIII November 1995

by

Marc J. LaFountain
(Volume Editor)

Volume 33 of
W(?sf Georgia College Studies In The Social Sciences
n Francis P. Conner (Series Editor)

j^ Copyright @ 1995 by:

Y West Georgia College

I Carrollton,GA 30118

e ISBN: 1-883199-04-2

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

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Acknowledgements

V

Contributors

vi

[ntroduction: Predicaments of Ethics in
Postmodernity

^arc J. LaFountain ..

1

:thics as Excess: Toward a "Postmodern"

Approach to Social Ethics
'arl L. Bankston III

13

le Politics of Ecstacy: Postmodernity Ethics

and Native American Culture in Oliver Stone's
1 he Doors and Natural Born Killers

iristopher Wise

41

m

Destiny Without Destination(?): Un Coeur en

Hiver, The Double Life of Veronique, and the
Question of Postmodern Ethics

Marc]. LaFountain

69

New Directions in Crime, Law, and Social
Change: On Psychoanalytic Semiotics,
Chaos Theory, and Postmodern Ethics

Bruce A. Arrigo

101

Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World:

Cognition, Consciousness, and Contact
Tobin Hart

131

Communication, Postmodernism, and

Postmodern Ethics in Communication
MarkG. R. McManus

259

IV

nck4\yCii/teA^ce4i\ye4\X4

I would like to thank Pick Conner, who has unselfishly served as
Series Editor of this journal for many years, for the support and the
freedom he has given me to pursue and develop this project. In the
publishing world, this is no small freedom. This is the last volume
he will oversee, and the progress West Georgia College Studies in the
Social Sciences has realized owes much to his dedication and forti-
tude. Dean Richard Miller of the School of Arts and Sciences is to be
commended for pledging to continue the commitment to make VSlest
Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences a project the College com-
munity will be proud to call its own. My gratitude to Kareen Malone, ;'
Bruce DiChristina, and Ted Simons for reviewing manuscripts. A
very special thank you to Christopher Wise, and a most special thank
you to Sheila LaFountain, for encouragement, advice, and care.

I The cover: Thank you Joan Kropf, Curator, and The Salvador
pali Museum, for permission to reproduce Dali's image. The Broken
Bridge and the Dream (1945), Oil on canvas (26 1 /4 x 34 3/ 16 inches),
Zollection of Mr. & Mrs. A. Reynolds Morse on loan to The Salvador
Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, Copyright 1995 Salvador Dali
vluseum. Inc.

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Bruce A. Arrigo received his PhD from Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity in 1993 and is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duquesne
University. He has authored some twenty-five monographs, articles,
and book chapters. Among the topics explored in his work are criti-
cal criminology, social theory, homelessness, feminist jurisprudence,
law and mental illness, punishment, and social justice. His most
recent book is The Contours of Psychiatric justice (1995).

Carl L. Bankston III is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the
University of Southwestern Louisiana where he teaches social theory,
cross-cultural sociology, and the sociology of immigration. His work
has appeared in International Migration Review, Sociology of Edu-
cation, Sociological Quarterly, Humanity & Society, Knowledge and
Policy, Deviant Behavior, and others. He is co-editor, with Wesley
Shrum and D. Stephen Voss, of Science, Technology, and Society in the
Third World: An Annotated Bibliography.

Tobin Hart is Assistant Professor of Psychology at West Georgia
College where he offers courses in the study of consciousness, hu-
man development and psychotherapy. His background includes
clinical, educational and transpersonal studies. An ongoing curios-
ity and research project is the experience of inspiration. As expressed
in his essay in this volume, issues of ethics, choice and cognition
relate to the event of inspiration and find particular complexity in a
postmodernist view.

VI

Marc J. LaFountain is Professor of Sociology at West Georgia
College where he teaches courses on critical and postmodern theory,
phenomenological sociology, visual sociology, environment, and art.
His current interests focus on the body, the erotic, art, and ethics.
His book. This is Not an Essence: Dali and Postmodernism, is being
published by SUNY Press.

Mark G. R. McManus is Librarian Associate Professor and Asso-
ciate Director of Libraries, West Georgia College. He has worked in
academic institutions in Georgia, Alabama, and Virginia. His cur-
rent research interests include physical and cultural packaging of
information and the rhetoric of social movements.

Christopher Wise is Assistant Professor of English at West Geor-
gia College. His areas of specialization include Third World Litera-
ture/Postcolonial Studies, Literary Theory and Criticism, and Film.
Wise is presently writing a book on the postcolonial African novel.

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And it is there - right in the depths of the human crucible, in this paradoxical
region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other ren-
ders to all things the lost colors of the times of ancient suns, where however,
loneliness rages..}

Some Predicaments of Ethics in

Postmodernity - Introduction

r

Marc]. LaFountain

In the 1920-30's Andre Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism sparkled
magically in the wake not only of Dada, but in that of what Robert
Nisbet called, in Sociology as an Art Form, the "rust" of fin-de-siecle
modernism. That rust, however, was only a prelude to what Adorno
later, and Lyotard even later, called "Auschwitz," a prophetic name
marking the time after which modernity would never again be viewed
with the same positive regard that animated the philosophes of the
Enlightenment. In a sense then that bridge to the future, constructed
of notions like progress, evolution, liberal individualism, industrial-
ism, the market, and instrumental reason, began to exhibit any num-
ber of infirmities. It appeared that at the turn of the 20th century
Toennies, Simmel, Durkheim, Weber and others' visions of the de-
mise of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were coming to pass. The
derangement of the senses Rimbaud advocated as a tactic for per-
sonal transformation seemed to be transpiring, at the communal and
societal levels, as an unwanted and unstoppable consequence of rap-
idly accelerating cultural differentiation.

Breton proposed surrealist praxis as an antidote to the latter, and
other, dissociations and discontents of modernity. Drawing upon vari-
ous esoteric and hermetic traditions, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and aspects
of contemporaneous poetry and art, Breton fashioned a bridge over
and through the morass. This bridge - named differently a conduct-
ing wire, a tissu capillaire, a communicating vessel, an ascendant sign,
a dialectical lever - would make it possible for individuals to over-
come the personal and collective failure of imagination and creative
action engendered by modernity and thereby surmount all contradic-

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2 Mrtrr. /. LaFouniain: Some Predicaments of Ethics in Postmodernity - Introduction

tions. In particular Breton argued that the mind's "savage eye" still
retains an eidetic image of a time when individuals were not frag-
mented and community served to secure their wholeness. Primitives
and children naturally understand this "state of grace".- Near the
end of Nadja, and in Mad Love and Arcane 1 7, he maintained it also
arises in true love, which "restores to all things the lost colors of the
time of the ancient suns". It is also possible to make oneself available
to the irruption of this emancipatory experience via surrealist prac-
tice. The performance of such practice was what Breton offered in
service of various social and political revolutions during his time. For
him, surrealism, more than just art, was a means to restore and in-
vigorate subjective and communal agency and well-being.

What Breton envisioned was nothing less than a reconstruction of
Ariadne's thread and the renewal of the moral autonomy of the indi-
vidual and the collective. A romantic optimist, at the very least, Breton
recognized this lovely vision, this point supreme, would be ever so dif-
ficult to attain, and impossible to sustain for any period of time. None-
theless it was a message of hope. When Dali finished The Broken Bridge
and the Dream in 1945, the possibilities for creating the bridge, a
simulacrum for both emancipatory transcendence and community,
seemed ever so slight. Popular interpretation has it that Dali, certainly
by 1945, had long given up on Surrealism in favor of his own selfish
and eccentric pursuits. The rupture of the bridge then would signify
both his break with Breton, who had excommunicated him from the
Surrealist movement in the late 1930s, and the specter of narcissistic,
alienated, and excessive individualism chronicled by Heidegger,
Sartre, Horkheimer and Adorno, and others of the period. It was clear
to many that the subjectivization and disenchantment of the world
predicted by the great social theorists of the later 1800s were engulf-
ing Western culture and were rapidly being spread about the globe.
Indeed indigenous communities were everywhere showing signs of
rift and rust.

The Broken Bridge and the Dream lends itself well to this scenario.
The dream, for the Surrealists and modernists alike, insinuates growth,
progress, metamorphosis and deliverance. For those not tied to
Eurocentric world views, it suggests the unity of humans with nature
and the gods, the sense of infinity and the sacredness of familial and
communal life, eulogized so eloquently in Herzog and Tamahori's
respective films, WJtere the Green Ants Dream and Once Were Warriors.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 3

For the dream is the sign of the future made in the image of the cre-
ative agent (whether individual or group) securely situated in the
habitus of a meaningful history and society. But something has hap-
pened to this dream. No one is quite sure yet if it is a nightmare or an
illusion. Or if it is now no longer possible to either dream or to build
any bridge to any future, or even to a past. Or if the disappearance of
the bridge is just a fleeting moment of rupture, and in the next frame,
it will reappear, as it does in the Hegelian vision which undergirds
the social thought of both Herbert Spencer and Marx.

What is in question though is not the dream itself, but the very
bridge by which the future is lived as the flesh and texture of history,
community and intersubjective daily life. While "we" - a terribly per-
plexing notion for late modernist and postmodernist thinkers - try to
figure out now what and where the bridge is, and where or even if it
goes anywhere, "we" also stand alone, we bump into each other, em-
brace each other, and we find ourselves in curious and awkward alli-
ances. There seem to be communities here, some based on the amo-
rous and erotic intimacy recounted by Maguerite Duras, some on con-
flict, some on the emotional contagion Gustave Le Bon described, some
on the simple juxtaposition of individuals who may have nothing in
common but their fate or juxtaposition, what Alphonso Lingis sug-
gests, in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, is the
community of the dying. It is difficult to tell if these individuals are
passionate or indifferent or stoic or ecstatic. It is difficult to discern if
their juxtaposition implies integration and community, or if, in Breton's
words, there is a magnetic field which embraces them.

The elastic grid of dialectical conjunction has been questioned by
writers such as Deleuze and Foucault, who speak of disjunctive con-
junctions and multiple grids. Christopher Wise's essay (this volume)
contests the latter notion that disjunction has displaced dialectical con-
junction by offering a refigured utopic vision of liberatory practices
which promise community and ethics. Mark McManus (this volume)
interprets this elastic grid as a molten center, which, not unlike Lacan's
Other which Bruce Arrigo (this volume) discusses, incessantly desta-
bilizes itself in favor of continued renewals.

We note in Dali's image that a number of individuals and groups
are on the stairs and under the bridge. Still others, perhaps already
over the bridge, or not yet near its elevating stairs, linger in the fore-
ground. And still others, in the background, either approach the bridge,
or have already gone across what there is of it to traverse. Or perhaps

Marc. J. LaFountain: Some Predicaments of Ethics in Postmodernity - Introduction

1

they are simply somewhere else? These others, in the distance, seem
to move in all directions, belying the notion of the common move-
ment of either an idiosyncratic or global community. At the precipice
of the bridge is what appears to be a heroic figure on a horseback.
This individual may be some charismatic leader, or some symbol of a
polls, who will lead the way across the bridge, thus recreating and
creating some set of resources for others. Or perhaps this individual
is Liberalism's Individual? or Nietzsche's ubermensch? or Blanchot's
"last man" who simply is on his or her own? Or maybe it is The Horse-
man of Death, a figure appearing in one of Dali's paintings in 1935,
who has arrived to say there is no longer a bridge, or that the dream is
only humanity's melancholic hangover which de Chirico also had
glimpsed before he retreated to the womb of classicism? On the
"other" side of the bridge another figure on horse moves without
discernable direction or intent. Those on the stairs, if at all they are
cognizant of what lies in their future, at the precipice or on the other
sides, seem exuberant and appear to move with abandon. At the bot-
tom of the stairs, two figures embrace, perhaps a farewell to solidar-
i ity, or maybe in a pact (not) to face the future. One in the middle of the

^ stairs either backs away from or into the future.

^ Who are these various individuals and communities scattered about

t the dream and the bridge? Are they the throngs of feminists who

e now assail each others' politics and aesthetics rather than those of

r "the male"? Are they the factious generations of "Blacks" suppos-

a edly united by the Pan-Africanism of Garvey, the Afrocentrism of

Y Asante or the ANC? Are they Inuits or Chipkos or Nebraskans or

Cherokees? Are they the various "natives" or the "whole man" of
Fanon and Cesaire's "Negritude" or those whom Kwame Anthony
Appiah has tried to gather in a "nationalist" project? Are they the
"subalterns" of the world about whose ability to speak Gayatri
f Chakravorty Sprivak wonders? Are they Sufis, Shi'ites, Bahai's,

^ Sunnis, Zoroastrians, Jews? And when all of these groups, aside from

3 their own intracommunal differences, are juxtaposed to countless oth-

9 ers, each with its own subjectivities and narratives, where the hybrid-

t ity and impurity Salman Rushdie described reign, what then of "the"

t bridge and "the" dream?

Acknowledging the demise of the bridge and the dream, Mark
McManus, resuscitating Kenneth Burke's work on communication,
attempts to salvage the possibility of community and ethics when such
dissimilarities irrupt. The essays of LaFountain (this volume) and Wise

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 5

suggest quite different communities and ethics that might arise in these
encounters. Whereas McManus and Wise revitalize strains of mod-
ernist thought to secure ethics and community, Bankston (this vol-
ume) and LaFountain ponder the vitality of the unavowable, inop-
erative community explored by Bataille, Blanchot, and Jean-Luc
Nfancy.^

In considering the realities subsumed by the "postcolonial" men-
tality, Anne McClintock suggests that the "angel of progress" has
wrecked, and in order to creatively intervene in what is unacceptable,
what "we" need is theories that do not harness singularities to singu-
lar visions of history and memory.^ For the modernist there is the
Incorrigible tendency to fear proliferation, thus the interest in Law
(whether of Nature, Evolution, the Market, Science, Progress). Bruce
Arrigo, drawing upon Lacan's psychoanalytic semiotics and chaos
theory, seeks ways by which Law may be loosened to permit and re-
spect a profusion of difference. Law, a name for the overdetermination
of agreement, is a tangle of convictions that, like the library of knowl-
edge in The Name of the Rose, go everywhere, yet are guided by prece-
dent. When the sources of precedent are revealed, and the singularities
they contain are released, "we" may well witness scenes similar to
that of Dali's painting. Arrigo tackles the complex issue of envision-
ing chaotic communities held together by law which is unstable and
not totalizing.

What does all this say of postmodemity and more particularly here,
of ethics? Perhaps this is a misplaced question, which better framed,
would ask about modernity, individuality and community? We al-
ready know modernity's answers though. They come in the form of
any number of structural configurations, among them liberal, social-
ist, and conservative capitalism, socialism, communism, a blossom-
ing variety of fascisms and nationalisms, imperialism, colonialism,
guerillaism, and terrorism, which are supplemented by the Natoization
of the New World Order, undeclared, "peace-keeping war," and tacti-
:al, covert, "secret state" operations. Under the weight of the latter
ormations, matched, if not outstripped by the speed of the multipli-
:ation of difference at the global level, the possibility of any dialecti-
:al process to stitch them together seems suspect. Without a (re)tuming
0 some form of idealism or totalitarianism where raw power forces
imilarity, it seems that there is little more than a profusion of an-
swers. These answers are scattered about, as are the figures in Dali's

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6 Marc. J. LaFountain: Some Predicaments of Ethics in Postmodernity - Introduction

painting, and the promise of some Utopia, or even more modestly,
some moment of recompense and rest, seems unlikely.

As differences open among and within relationships, groups, com-
munities, tribes, and cultures, and as more and more of these differ-
ences produce a surplus of particulars and singularities, the notion of
communities and ethics becomes most problematic. For ethics depend
upon and mark out communities. They are constituents of the tissue
that grows community. The simple juxtaposition of individuals does
not insure or even imply the existence of community, let alone caring
or responsibility for others. Or, if it does, "we" must accustom our-
selves to what that means. To design in advance a diverse community
and /or to learn to live with immanent and contingent community
demands a patient embracing of the difference between the event of
ethnos/ethos and what falls out of the event that "we" then live with
both radiantly and in affliction. Now "we" must endure the impossi-
bility of difference instituted by difference itself. For the modernist
subject who stakes his or her sense of community on an active, pro-
ductive, sufficient sense of subjectivity and agency, this is a most cruel
and ironic condition. Ethics become horribly unruly in these spaces.
Postmodernity is one name for this space and event, and it exceeds
the anomic modernity that worried Durkheim.

Modernity's objective and hope, hke that of probably all premodem
peoples and societies, was to dream the happy dream. Because, how-
ever, the bridge is broken and the dream's fate somehow seems im-
plicated in that rupture, it cannot be assumed that these individuals
are lost, that their lives are meaningless, that there is no sense of com-
munity or ethos in their midst. Where and what those meanings are
and how that community can be understood though are indeed diffi-
cult to figure. Contrary to the nihilism, pessimism, and cynicism typi-
cally attributed to postmodernist thought, I suggest it confronts us
anew with the enigma, irony and vexation, indeed the very impossi-
bility of figuring the unfigurable. Postmodernist thought does not,
however, simply free us from these difficulties. For as Bataille sug-
gests in Inner Experience, we struggle to establish the essence of oui
identity and being in community and exchange, but our essence is
impossible. To arrive at this essence, however, requires that wc
"emerge through the project from the realm of the project".^ At
Bankston observes, ethics now seem to imply transgressiveness. Whei
this is not understood properly, we find in America, for instance, tha
Disneyworld, The Superbowl, and Madison Avenue are perhaps as

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 7

much a problem as are drugs, violence, and sex: they are all perver-
sions of the "sacred" exchanges between self and non-self that pro-
mote ethics. In a related but quite different manner, Tobin Hart (this
volume) cautiously approaches this notion by appealing to an experi-
ence of the transpersonal whose deconstructive force in many ways
promotes a similar posture of exchange between what can be ratio-
nally constructed and what is beyond that reach.

In articulating the necessity and impossibility of identity and com-
munity, Bataille offered that the human "... is a particle inserted in
unstable and tangled groups" (IE, p. 84). He further suggests that only
the instability of relations permits the illusion of a being which is iso-
lated and which exists without exchange. "Being is always a group of
particles whose relative autonomies are maintained. These two prin-
:iples - constitution transcending the constituent parts, relative au-
tonomy of the constituents parts - orders the existence of each "be-
ing" (IE, p. 85). In Bataille's view the transcendence of singularity and
the resistance of singularity to transcendence are impossible to know
3r identify as a unity. Yet "we" must try to find a way. Postmodernity
may be taken as the event of that futile but obligatory attempt. The
strange "communities" that will arise in these efforts require suppli-
cation and patience, courage and fear of courage, an affirmation of
passion, and a willingness to not know how they can be created until
the event of their presence has already passed and "we" have only a
trace of what they were to tell us what they are. Herein postmodern
ethics, contrary to modernist ethics which tend to prefigure the event,
can be discussed.

Notions of movement, abandonment, perturbation, dislocation, hy-
peractivity, passing, and the like conspire with other notions such as
blindness, ignorance, contextlessness, and the like to produce a sense
3f eventfulness rather than situatedness. Such considerations make
Dther notions, such as subjectivity, agency and practice, highly prob-
ematic. Feminist theorists have been particularly sensitive to the lat-
:er, especially as they bear on considerations of the meanings of lo-
:ale and subjectivity. Issues associated with standpoint, or lack thereof,
lave given many theorists a means by which to critique and subvert
I variety of constructions of woman. Feminists, like other critical theo-
ists, acknowledge that living without location or identity can be both
)eneficial and pernicious. As any questions of ethics necessarily im-
)ly a notion of community and polis, positionality and locale become
mportant.

Marc. J. LnFoiiutain: Some Predicaments of Ethics in Postmodernity - Introduction

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Returning to Bataille's views of instability and constitution as a
point of departure, feminists such as Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, and
MacKinnon have labored to find undecidable and /or destabilized
identity a beneficial condition. Agreeing perhaps more with Derrida
than with Lacan, many poststructuralist or postmodernist feminists
noted a strain among some feminists toward an essentializing of
"woman," and like Derrida (though not necessarily agreeing with his
politics), promoted the dream and desire for "innumerable ... [and] ...
incalculable choreographies"*' which would multiply difference. Iris
Young and Jane Flax's views that feminist practice should contribute
to the unstable and disorderly nature of reality flows from these views.
Donna Harraway's "cyborg" is one of the most well known celebra-
tions of the latter. A subject-in-process is apparent in such formula-
tions, and its absconding disposition renders it capable of avoiding
being located too easily. As Paul Virilio observed in War and Cinema
and The Aesthetics of Disappearance, taking up indeterminate positions
foils the ocular machinery that fixes and thus destroys identity. It can
be argued such feminist practices are a reversal or rejection of the war
games of representation, a point advanced in Judith Butler's notion
of gender as a contestable performance producing a field of
undesignatable differences.

Others have argued, however, that much of the
abandonment-of-identity thinking stems from male writers who, hav-
ing historically enjoyed a sense of identity and place, now find it stra-
tegically exciting and worthwhile to live without identity and con-
text. Among those highly resistant to the latter would be the cluster of
feminists characterized by both Alice Echols and Hester Eisenstein as
"cultural feminists". Writers such as Alcoff, Bordo and Probyn sug-
gest that a sense of body and positionality are crucial to ethics and
justice. Locale for such thinkers is not so much associated with fixity
and identity, but with agency and the possibility of resistance, with a
perspective on shifting practices and counter-practices, a view evi-
dent in the works of Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and Ynestra
King. Suspicious of what Bordo named the "gender-scepticism" of
postmodernists, Smith-Rosenberg's notion of the trickster, for instance,
would be countered by Dorothy Smith, Patricia Williams, Seyla
Benhabib or Nancy Eraser's concerns that there be a standpoint from
which to counter fragmentation and the momentary politics of time
and place. Who, LaFountain wonders in his essay, could Camille or
Veronique be for these various writers?

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 9

There is nothing about the name postmodernity that suggests that
modernity is over or even that postmodernity has replaced it. Rather
to use this name is to suggest that something compelling has irrupted
and now stands in the vicinity of modernity. This something seems to
be quite other than modernity, yet its enigmatic and paradoxical con-
nections are complicit and insidiously complicated. To clearly demar-
cate them is impossible. Rather than dedicate space and energy to a
rehearsal of the differences between modernism and postmodernism,
the focus here is on "postmodern ethics". The latter does include re-
sponses to the postmodern "situation" from a modernist standpoint,
that is, modernist ethical stances applied to postmodern issues. Yet
the thinking and writing of postmodern ethics also requires attention
to what can be named "postmodern" ethics. As the essays here
struggle to demonstrate, modernist and postmodernist ethics are not j f

one and the same. . ^;.

Now we are surprised when we do understand each other rather
than when we do not. We are also surprised now when "we" even
question if "we" really do understand each other when we have sim-
ply assumed we do. The latter may well be signs of postmodernity.
This incredulity at mutual understanding is a reversal of modernity's
assumption that as knowledge grew, so would mutual understand-
ing. (The latter is well exemplified by the celebrated debate between
Habermas and Gadamer who, despite their differences, have tried to
reconstruct self and interpersonal understanding in the wake of
modernity's ravages). The incredulity at mutual understanding, for
sociology, of course, is a cruel twist. For, as Lemert has suggested in
Sociology After the Crisis, sociologists have always posited mutual un-
derstanding as the bedrock of all professional and "practical" sociolo-
gies. That this ground is a question at all cannot be ignored, and the
question will not disappear by simply reasserting a ground.

The current tendency to celebrate the subjectivities and narratives
of indigenous tribes, groups, communities, etc everywhere often is
supported by appeal to Lyotard's notion of the petit recits which have
flourished after the demise of the grand narratives of modernity. What
is too often not considered though is that in The Dijferend he high-
lighted another condition associated with postmodernity. That con-
dition is that often when individuals or groups communicate, they
assume they understand each other until a difficult situation arises,
2.g., a question about what is ethical or just, when they are confronted
^vith the utter undecidability of a means of settling what is in dispute.

I

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It can be said that such situations have always arisen among and be-
tween peoples. It perhaps also can be said of postmodernity that it is
a scene where a profusion of undecidables multiplies. If postmodernity
is a preponderance of the heterogenous and the different, then the
decidability or sense of community, and ethics, is at stake. The prob-
lem, however, is not to say there are no communities or ethics, but
rather, to ask what sort of community can there be in the face of exor-
bitant difference. Is there only, as Nancy and Lingis suggest, our im-
pending death that binds us? Perhaps this was a subject of discussion
near The Broken Bridge and the Dream?

To contemplate questions of ethics requires attention to questions
of how notions of agency and subjectivity, proximity and relation-
ship, and meaning and reality can be constructed. While crucial to
any possible ethos, constructing the latter does not per se generate
ethos. For ethos is more than just the how and the substance of the
construction. It is a sensitivity and dispensation, a benediction, which
embraces and without whose embrace anything can happen even
within a domain of mutual understanding. With ethos, of course, arise
issues of justice. Justice itself is a dispensation of ethos, and as we
witness almost daily, can rip apart ethos. Arrigo's essay critiques the
sense of ethos that travels with modernity's versions of criminal Law.

If then postmodernity is a scene where the ethical ground that trans-
forms the proximity and juxtaposition of individuals into communi-
ties by making them meaningful and coherent is in question, if not in
utter disarray, what is to be done? Play with pieces, as some who
miss his critical edge like to think Baudrillard advocates? In lost times
the matter was not so difficult. It was taken care of by the gods, who
Durkheim, Bataille, and others recognized as nothing less than the
community sanctifying its own moral authority. If the gods have dis-
appeared or died, rather than just having turned their backs, as sug-
gested in Exodus, what is the fate of community? Tobin Hart's re-
sponse to this question suggests that postmodernist thought, to be
ethically viable, must acknowledge transpersonal experience as a con-
stituent of revitalized moral authority. Not one inclined to defend
modernity's version of ethics, he even maintains that the practice of
deconstruction sustains transpersonal experience which carries with
it an ethical demand. Hart draws on the traditions of Eastern and
Western holistic psychologies, rather than on Levinas, as is common
for many postmodernists, to argue for an experiential-epistemic ori-
entation that doubles as ethical responsibility.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 11

Addressing the issue of postmodern sociality in light of what it
means for ethics and for critical sociology, Zygmunt Bauman suggests,
in Postmodern Ethics, that postmodernity is a time in which the moral-
ization of social life may be enhanced. He suggests that postmodernity
does not mean abandoning modernist ethical concerns (e.g., human
rights, social justice), but it does mean rejecting modernity's means
for dealing with those moral issues. Arrigo, Hart and Bankston
squarely reject modernity's solutions. Hart's reliance on the teach-
ings of holistic psychology and Bankston' s interest in Bataille's sense
of the sacred, while as dramatically different as cognition and
non-sauoir, nonetheless point in a parallel direction. For each leans on
a sense of proximity and /or exchange, and articulates, each in his
own fashion, a sense of the eventfulness of the unavowable commu-
nity discussed in LaFountain's essay.

Bauman's Postmodern Ethics is perhaps the first major sustained j ^;,

reflection on postmodern ethics put forward by a sociologist. Sug-
gesting that postmodernity, though bleak, is an occasion for a renewal
of community and moral action, it can be contrasted with John
O'Neill's recent The Poverty of Postmodernism. O'Neill maintains that
postmodernism is giddy, conceitedly bankrupt, and offers little but a
distraction to moral decency. The essays in this volume take into ac-
count issues raised by both authors, but dedicate themselves to nei-
ther. For like modernity, postmodernity is multifaceted and cannot be
placed in a neat economy. The tasks of the authors in this volume is
thus to confront the problem of thinking about ethics in postmodernity.
Such thinking does not center on democracy or socialism or other
types of sociopolitical organization, but on issues of communion, car-
ing, and responsibility. Modernity has already shown the ways it has
promised and eroded the latter. Postmodern thinking arises in this
commotion.

The essays in this volume are not committed to an exclusive con-
cern with the periodization or the philosophical status of
postmodernism. Recognizing that both historical factors and philo-
sophical issues are entwined, they acknowledge that aspects of ultra-
modern, hyperreal society are as important as are philosophical no-
tions found in the works of thinkers from Buddha to Plotinus to
Nietzsche. It is obvious, as Drucilla Cornell, Jameson, and Baudrillard
have pointed out, that hegemonic codes of imperial power have pro-
foundly influenced social existence. To focus exclusively on advanced

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Marc. }. LaFountain: Some Predicaments of Ethics in Postmodernity - Introduction

industrial society, mass consumption or patriarchal legalism though
is to risk proposing a totalizing critique to a supposedly totalizing
problem. The essays presented here thus are varied in their positive
and negative appraisals of both modernity and postmodernity and
each is guided by an effort to discern what "postmodern ethics" and/
or "ethics" in postmodernity might mean or signify.

References

' Andre Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987), p. 8.

'Andre Breton, Point du jour (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), p. 250.

^For instance, see Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris
(Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988) and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Com-
munity, trans. Peter Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland, and S. Sawhney (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

* Anne McClintock, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Tost-colonialism,' in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, eds. Patrick Williams and L. Chrisman
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

^Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York, 1988), p. 46. Henceforth cited as IE.

^Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, "Choreographies," Diacritics, 12:2 (1982),
pp. 66-76.

Ethics as Excess: Toward a
''Postmodern'' Approach to Social
Ethics

hy

Carl L. Bankston III

This essay attempts to look at the primary strains of modernist
thinking on ethics by discussing three classical thinkers who, it is ar-
gued, embody fundamental tendencies in modernist ethics. Hobbes
saw ethics in human behavior in terms of two forms of Nature, the
State of Nature and Natural Reason. Ethical development, for Hobbes
and his intellectual descendants, is a matter of the repression of the
State of Nature by Natural Reason. Locke understood human nature
as the product of external forces, but maintained the existence of ab-
solute moral notions. In this view, ethics do not exist in human be-
ings, but through experience humans somehow develop ethical stan-
dards that conform to pre-existing eternal patterns. In the writings of
Rousseau, we can find a "true self" in which ethical principles reside.
The ethical development of human beings consists of the rediscovery
of this "true self," which provides an ultimate code by which the world
may be judged.

The essay suggests that one solution to the problem of finding a
"postmodern" ethics as an alternative to the centered, universal, posi-
tivistic principles of modernism, may be found in a reading of Georges
Bataille's ideas on excess and waste as wellsprings of human behav-
ior. These ideas provide a basis for understanding ethical codes as
emergent structures.

Beyond this, the essay argues that the approach to ethics suggested
3y Bataille's work can serve as a strategy for radical liberation, since
it can be used to negate external and objective normative patterns
imposed on self and others. Being aware of the provisional nature of
normative structures can help us to approach the emptiness, or de-
sire, that produces these normative structures. This can help to sub-
v^ert the closed, subject-object dualism of rationalist ethics in favor of
an ethics (or anti-ethics) of sustained negation and openness.

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Introduction: Postmodernism and the Problem of Ethics

Since roughly the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, Western so-
cial thought has been based on an image of "modem man" as a uni-
tary, atomistic, and definable self operating through rationality in a
world of objects that behave according to universal and deterministic
rules^ This image developed from the Aristotelian tradition of West-
ern European rationalism as modern capitalism began to take its clas-
sical form in Western Europe, and we may see this image of the self in
the cosmos as an expression of the social relations embedded in mod-
ern capitalism, since as Durkheim and Mauss argued^ the logical re-
lations expressed by a society are social relations "extended to the
universe."

Domination, of objects and of other selves interpreted as objects, is
essential to the modern image of the rational self. "Implicit in the no-
tion of the rational individual is the idea of domination. To be rational
is to exercise control, to effect, to produce" \ A knowing subject dis-
solves itself into a smooth, hegemonic center from which all entities
outside the subject radiate according to the rules of the eternal, that is,
according to the instrumentalities of control. The epistemology de-
duced from the modern image of the self is a matter of discovering
the Laws of Nature, the cosmic mechanics of control. The system of
ethics deduced from this image is a matter of discovering the Natural
Law, the universal rules of behavior that are imposed from the infi-
nite center (i.e., the realm of the pure subject) upon the objects in the
social world.

Classical capitalism reached its peak from the late nineteenth
through the first half of the twentieth centuries. The static, hierarchi-
cal perspective that developed along with classical ("factory") capi-
talism and was projected by it onto the physical and social environ-
ments was appropriate both to hierarchical relations within the
nation-state and to hierarchical relations among nation-states. Since
the mid-twentieth century, though, while factories and their patterns
of social relations have not disappeared, they have increasingly come
under challenge from new permutations of capitalism. The "repres-
sive desublimation" of the consumerist society that has grown out of
increasing surplus production^ has created a multiplicity of desires in
place of the unitary asceticism of investment, production, and invest-
ment. The corresponding technological sophistication of an
information-based economy is, at the same time, unintentionally chal-

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 15

lenging the older, modernist pattern of unified perspectival control
(DPC p. 12).

Changes in economy and technology create uncertainty and pro-
duce the preconditions for an alternative to the paradigm of classical,
modernist social relations. Earlier in the century, challenges to the ra-
tionalization of social relations began to appear in forms of human
endeavor that were heir to the historical tradition of the arts, in such
practices as Dada^ and Surrealism^ "Postmodernism" is in some ways
a successor to these practices, since the term has come to be used to
describe a set of intellectual predispositions based on the search for
"the abandonment of a center, privileged reference points, fixed sub-
jects, first principles, and an origin" (DP, p. 20). In place of the mod-
ern rational, unitary self dominating a coherent world of discover-
able, systematic certainties, the postmodern perspective posits a self
emerging from a confluence of diverse experiences, arbitrary forms
of social relations, and systems of communication."

By making possible the perception of an alternative to modernist
rationality, these economic and technological changes have also made
possible the perception of some of the destructive effects of instru-
mental modernism. Within the realm of social relations, dominating
rationality has been seen as leading to brutal and exploitative rela-
tions among social actors (DPC; FRK). In the physical environment, it
has been seen as a source of degradation and destruction.^

Thinkers associated with the postmodern program have generally
concerned themselves primarily with issues related to epistemology
with how social relations produce ways of knowing. The goal of this
essay is focus on ethics, on the ideas that humans have about how
they ought to behave. It attempts to look at the primary strains of
modernist thinking on ethics by discussing three classical thinkers
who, it is argued, embody fundamental tendencies in modernist eth-
ics. Then, it will argue that one solution to the problem of finding a
postmodern" ethics as an alternative to the centered, universal, posi-
tivistic principles of modernism, may be found in a reading of Georges
Bataille's ideas on excess and waste as wellsprings of human behav-
ior.

I. Hobbes: Social Ethics as Tutelary Repression

Writing in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes was an ethical
modernist in his emphasis on individual interests, in his belief in a

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universal moral order beyond those interests, and in his faith in con-
tract and convention as means of reshaping individual interests in
accordance with the moral order. It is too easy to look back at Hobbes
from our historical distance and misinterpret him as arguing, along
the lines of Foucault, that the principles underlying social relations
are expressions of competing power relations. Hobbes did see the at-
tempt to exercise power, at an individual level, as one of the elements
in the production of a social order. Since every individual attempts to
maximize self-interest, all individuals, ceteris paribus, engage in unre-
stricted competition. "During the time men live without a common
Power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called
Warre," a war "of every man against every man.""*

The pursuit of self-interest is for Hobbes, though, only part of the
story, and Hobbes was not the radical individualist that exclusive at-
tention to this part of the story would suggest. For Hobbes posited, in
addition to the anarchic "State of Nature," a pre-existing and abso-
lute "Natural Reason," the realization of which provides a transition
from anarchy to an ethical and orderly social existence. As Wrong^"
has pointed out, it is questionable whether individuals have interests
apart from those created by social ties, since even the striving for sta-
tus, property, or control over other humans necessarily involves a
shared valuation of status, property, or control. Even a "game theo-
retic" interpretation of Hobbes" (see Hampton, 1986, for a discussion
of approaches to Hobbes in terms of the Prisoner's Dilemma game)
must take into account some underlying means of creating game rules
and goals. Individuals can always simply refuse to participate in so-
cial processes (PO, p. 56); the game must be set up, in other words,
before they can play it, so that particular games cannot simply emerge
from compromise on rational self-interests^-.

Like a true modernist, Hobbes saw virtue among humans as a mat-
ter of the gradual realization of Reason out of passion. Hobbes' fa-
mous state of nature, R.E. Ewin has argued^\ was not so much a an
actual pre-social condition as it was a heuristic concept. The state of
nature is the state in which humans give full reign to their natural
passions, and the more humans are controlled by their natural pas-
sions, the closer they come to a complete state of nature, although this
state is probably never perfectly realized, as families and other pat-
terns of obligations and cooperation never completely disappear (VR,
pp. 123-124).

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 17

Why should humans establish social contracts? Surely those who
are in a Hobbesian state of nature, that is, under the sway of irrational
passions, are unsuited to compromises leading to the fearful creation
of contractarian obligations. Rather, social cooperation was seen by
Hobbes as an ongoing means and product of ethical tutelage. Human
beings "play the game" of society, we might say, because a set of rules
exist prior to any particular playing (GL, p. 68). Hobbes saw these
rules as "laws of nature." "Laws of nature prescribe, among other
things, that people be grateful, sociable, forgiving, and not vengeful,
hateful, or proud. "^'*

In the process of dealing with other humans, in this interpretation
of Hobbes, people become rational and therefore virtuous: they do
not create relativistic virtues out of selfish striving. In contemporary
sociological terms, we might say that social ethics are produced by
normative socialization, but the socialization is a matter of the culti-
vation of a universal pattern for social interaction, rather than a mat-
ter of the inculcation of arbitrary values. Reason represses passion;
the Laws of Nature repress the State of Nature.

Psychological repression and political repression in this moral phi-
losophy are parallel clauses in the social contract. Humans do not
establish a social contract because they automatically see it is in their
interest to do so. Being part of a regulated (that is, "ruled") social
order (covenant) means that they cultivate the habit of reason, take
on a character different from that of people in the passion-guided state
of nature, and behave in accordance with the social contract. Thus,
Hobbes portrayed justice as carrying out contractual obligations and
injustice as the violation of contractual obligations, as disrupting an
order that is moral because it is rational and rational because it is
moral (L, p. 202).

Because the repression in this movement from the State of Nature
to the Laws of Nature is psychological, ethics in the writings of Hobbes
hearken back to the original, Greek sense of the word ethos: character.
Becoming a just and rational person (a "civilized" person, as the nine-
teenth century would have it) meant more than simply acting in a just
manner; it meant developing a character that led one to desire justice,
in the sense of fulfillment of social contractual obligations (SMV, p.
112). The rule of reason is the rule of the sovereign. The former is the
internal means of preventing the passions from erupting into the or-
derly working of character, and the latter is the external means of

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Carl L. Bankston HI: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

preventing the passions from erupting into the orderly working of
social relations.

This Hobbesian repressive dualism has continued to run through
the thinking of a large segment of modernist social theory, but it may
be most clearly identified in the classical Freudian model of humans
in society. "He (Freud) conceives of the self not as an abstract entity,
uniting experience and cognition, but as the source of a struggle be-
tween two objective forces - unregenerate instincts and overbearing
culture." ^^^ Like Hobbes, Freud tended to see instinct (or Trieb in the
original German; "drive" would probably be a better translation) as
innate and individualistic. Hobbes' passions perhaps emphasized
domination, while Freud's instincts or drives emphasized sexuality,
but there is no necessary inconsistency between these emphases. Both
derive from a conviction that humans are innately moved toward
antisocial self-satisfaction. Like Hobbes, Freud saw humans as mov-
ing toward a social state by means of a tutelary process of repression
that would develop a character capable of subordinating anarchic
desires to the civilizing rule of reason.

For Freud, as well as for Hobbes, the "natural" or "primitive" state
was an allegorical historicizing, rather than a statement of actual an-
thropological development. Totem and Taboo^'', for example, is mean-
ingful only as an allegory of Freud's view of human nature. The kill-
ing of the father (the introduction of guilt into human social relations) .
and the establishment of a social contract among the murderous and
rivalrous brothers is a Hobbesian tale of the creation of social order
from the mutual repression of self-seeking passions.

The "immoral man, moral society" tradition inherited from Hobbes
continues to be influential in contemporary social thinking, often
deeply colored by Freudian influences. One manifestation of this
Hobbesian tradition among thinkers who have attracted attention in
recent years is Camille Paglia. Paglia's writing, it is true, often lacks
the precision of her great forbears, Hobbes and Freud, careening wildly
among its subjects in amphetamine discursiveness, but that her ideas
descend from the principles of Hobbes cannot be doubted. I mention
her here because her popularity (notoriety?) shows how these prin-
ciples continue to flourish.

Paglia casts her basic ideas in the same historical mold that Hobbes
and Freud used to give shape to their ideas: "In the beginning was
nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of
God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem ... So-

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West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 19

ciety is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power."^^
Nature for Paglia, which always has red claws and teeth, exists inside
of human beings as sexuality (seen chiefly as sado-masochistic, a merg-
ing of the emphases of Hobbes and Freud) and its violence is repressed,
controlled, and shaped by the civilizing, tutelary influence of an ab-
solute social order.

II. Locke: the Contradictions of Moral Notions

Locke has been characterized as a derivative thinker, a follower of
Hobbes. "Although Locke, by virtue of his later position with respect
to Hobbes, could give more explicit emphasis to individual rights,
the fact remains that it was Hobbes's own brilliant sketching of the
political environment of individualism that made the later system
possible. "^^ Locke's debt to Hobbes may be revealing, suggesting the i l'^

evolution of modern liberalism from modern conservatism and the
continuing links between the two intellectual tendencies. Locke's so-
cial ethics, though, represent an important deviation from Hobbes,
and the fragmentary and contradictory nature of Locke's ideas about
ethics continues to haunt the ethical notions of liberalism in the social
sciences.

We are accustomed to thinking of the modernist view of the uni-
verse as a unified whole, a rational order, the undermining of which
has left us lost in an epistemological and moral funhouse. But Locke's
difficulties in putting together some of the key assumptions of mod-
ernism, specifically positivism and universalism, suggest that these
assumptions may not really fit together at all. Locke is best known for
his image of human nature as tabula rasa. In his Essay Concerning Hu-
man Understanding^'^, he argued against the idea that human beings
are born with innate ideas. He maintained, instead, that the ideas of
humans are created by experience.

Moral notions are also, according to Locke, experiential in nature
and character. Because many people can break moral precepts with-
out feelings of guilt, he argued in Book I of the Essay, it is clear that the
precepts are not written in the hearts of all, that they must be prod-
ucts of experience and habit. This claim placed Locke's positivism at
odds with the demands of universalism. Richard Hooker, in the first
volume of his great work. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity^^ had ar-
gued that there is a Natural Law and that its rules can be known by
all through reason because they are written in the conscience of each

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Carl L. Bankston III: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

person. It is clear that Locke's positivism, his belief that ethical ideas
are results of external causes, undermines this universalism. If ethical
precepts are products of experience, then, since, experiences vary from
individual to individual and from place to place, ethics will vary from
place to place, just as billiard balls struck from different angles roll in
different directions.

Does this mean that Locke discarded ethics altogether as illusory,
or that he regarded them as legalistic conventions in an essentially
lawless universe? The philosopher John Colman has argued against
this interpretation of Locke, maintaining that Locke saw moral no-
tions as archetypes, in the same sense that mathematical concepts are
archetypes: they are abstract principles that exist prior to and inde-
pendently of human discovery of them.-^ A universal Natural Law, in
other words, has been superimposed on atomistic and deterministic
human experience. Even though we are born with no knowledge of
the Law, and our ideas about laws and rules are derived from impres-
sions from the physical world, these chance impressions somehow
bring us into conformity with the absolute. It would appear that the
structure of this physical world that creates our moral notions is such
that we learn happiness is produced by acting in consonance with the
Natural Law, which is completely external to us.

Locke's ethical dualism is even stranger than that of Hobbes, but it
is perhaps even more symptomatic of the complexities of modernist
social ethics. The idea of unformed individuals being shaped by ex-
perience into conformity with an external rational order continues to
be a core assumption of much sociological thinking. In American so-
ciology, Talcott Parsons has been one of the foremost exponents of a
Lockean-style dualism consisting of abstract forms and the experien-
tial shaping of individuals toward conformity with those forms.

Social acts. Parsons tells us, "do not occur singly and discretely,
they are organized in systems."--^ There is a normative order, a source
of "standards of value-orientation" (including moral standards) that
exists outside of any particular individual (thus constituting a socio-
logical equivalent of Natural Law) (SS, p. 13). Conformity to these
standards makes social interaction possible for Parsons, as the acqui-
sition of pre-existing moral notions makes social interaction possible
for Locke.

The standards of social interaction are not genetic in character (SS,
p. 205). They involve the shaping of individual minds by the process
of experience. Socialization entails the shaping of the

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXUI, 1995 21

value-orientations of the individual along lines that reproduce the
dominant values of the social system (SS. p. 227).

If the code (the pattern of value-orientations) is not to be found
inside of the individual (if they exist prior to and independently of
individual discovery), however, where does it reside? In the social
system, many sociologists would answer. But this turns "society" into
a kind of absolute, an almost theological source of Law. This Law some-
how comes into existence among social actors, even though it does
not exist inside of any of them, and the actors come into conformity
with it as a result of externally imposed experiences that somehow
happen to provide the necessary combination of forces.

III. Rousseau: The Rediscovery of the Inner Absolute

Rousseau's image of human nature is often contrasted with that of
Hobbes. Hobbes, it is said, saw humans as evil by nature, requiring
restraint, while Rousseau saw humanity as fundamentally good, in
need of liberation from the confinements of institutional artifice. This
popular view is something of an oversimplification, but Rousseau did
tend to see ties among human beings as existing inside of individu-
als, rather than as externally imposed in a Hobbesian manner. At the
core of human nature, Rousseau argues, are two "drives," "self-love"
and "pity": "the one interests us deeply in our own preservation and
welfare, the other inspires us with a natural aversion to seeing any
other being, but especially any other being like ourselves, suffer or
perish. "^^

It is clear that these two "drives," although they may come into
conflict in specific instances (such as when one must "kill or be killed")
are intimately linked: we identify ourselves with others and our in-
terest in our own preservation is mingled with an interest in the pres-
ervation of others. But these two fundamentals do not determine hu-
man social action, because their quality and expression is shaped by
Tee agency (DOF, p. 186). Human beings perfect (or corrupt) them-
selves through the choices they make.

The basis of ethical behavior, then, lies inside of human beings but
it is not automatically expressed. Nor are choices made in a vacuum;
choices, and therefore possibilities for perfection or corruption are pro-
foundly affected by the environment and can be changed by changes
in the environment. The greatest changes in the social environment,
n Rousseau's view, resulted from technological change. As technolo-

22

Cad L. Bankston 111: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

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gies of production became more sophisticated, particularly as the arts
of agriculture and metallurgy came into being, surpluses came into
existence. Since people had unequal abilities to take portions of the
surplus, social inequality came into existence, bringing with it com-
petition and also insincerity, dissimulation in order to achieve posi-
tion (DOF).

An advanced society, therefore, serves both to introduce conflicts
of interest among human beings and to alienate humans from their
"true selves." This leads people to make choices that lead away from
their own perfection because it distances them from this "true self,"
the locus of ethical decision in which there is a unity of self-interest
and altruism. Rousseau has reversed Hobbes and Locke, taking the
ethical absolutes out of the heavens and placing them into the soul.

The fact that ethical behavior is not automatically expressed, how-
ever, means that learning occupies an important place in Rousseau's
schema. But this learning is not a repressive imposition of universal
absolutes, as it is for Hobbes, nor is it a fortuitous socialization of
unformed individuals into pre-existing patterns, as it is in the Lockean
tradition. Education, for Rousseau, entails the gradual and develop-
mental rediscovery of the true self.

Rousseau's philosophy of education is clearest, perhaps, in his
Emile}^ There, he describes the ideal education of a hypothetical child
in terms of a series of developmental stages, each of which are deter-
mined by the stages of growth experienced by all children. The goal
of this developmental cultivation has been described as "education,"
rather than "socialization": "the goals of education should be kept
separate from the goals, values, and prejudices which prevail in the
larger society. Emile is not going to be socialized into any role or set of
social expectations, but will be educated to become an autonomous
person."^^ Because the source of ethical judgement lies, in some sense,
inside the person, a moral education entails the development of the
capacity to understand and apply deductions from an inner absolute.
"A good education implies, for Rousseau, that the child develops the
ability, and the disposition, to submit all the received norms and ex-
pectations to the scrutiny of his or her moral principle" (MA, p. 71).

Ethical behavior, from this perspective, is a matter of the gradual
and guided rediscovery of an inner absolute. Moral principles are
pre-existing standards, but standards to "be drawn out of a natural
conscience rather than found in a Nature outside of the individual.
Rousseau's modernism, then, is a humanistic and in some ways radi-

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 23

cal modernism, but it is within the boundaries of modernist thinking
on self and society. There is a definite self in this model, and there is a
center, albeit an internal center, from which moral principles are de-
rived and imposed on an objective world. Ethical behavior is pro-
duced by a developmental process of discovery of the true self.

The model of Rousseau continues to be found in the contemporary
social sciences, most conspicuously in several schools of psychology.
Rousseau might be thought of as the father of developmental and
life-cycle approaches to psychology, with his insistence that instruc-
tion had to follow the stages that occur in the course of human life.
Contemporary developmental approaches tend to share with
Rousseau an optimism derived from the idea that people are evolv-
ing toward some desirable state. ^^

However, it is among the humanistic and radical psychologists that
Rousseau's ideas about the gradual unfolding of a true self, where
self-interest and altruism exist in union, that Rousseau's ethical con-
cepts continue to wax strongest. Humanistic psychology, most closely
associated with the work of Carl Rogers, takes over the idea that hu-
man beings are developing toward the realization of a true and ideal
self. In Rogers' classic Client-Centered Therapy/'^ he portrays humans
as having an ideal self, which is approached by the process of
self-actualization.

The radical Freudian revisionists have carried this idea of a true
and ultimately ethical self even further. In much the same way that
Rousseau stood Hobbes on his head by taking the Natural Law out of
the heavens and placing it in the soul, the "Left Freudians" have up-
ended the Hobbesian Freud, finding virtue in release, rather than in
repression. Marcuse, for example, has found aggression (Thanatos)
in the repression of the id and liberation in the id's free expression of
sensuality (Eros) (EC). Norman O. Brown has expressed similar ideas
in more eschatological terms, arguing that the human race must turn
away from "the path of sublimation" and toward the return of re-
pressed corporeal existence, the "Resurrection of the Body."^^

These last descendants of Rousseau have, perhaps, come closest to
moving beyond the limits of modernism. Marcuse criticizes techno-
logical and instrumental rationalization as forms of domination.^^
Brown challenges the idea of fixed personalities (LB, pp. 90-108). But
the continuing idea that there is a repressed self, "the body of infancy"

I LAD, p. 48), that can ultimately be rediscovered indicates that the

24 Carl L. Bankston III: Ethics as Excess: Toivard a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

edge him or not) in the search for an absolute code that has been dis-
placed from the ego /head /heavens to the id /body /soul.

IV. Bataille: Ethics as Excess

A. Surplus, Gift-Giving, and Ethical Relations

Each of the tendencies expressed by the three modernist thinkers
discussed above shows the attempt to impose a Lyotardian "totality"
on an unruly social reality. Hobbes posited two "Natures," an anethical
Nature of Human Nature and an ethically absolute Nature of Natural
Law. In this approach, repression is the origin of ethics, through the
imposition of Natural Law on Human Nature. Locke, also, fell into a
dualistic image. The nature of the human is a matter of chance experi-
ence. Through chance experiences, however, humans are led towards
a pre-existing ethical absolute and meet the demands of this absolute,
much as humans in the Parsonian model happen to be socialized to-
ward the functional requirements of a society. For Rousseau, harken-
^ ing back to an innate absolute, ethical principles are inborn, but these

i principles have somehow been obscured by social institutions. Para-

r doxically, in Rousseau's model, society has distorted social character.

\ Rousseau's model manages to humanize ethics by bringing morality

t out of an eternal Natural Law that lies beyond the human, but it re-

g mains trapped in the modernist idea of a self that is the source of

r absolute principles to which an external, objective world is subjected.

Are social ethics only conceivable in absolute terms? Can there be
^ a "postmodern" ethics, that is, an immanent, de-centered, emergent,

contingent ethics that moves toward no pre-ordained end? In this
final section of the essay, I would like to argue that such an approach
to ethics in the social sciences is possible, and that its rudiments can
perhaps be found in the writings of Georges Bataille. Furthermore, I
i would like to maintain that such an approach, by dissolving images

^ of human behavior as deriving from external and objective sources,

3 can be seen as a strategy of radical liberation.

3 At the core of Bataille's thinking on human behavior lie the con-

t cepts of surplus and waste. "I will begin," Bataille writes in The Ac-

t cursed Share, "with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation

a determined by the play of energy on. the surface of the globe, ordi-

narily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the
excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an
organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 25

completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without
profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophi-
cally.'""^ The basic problem of humanity and, indeed, the basic prob-
lem of living matter in general is the expenditure of excess energy, or
waste, useless consumption.

When consumption is described as useless, however, this does not
mean the consumption is without results. War, catastrophic waste,
certainly has effects beyond the human organisms who are casting off
their surplus through violence. Literal destruction, however, is not
the only way to dissipate a surplus. A surplus may also be displaced
into activity that is, from the point of view of the individual, pure
uselessness, luxury. Any externalizing of energy is waste from the
perspective of the system, whether the energy is simply burned up
(which is actually a transformation rather than a loss of energy) or
dumped into activities outside the system. Thus, the growth of pyra-
mids and stock exchanges occurs from the continual dumping of sur-
plus by individuals into a collective pool, a sewer. "I insist that there
is generally no growth, but only a luxurious squandering of energy in
every form!" (ASI, p. 33).

Bataille identifies three luxuries in nature: eating, death, and sexual
reproduction. Each luxury is an establishment of relations between
self and not-self. Eating wastes energy because through eating more
efficient systems (simple plants, animals lower on the food chain) lose
themselves to less efficient systems, the eaters and predators who im-
pose heavier burdens on the environment, are further from
self-sufficiency, and squander more life in each moment of existence.

In death a system squanders all of its energy, yields up all of its
energy to the surrounding environment. Destruction creates an abso-
lute unity between self and not-self. 'Tn this respect, the luxury of
death is regarded by us in the same way as that of sexuality, first as a
negation of ourselves, then - in a sudden reversal - as the profound
truth of that movement of which life is the manifestation" (ASI, pp.
34-35).

It is in sexuality, though, that the paradoxical nature of squander-
ing becomes clearest. Through sexuality, individuals give up their own
energies, their own possibilities for growth, and give their possibili-
ties away to the species. Following Bataille's logic, we might say that
sexual activity is the original gift. "If, with regard to the species, sexu-
ality appears as growth, in principle it is nevertheless the luxury of
individuals. This characteristic is more accentuated in sexual repro-

26 Cnrl L. Bankston III: Ethics as Excess: Toumrd a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

duction, where the individuals engendered are clearly separate from
those that engender them and give them life as one gives to others"
(ASI, p. 35).

Squandering, then, both gives birth to new life out of the waste of
the old life and it links individual entities to other entities, thereby
giving rise to new systems and to larger systems (meta-sy stems?) that
contain and subsume the luxurious wasters that have brought them
into existence. Bataille refers to the expenditures that create larger
systems by producing ties among individuals as "the sacred."^'

This idea of society, the union of individuals into a pattern of so-
cial ties, as the sacred in human life is drawn, of course, from
Durkheim."*^ But while Durkheim tended to see society as existing
prior to individuals and shaping the normative development of indi-
viduals, in this version of Bataille and his colleagues we can see hu-
man society, and its normative underpinnings, emerging from the
process of social interaction. This interaction is, echoing the later Freud,
n erotic in character: "love expresses a need for sacrifice: Each unity

must lose itself in some other that exceeds it."^-'
^ Instead of portraying normative patterns among individuals as the

imposition of an abstract code upon actors or as the shaping of actors
^ in accordance with an external code or even as the realization and

* manifestation of an internal code, the perspective offered by Bataille

gives us a picture of normative patterns spinning out of the actors'

{ abandonment of themselves because the creations of self have become

a too much for them. Not only does this picture offer a contrast to the

J universalism of the modernist mentality, it also subverts the latter 's

r rationalism. Ethical behavior is not developed by learning to behave

in accordance with Reason, it is produced by the internal impetus
toward the Sacred.

One is reminded, here, of Max Weber's description of the evolu-
tion of ethics. Weber described ethics as evolving from a magical ethics
to a religious ethic of norms to an ethic of principle (MA, pp. 122-133).
Each of these types is associated with a particular type of society. The
first, in which human behavior is guided by taboos enforced by spir-
its, might be thought of asxiescribing tribal societies. The second, in
which behavior is guided by moral prescriptions, might be thought
of as characteristic of traditional, religiously based societies. The third,
in which behavior is guided by internalization of principle (such as
the "Protestant Ethic") can be understood as describing the capitalist,
industrializing societies. The third type, as the type connected with

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 27

the modernist mentality, is the ethic within which Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau and their descendants have operated.

Weber's system of ethical evolution is consistent with the earlier
conceptions of ethical change of Hegel. Hegel conceived of ethical
notions as developing from Sittlichkeit, or obedience to conventions
and customs, to Moralitat, or conformity to abstract universal prin-
ciples found in individual consciences.''^ This development, in Hegel's
view, initially weakens the ties that bind human communities by sepa-
rating the subjective realm of the reflective individual from the objec-
tive realm of collective life. Eventually, however, moral principle and
community needs are expected to reach a synthesis, a balance between
subjective perception of right and wrong and the objective require-
ments of shared life.^^

The "ethics as excess" approach that I am describing here fits into
the Weberian and Hegelian schemata as additional categories, but it
also undercuts the linear evolutionary assumptions of these schemata;
although, as we will see, Hegelian notions of development continue
to haunt Bataille's thinking. In its emphasis on the sacred character of
normative patterns in human society and in its insistence on the con-
creteness of social obligations, the Bataille perspective would seem to
circle back, in many respects, to the magical ethics of Weber. This would
suggest that the "evolution" of ethics only seems like an evolution
when viewed from the standpoint of the third category: from the view-
point of absolute principle, all movement is linear movement toward
absolute principle.

This view does not circle back completely, however. A spiral might
be a more accurate geometric metaphor. While it moves away from
abstract principle and toward the sacred, it also sees the sacred char-
acter of normative ties as produced by social interactions, rather than
as a pre-existing state into which social actors enter. Thus, festivals,
ceremonies of expenditure, do not call the spirits back to the human
world or repeat the eternal mythical time of the beginnings so much
as they re-produce, through their intensity, the sacredness which is
social interaction.^^

In place of the Hegelian model of "custom, principle,
custom-enlightened-by-principle," an ethics as excess strategy would
imply seeing both customs and principles as limitations on pure ex-
penditure that lose sight of the primal nature of expenditure itself. At
this point, it may be useful to recall Bataille's objections to
Levi-Strauss's argument on the origins of the prohibition against in-

28 Carl L. Bankston HI: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

cest. Levi-Strauss maintained, according to Bataille, that this prohibi-
tion came about as "a distributive system of exchange. "^^ To engage
in sexual relations with one's own daughters would be a matter of
hoarding the sexual wealth in one's own family. Establishing rules
against this kind of extreme endogamy establishes reciprocal relations
among groups of people, it creates avenues of exchange that make
possible "the extension of alliances and of power" (ASH, p. 47).

But the practical advantages of gift-giving, Bataille argues, are not
sufficient to explain why people renounce things and bestow them
on others. There is always an arbitrariness in definitions of what con-
stitutes incest, and if we explain gift-giving by alliances, we must ex-
plain why people choose one set of alliances over another. The act of
giving itself is the motivation for renunciation; it is an act of pure
expenditure.

Levi-Strauss's explanation (like the Hegelian obedience to custom
or to conscience) concentrates on the prohibition, justified as a require-
ment of community life or as a rational calculation for profit. But this
^ explanation is really an act of bad faith. It involves taking the limita-

i tions of self-abandonment, the results of squandering, as the

r self-abandonment, the squandering, itself This kind of explanation,

\ like the interpretation of normative patterns as obedience to social

t givens or universal principles, is interpreting gift-giving simply as a

g matter of not-keeping.

r- Objective ethical systems, then, rationalized as taboos or customs

or principles, offer ex post facto explanations of the forms arbitrarily
produced by self-abandonment. Marriage ceremonies typically involve
so much giving of gifts because they are occasions for moving across
boundaries, not because they are designed to establish new bound-
aries among actors through exchange."''* The normative patterns, such
as marriage, as well as the theory (or "theory", for any view that de-
I nies universality can claim only a contingent and metaphorical ap-

S propriateness to the phenomena about which it theorizes) that de-

3 scribes them, spiral^ out of the self-abandonment of actors. In accor-

a dance with postmodern phenomenology, "mind, self, and society

t emerge within an ever-changing symbolic envelope."^*^ The system

t of normative meanings is not imposed on situations, as in the

a Parsonian view SS, p. 11), but this system is exuded, as waste, from

J. participants in social situations.

An example of the process of generating social meanings through
excess may be seen in the development of economic value and norms

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 29

of behavior during the yearly Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans.
During this celebration, Mardi Gras beads, plastic beads that are vir-
tually worthless at other times of the year, take on enormous value.
As the beads are thrown from floats in the parades or from the balco-
nies of buildings in the French quarter, participants scramble to gather
as many of these precious items as they can.

It has become the custom in recent years for those standing in the
streets beside the floats or below the balconies to offer a curious ex-
change for the valuables. Mardi Gras celebrants, usually women but
sometimes also men, will expose normally hidden parts of their bod-
ies (breasts for women, penises for men) in order to receive beads,
with the highly prized long white beads offer an especial inducement
to disrobe."**^

This exchange of pointless gratuities can offer insights into human
behavior and norms on other, non-ceremonial occasions. It should be
noted that the absurdity of valuing plastic beads is obvious to us only
because we do not value plastic beads elsewhere and at other times.
In fact, we do normally value a substance that has just as little utility
as plastic beads. Gold, a soft, shiny substance that serves only as a
decoration, is not only valued, it has served as the standard of value
and the basis of all economic transactions over most of the course of
Western history.

Wesley Shrum and John Kilbum have argued, brilliantly, that ritual
disrobing at Mardi Gras in exchange for useless items both reflects
and reinforces the moral order of the market system."*^ Their argu-
ment can be extended by pointing out that a reflection is an image of
the thing it reflects. This is to suggest that the moral order of non-festive
days, produced by the urge to waste surplus, is just as pointless and
just as arbitrary as the moral order of self-exposure on Mardi Gras.
Forms of human relations (social systems), including the ethical cat-
egorizations of those forms of relations, are spun out of the continual
exchange of gratuities.

One might object that the example I have offered here is mislead-
ing because a festival is not so much a reflection of the day-to-day
moral order as it is a parody. People who expose themselves at Mardi
Gras are aware of the usual normative strictures on clothing and they
are aware that they are violating these strictures. They are aware that
plastic beads are normally considered worthless, and their striving
for these items is defined as "play," instead of "work." The attitudes
1 toward these shared activities on the festive occasion is ironic, which

30 Carl L. Bankston IB: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

means that the participants are conscious that their behavior and re-
lations constitute a mockery of ordinary relations and behavior, and
that their exchanges are otherwise meaningless. But this is precisely
the value of the festival for the student of social relations: in the festi-
val the creation of the system of social categories out of the exorbitant
and wasteful urge to consume, which is latent in day-to-day life, be-
comes manifest.

Since the casting off of energy, useless from the point of view of the
individual actor, creates larger systems from smaller systems by cre-
ating a union among systems, understanding ethical codes as prod-
ucts of the inner compulsion of surplus can, I think, help to address
the basic concern of Lyman and Scott's "sociology of the absurd": "the
puzzle, the mystery of how social order somehow emerges from the
chaos and conflict predicated by the inherently meaningless is the
motive for the study of social phenomena."''^ Grasping the forms that
emerge from the purposeless interactions of individuals means that
r, we need to look at the kinds of surplus (emotional, physical, finan-

cial) that individuals have and need to squander under given situa-
tions.

Forms, however, are only outlines, definitions of substances. Look-
ing more closely at the sources of sacrificial surplus, the essence of
human relations, we see that at the core of the surplus, the source of
all sacrifice and giving, is emptiness. That is to say, the self is empti-

J ness. Taking emptiness as the nature of the self, I will suggest that a

a useful strategy for moving beyond the objective, universalist assump-

r tions of modern ethics may be to affirm this emptiness and to take as

J "ethical" all that allows humans to realize an identity as no-thing, as

( boundless subjectivity.

t

B. The Absent Self
r

s If we follow Bataille further and ask the nature of the selves from

g which interactions and normative codes emerge, we find that each

g self is, at its core, nothing. The self of Hobbes and his successors is

. defined, given its ends (both in the senses of limits and purposes) by

. the imposition of the external on the internal. Bataille denies the ends

of the self (in both of those senses) and therefore arrives at a self that
neither has contents nor is ultimately contained by anything outside
of itself and is therefore empty.

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 31

We have seen that luxury and expenditure underlie all forms of
relations among humans. Desire, the urge toward communion, is the
product of the progressive accumulation of energy that must be spilled
over. It is clear that desire is to be understood not as what it is, but as
what it is not:

The object of sensual desire is by nature another de-
sire. The desire of the senses is the desire, if not to de-
stroy oneself, at least to be consumed and to lose one-
self without reservation. Now, the object of my desire
does not truly respond to it except on one condition:
that I awaken in it a desire equal to mine. Love in its
essence is so clearly the coincidence of two desires that
there is nothing more meaningful in love, even in the
purest love. But the other's desire is desirable insofar
as it is not known as a profane object is, from the out-
side (as an analyzed substance is known in a labora-
tory). The two desires fully respond to each other only
when perceived in the transparence of an intimate com-
prehension (ASII, p. 113). ,1

By desiring, for Bataille is using sensual desire here as an example of
desiring in general, we do not seek a thing, we seek loss in another de-
sire. The self, as pure subject, is nothing, or no-thing, it has no objective
being. Since its seeking is ultimately another subject, another no-thing,
the "objects" of desire are illusions (in the etymological sense of that
word as "play" or "mockery"). We can take the central self, the pure
subject, as emptiness and the goal of the self in outward movement as
the attempt to realize this emptiness, to disappear in "a sovereign total-
ity which is not divided by any abstraction and is commensurate with
the entire universe" (ASII, p. 112).

This social psychology of emptiness turns traditional social psychol-
ogy on its head. Mead and Cooley, social psychologists in the Lockean
tradition, described the creation of identity as the gradual domination
of subjectivity by objectivity through experience. For Mead, the "I" within
each person develops a "me" by objectifying the "other," and then imag-
ining how that other might look back upon the original "l."^^ Cooley,
along similar lines, described the development of the well-known "look-
ing glass self"^ The social being is trapped in a hall of mirrors, with
reflected images blocking every avenue of escape. The project we find
in the social psychology of annihilation is the smashing of the mirrors.

32 Carl L. Bankston III: Ethics as Excess: Toivard a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

Principles, the generalized repetitions of the selves seen in the
Cooleyan hall of mirrors, turn all actions into stylized performances,
into categories. Viewing categories as the arbitrary and illusory play
of self-abandonment means accepting the groundlessness of the re-
flective subject. The reflective subject, after all, is created, according
to the model of socialization developed by Cooley and Mead, by the
self's categorization and objectification of others and by the reflective
categorization of self by analogy to others. It is this process of catego-
rization and objectification that makes our social world a world of
things.

If our categories are our own creations, and not forms indepen-
dent of us, then we must ask what it is that creates the forms and
exists prior to them. Of course, what exists prior to form is formless-
ness, and what exists prior to things is nothing. If we see principles or
customs, then, as the arbitrary excess of an outward impulsion, we
have not only dismissed the theistic and humanistic grounds for these
ethical categories, we have identified the source of these categories as

pure absence. "The murder of the first, great metonymy (theology as
T a signifying practice) intimates that there never was a ground to West-

^ ern experience, that absence was always the primal will to will."^''

^ The denial of the primacy of the objective and the assertion of the

t primacy of absence, as the purely subjective, is to deny the external,

since the external is all that is outside the subject. But the embrace of

J subjectivity is also not, as might be suspected, an exercise in solip-

s sism. Paradoxically, the interior life demands ex-stasis, it demands

T goirig out of oneself ."^^ In the paragraph from Accursed Share quoted

J- above, desire was identified as desire of desire. The completely inte-

rior is a matter of shared subjectivity. Speaking of Heidegger's re-
mark that our realite-humaine (the French translation of Heidegger's
Dasein) as a community of seekers is determined by our knowing,
^ Batille remarks, 'Tt is not possible to have knowledge {connaissance)

of it without a community of seekers, nor to have interior experience
without a community of those who live it" (EI, p. 37).
The community of emptiness, then, blooms from the cultivation of
^ pointlessness. By denying the objective, we deny "others" as varia-

t tions on the category of "the other." What is called "interior experi-

2 ence" is actually a demolition of the social construction of identity

through reciprocal and reflexive objectification.

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 33

C. Excess and the Problem of Fascism: Bataille's Incomplete
Nihilism

Bataille, notably in his work on eroticism, often identifies destruc-
tion too neatly with the return of discrete selves to the continuity of
the undefined. If we accept his identification of eroticism as that which
brings being into question for humans, then how can we accept his
claim that "in eroticism, I lose myself?" (LE, pp. 35-37) Bringing into
question is not a resolute and absolute act of denial. Rather, bringing
into question is an ironic act, along the lines of the simultaneous affir-
mation and rejection of market values displayed by our bead-grabbing
Mardi Gras celebrants. Bringing into question involves the creation
of a "doubleness," as Stoekl has noted.'*''

One may deal with "doubleness" in at least two ways, simulta-
neous affirmation and rejection may serve as a means of embracing | '.-i
the hollowness of a phenomenon. This is the strategy of irony. Alter-
natively, "doubleness" may be approached in Hegelian fashion, as a
dialectic to be resolved by an affirmation that subjects and contains
the original affirmation and rejection. I want to argue that one of the
ethical dilemmas with Bataille's thinking, its apparent links to fas-
cism (PWM, pp. 6-21), may be a result of Hegel's continued haunting
of Bataille's work.

Bataille had an uncomfortable relationship with the thought of
Hegel. He had regularly attended Kojeve's seminar on Hegel (AK, p.
103), but his explicit writings on Hegel's "closed system" were gener-
ally critical (EI, pp. 127-130; AK, pp. 109). "He (Bataille) has no inten-
tion of seeking a reconciliation, a closure or an end" (AK, p. 109). De-
spite, this suspicion of Hegel, however, Bataille's dualities often tend
to be dialectical and developmental, rather than ironic.

The type of eroticism known as "sado-masochism," a variety of
especial interest to Bataille and his associates operates by posing the
question of self-definition, thereby creating a tension between a pri-
mordial continuity and the distinction of objective self and objective
other, and ultimately resolving this tension in favor of a new, expanded
objectification of identity. I lose myself only to gain myself again, with
sharper, harder boundaries. Eroticism does not necessarily end, that
is to say, with becoming an "open being," a being "lost in the infinite
silence" (LE, pp. 299-300). One can always open oneself only to con-
sume or be consumed and close oneself again in a new unity. Here,
we must distinguish between death and fantasies of death, between

34 Carl L. Banksion 111: Ethics as Excess: Toioard a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

dying (which is a true dissolution of self) and killing (which is an
identification with the dissolving self of the other that ultimately
reaches a new synthesis of self). The peculiarity of sado-masochism
lies in the fact that it is a bounded, self-conscious reflection on trans-
gression, rather than pure transgression. It involves a synthetic
identity's voyeurism of its own death and ecstasy as an original iden-
tity.

Bataille's version of eroticism, then, suggests an ethical difficulty
that we can see running throughout his work: he suggests that inte-
rior experience should be boundless, but too often he seeks only the
fantasy of boundlessness within a bounded existence. One is reminded
of Shadia Drury's remark on Bataille's politics: "initially, Bataille was
attracted to the fascists because he thought that they were the new
reincarnation of sovereignty (i.e., of human autonomy from the world
of things); but later, he rejected them because their violence was not
wasteful and purposeless enough - apparently it was a mere means to
n power" (AK, p. 108). The excesses of the fascists, he came to see, were

not pure waste, but investments, expenditures calculated to expand
*^ the delimited self.

We can see the initial plan to initiate the Acephale group with a
human sacrifice (plans that, even if seriously intended, were never
carried out)'*^ as a product of this failure to distinguish between the
annihilation of self, which is pure expenditure of energy, and

J assassination's fantasy of the annihilation of self, which is the expen-

e diture of energy calculated to yield a metaphysical or erotic profit.

T The assassin, like the voyeur and the sadist (PS, pp. 90-92), transgresses

categories in order to produce a dissolution of categorical limitations
within an intensifying category. Thus, the creation of the sacred in the
modern world (the project of sacrifice) does not mean the disappear-
ance of the world into the sacred, but the consumption of the sacred
by the world.

As approaches to the normative codes within behavior that we re-
fer to as "ethics," then, the postmodernist strategies of Bataille suffer
from their failure to be sufficiently apocalyptic in their nihilism. Too
often he focuses only on moments of transgression, and therefore is
often led dangerously close to embracing the results of excess, rather
than the excess itself.

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West Georgia College Studies in Social Scieitces, XXXIII, 1995 35

D. The Ethics of Excess: Implications for Application

I have suggested above that the approach to the idea of social eth-
ics yielded by my own reading of George Bataille can not only serve
as a perspective on the nature of ethics in human relations, but can
also serve as a radical strategy for liberation. To see how this is pos-
sible, it is useful to pose the question: what would be "ethical" from
the point of view of the set of intellectual ploys known as
"postmodernism?" Is it possible to speak of "ethics" or of behavior
as "ethical" once we have abandoned the center, set the compass free
of privileged reference points, and discarded first principles? Certainly,
we are no longer able to pass ready canonical judgements, free of all
political and social biases. I think we can, however, still speak of "eth-
ics" in the provisional sense of behavior or attitudes that are consis-
tent with the epistemological ploys that we have chosen as desirable.

The ploy chosen by Bataille and his associates seems to me to offer
an appealing way of coping with the collapse of the idols and of pro-
viding an alternative to the spiritual cul-de-sac of life in advanced
market societies. If the logic of domination of modern Western civili-
zation has a universal center and fixed points of reference as its pre-
mises, and objectification as its process, and if the ethic of domination
is an expression of the logic, then opposition to domination should
choose the dissolution of the center and the destruction of objects as
its preferred style, its "ethic."

The "ethics as excess" approach that I have read in or into the work
of Bataille and his colleagues can provide just such a style of thought
and behavior, as well as a theoretical tack for conceptualization. I do
not only argue here that normative patterns are provisional forms flow-
ing from the urge to expend, from desire. I also argue that emptiness
is at the heart of desire and that if we are to move away from reifying
those provisional forms (the process of objectification), then we should
continually negate the products of emptiness in order to move to-
ward emptiness itself.

I take this movement toward emptiness as the program that the
short-lived College of Sociology referred to as "sacred sociology." This
kind of sociology is not so much an analytical tool as it is a style of
commitment. "This perspective (sacred sociology) seems to place the
group on the other side of the world {aux antipodes) from the scientific
method of Durkheim and Mauss. It seems oriented instead to the cre-
ation of the sacred in the modern world" (OI, p. 11).

36 Carl L. Bankston III: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

I have argued above that social ethics, that is, patterns of norma-
tive relations in existing societies, are to be understood as the emer-
gence of larger systems (groups, societies) from the excesses of smaller
systems (individuals). If we wish to affirm the sacred, the emptiness
that underlies and yields all systems, then we would take as "ethical"
those gestures that lead us away from the objectification of ourselves
and others and toward the freedom to be nothing.

Transgression, the violation of reified normative patterns, becomes
an "ethical" strategy, then, because it is a means of revealing the sa-
cred hidden inside those patterns. This transgression, given the rejec-
tion of domination, should not be the violation of objective relation-
ships at one level simply in order to affirm another objectivity ca-
pable of taking voyeuristic pleasure in the experience of destruction.
Transgression, instead, should be of an unceasing character. "The play
of limits and transgression," Foucault has written, "seems to be regu-
lated by a simple obstinacy: transgression constantly crosses and re-
crosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short
duration, and thus it is made to turn once more right to the horizon of
i the uncrossable."^'' Since we cannot simply abolish limits, our strat-

r egy of transgression should be to maintain the play, to maintain all

^ oppositions as ironic oppositions rather than reified oppositions, in

t order to weaken the lines that surround nothingness and become more

intimate with the nothingness inside ourselves and around us.

I

3 Conclusion

J This essay has sought to describe some of the fundamental traits

r ' of modernist ethics and to draw on the works of George Bataille in

c order to suggest how a "postmodernist" ethics might serve as an al-

t ternative to the normative preconceptions of modernism's logic of

r domination. 1 have delineated the approaches of three key thinkers of

g the modern era and suggested that these approaches continue to in-

g fluence contemporary social theory. I have argued that the ideas of

absolute Self and absolute Principle are manifested in different man-
. ners in these three. In the Hobbesian approach, we are faced with the

dichotomy of the Law of Nature and Natural Law. Human beings
become ethical creatures through the repressive imposition of the lat-
ter on the former.

In the Lockean approach, human beings are determined by experi-
ence, but there is a pre-existing code that lies outside of experience.

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 37

As humans are formed by experience, they come into conformity with
this code. Rousseau and his intellectual allies do not abandon the ab-
solute so much as they read it into the Natural Man, an absolute "true
self" that contains the absolute code, which needs to be rediscovered
and evoked in order to subject the world to its judgement.

I have argued that we may find a response to these modernist ab-
solutes in the writings of Georges Bataille. This theorist views social
behavior as originating in surplus that creates social forms by neces-
sitating expenditure of energy (a casting off of self into the non-self).
Seeing social ethics as patterns ^of excess spinning out of local inter-
actions means that we need to put aside universals, such as Natural
Law or even the Natural Self, to interpret the moral obligations of
humans toward other humans as situation-specific. When we look at
the ethical attitudes assumed by social actors, these only make sense r-

in terms of the kinds of excess generated by particular social and physi-
cal circumstances.

The value of this reading of Bataille, however, does not consist solely
of developing a new conceptualization of how normative patterns
arise in human relations. The modernist ethical schemata are means
of orienting people in the rationalized and objectified world of the
market system. If we want to subvert this system and its modes of
operation, then we need to seek an "ethics" (or "anti-ethics," if this
term is preferred) that can disorient people, and undercut and
delegitimate the normative assumptions of rationalization. Further, if
we accept the argument that the negation of rational forms is the quest
for emptiness, then we need to seek a strategy of delegitimation, of
denial, that will not lead to a new closure in a new system of domina-
tion, but will foster sustained openness and sacred nihilism. I have
tried to describe, therefore, how a "postmodernist" ^ approach offers
a way of being "ethical" (or "anti-ethical"), as well as a sociological
way of thinking about ethics.

References

' Dragan Milovanovic, "Dueling Paradigms: Modernist versus Postmodernist
Thought," Humanity and Society, Vol. 19 (1995), p. 20. Henceforth cited as DP.

Stephan Pfohl, Death at the Parasite Cafe: Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern (St.
Martin's Press, 1992). Henceforth cited as DPC.

Jean Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1984). Henceforth cited as PC.

38 Carl L. Bankston lU: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

^ Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.)

^ Marc J. LaFountain, "Foucault and Rodney King: The Rationality' of a Legal Beat-
ing," Humanity and Society, Vol. 16 (1992), pp. 564-570. Henceforth cited as FRK.

^ Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, (New York:
Vintage Books, 1955). Henceforth cited as EC.

"^ Jeffrey A. Halley, "Cultural Resistance to Rationalization: A Study of an Art
Avant-Garde," in The Renascence of Sociological Theory: Classical & Contemporary, ed.
Henry Etzkowitz and Ronald M. Classman (Itasca, Illinois: F.E. Peacock Publish-
ers), pp. 227-228.

*" Carl L. Bankston III, "Surrealism as Social Philosophy," American Book Review, Vol.
16, no. 6 (1995), p. 11.

" Carl L. Bankston 111, "Intentionally Excessive," American Book Reviezv, Vol. 15, no. 5
(1994), p. 1.

'^ On this point, see Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology
and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

'' Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,-
1968), p. 185. Henceforth cited as L.

'" Dennis Wrong, The Problem of Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1 1995). Henceforth cited as PO.

X " See Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge

J. University Press, 1986) for a discussion of approaches to Hobbes in terms of the

Prisoner's Dilemma game.

'- Carl L. Bankston III, "Games and Language, Language and Games: An Essay on
t the Nature and Use of Social Simulation," Humaiiity and Society, Vol. 19 (1995), pp.

6 65-74. Henceforth cited as GL.

'^ R.E. Ewin, Virtues and Rights: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Boulder,
Colorado: Westview Press, 1991). Henceforth cited as VR.

'^ David Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (ambridge: Cam-
r bridge University Press, 1994), p. 142. Henceforth cited as SMV.

^^ Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
C 1979), p. 28.

1 '' Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
'^ Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

(New York: Vintage Books), p. 1.
"* Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Free-
dom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 138.

2 ^'' ]ohn Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Works of ]ohn Locke, Vol I
t (New York: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1899).

f - Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 1977)
-' John Colman, John Locke's Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1991), pp. 105-106.

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 39

^Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951), p. 7. Henceforth
cited as SS.

^^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality
Among Mankind." In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality, ed. L. G. Crocker (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967),
p. 171. Henceforth cited as DOF.

-* Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Ba-
sic Books, 1979).

-^ Alessandro Ferraro, Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical
Thought ofjean-jacques Rousseau (Albany, New York: State University of New York
Press, 1993), p. 71. Henceforth cited as MA. ' j

^^ Wesley R. Burr, "Using Theories in Family Science," InResearch and Theory in Earn- '

ily Science, eds. Randal D. Day, Kathleen R. Gilbert, Barbara H. Settles, and Wesley
R. Burr (Pacific Grove, Cal: Brooks /Cole Publishing Co., 1995), p. 81.

'" Carl Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1951). ,

r r'
^^ Norman O. Brown, Eife Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (New J; ^i

York: Vintage Books, 1959). Henceforth cited as LAD; Norman O. Brown, Eove's

Body (New York, Vintage Books, 1966). Henceforth cited as LB.

^'^ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

^" Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. I, trans. Rob-
ert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 21. Henceforth cited as ASI.

'^' Georges Bataille, "The Moral Meaning of Sociology," in The Absence of Myth: YJrit-
ings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), p. 110;
George Bataille and Roger Caillois, "Sacred Sociology and the Relationships Be-
tween 'Society' 'Organism,' and 'Being,'" in The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed.
Denis HoUier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
pp. 73-84.

^- Denis HoUier, "Foreword: Collage," in The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed. Denis
HoUier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.

XV.

^^ Georges BataiUe, "The College of Sociology," in The College of Sociology (1937-39),
ed. Denis HoUier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), p. 337.

^ G.W.F. Hegel, Eectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, trans, by E.S. Haldane

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 387.
^^ See the discussion of Hegel's views on these two types of moraUty in Shadia B.

Drury, Alexandre Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin's

Press, 1994), pp. 7-11. Henceforth cited as AK.
^^ Roger Caillois, "Festival," in The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed. Denis HoUier,

trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 279-

303.

^^ Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. II, trans, by
Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 37. Henceforth cited as ASH.

^^ Georges Batailles, E'Erotisme (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1978), p. 244. Hence-
forth cited as LE.

40 Carl L. Bankston III: Ethics as Excess: Toward a 'Postmodern' Approach to Social Ethics

^^ T.R. Young, "Chaos Theory and Human Agency: Humanist Sociology in a
Postmodern Era," Humanity and Socieh/, Vol. 16 (1992), p. 446.

^ Craig J. Forsyth, "Parade Strippers: A Note on Being Naked in Public" Deviant
Behavior, Vol. 13 (1992), see esp. pp. 395-397 on the exposure-bead exchange.

"" Wesley Shrum and John Kilbum, "Ceremonial Exchange and Moral Order: Three
Ritual Paradigms of Mardi Gras." (Unpublished Manuscript, n.d.).

''- Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd (New York: Gen-
eral Hall, 1989), p. 7.

'^^ George Herbert Mead. Mind Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behavior-
ist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

** Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization (New York:
Scribner's, 1902).

-^ Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and
Hy-peraesthetics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), p. 89. Henceforth cited as PS.

''* Georges Bataille, L'Experience Interieure (Paris, Gallimard), p. 137. Henceforth cited
as EI.

''^ Allen Stoekel. Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel.
Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 11. Hence-
forth cited as PWM.

*^ Daniel Hawley, L'CEvre Insolite de Georges Batailles: Une Hie'rophanie Moderne
i (Geneva: Librairie M. Slatkine, 1978), p. 11. Henceforth cited as OI.

"^ Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews
\ (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 34.

t As I use this word, even in quotations, I wonder if it has already become fossilized

^ within its encrustations of popular associations and connotations. If the word can

only be used ironically, then perhaps its use in the title should suggest that this
I essay itself might be read as an ironic intellectual ploy.

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The Politics of Ecstasy:
Postmodemity, Ethics, and Native
American Culture in Oliver Stone's
The Doors and Natural Bom Killers

by Christopher Wise

"The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is
not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobri-
ety in that complementary to it?" |j r<

" 1

Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism

"The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the
Indian. I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me
in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was
raised over the great waters, and his land is over there.
Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room.
There are now white people all about me. I have but a
small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep
it/'

Red Cloud, Chief of the Oglala Sioux ^

Introduction

The title of my essay is taken from a poem by Jim Morrison, lead
singer of The Doors, which was written shortly before his death of
"heart failure" at the age of twenty-seven.^ Morrison was buried in
Pere Lachaise cemetery near Mont Martre, and his tomb is now the
fourth largest tourist attraction in Paris, ranking only behind the Eiffel
Tower, the Louvre, and the Musee d'Orsay.^ There have been hun-
dreds of articles written about Morrison since his death, and five sepa-
rate biographies have also appeared, one of them topping the New
York Times Best-Seller List, Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins's No

42 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

One Gets Out of Here Alive (1980). In 1982, Rolling Stone magazine also
ran a special issue on Jim Morrison, with a cover photograph and
caption reading, "He's hot, he's sexy, he's dead." Today, this issue
remains one of Rolling Stone 's biggest all-time sellers.'^ Whatever the
reason for Jim Morrison's appeal, he remains an enigmatic and se-
ductive cult-hero for thousands of people, not unlike popular iconic
figures such as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. In
this context, Oliver Stone's filmed version of the life of Jim Morrison,
The Doors (1991), represents only one more commentary on an al-
ready complex and abundantly inscribed phenomenon. In the follow-
ing essay, I will focus on Stone's reinterpretation of the poetry and life
of Morrison, as well as Stone's depiction of Native American culture
in the film. More specifically, I will explore Stone's wholesale packag-
ing of Native American religion in The Doors , or his suggestion that
60s rock star Jim Morrison somehow practiced an "authentic" form of
shamanism during his brief career, defined by Mircea Eliade as a "tech-
nique of ecstasy."^

In addition to The Doors , I will also analyze Stone's later and more
i controversial film. Natural Born Killers (1994), which similarly em-

phasizes the potentially redemptive character of Native American
religion. In Stone's more recent film, which builds upon themes first
introduced in The Doors , we are offered a more explicit critique of
postmodern media culture. Not unlike Morrison of The Doors, Stone

J himself suggests in Natural Born Killers that Native American culture

a may provide an axiological basis from which a largely unethical

r postmodern culture may be critiqued; that is, in appropriating Na-

tive American culture. Stone seeks to transcend mainstream (i.e. white)
culture to both chastise and renew it from a mythical "outside" van-
tage point. Postcolonial critics as widely divergent as Anthony Appiah
(Ghana), George Yudice (Brazil), and Sara Suleri (India) have warned
against the dangers of encouraging postcolonial art /literature to per-
form the task formerly assigned to the modern: namely, the manufac-
turing of otherness.^ While Stone's films tend to exploit Native Ameri-
^ can culture in precisely this way, I will argue here that there is also a

^ sense in which Stone's appropriation of Native American religious

t beliefs may engender a progressive and effective anti-capitalist poli-

8 tics. Because Native Americans (and many other peripheral groups)

desire to protect the sacred dimensions of their belief systems, the
ethical dimensions of such popular appropriations of indigenous cul-

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXUI, 1995 43

tures must be negotiated in light of the nature of postmodern culture
itself, especially as many "postmodernists" like Jameson, Baudrillard,
and Lyotard have defined it, but also in light of the concerns of pe-
ripheral groups who wish to preserve their distinct cultural systems.
If the "cultural logic" of late capitalism necessitates that both the left
and formerly colonized groups overcome their traditional disdain for
popular media, as many Marxist and postcolonial critics have argued,
there may be a point at which the agendas of peripheral groups (like
Native Americans) and radical film-makers /artists merge. My essay
will seek to mark out this domain by analyzing Stone's films. The Doors
and Natural Born Killers .

The Noble (and Invisible) Savage Revisited

From the early days of colonization through the present.
Euro- American novelists, journalists, and artists have portrayed Na-
tive Americans in predictably racialist (and profitable) patterns, pro-
jecting their highest spiritual aspirations, as well as their most loath-
some fears and desires, upon a largely impenetrable and wordless
object. From James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans through
Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves , the pattern has remained re-
markably consistent: The Native American is effectively dehuman-
ized by being reduced to a static type within an overwhelmingly com-
plex (and already inscribed) system of representations. The opposi-
tion created by Cooper between the good or Noble Savage (Uncas)
and the demonic and miscegenistic Redskin (Magna), for example,
perpetuates a stereotypical or racialist view of Native Americans be-
cause it reduces them to mere cardboard figures, therefore denying
them the possibility of historical process.^ However, if Cooper's The
Last of the Mohicans builds upon Romantic attitudes about Native
Americans, exploiting the binary opposition of the Noble /Demonic
Savage, few Euro-American books and films since have fared any
better at humanizing Native Americans, or at presenting Native Ameri-
cans as complex, contradictory, and "ordinary" people in history. There
are of course good economic reasons why this is so, namely because
Romantic myths about Indians are now more lucrative than ever-
which is why a film like Dances With Wolves can be tremendously
profitable but a film like Jonathan Wacks' Powwow Highway, released
in the same year but set on a contemporary reservation, failed miser-
ably at the box-office. Because films like Dances With Wolves largely

44 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

ignore the fact that Native Americans are alive and well today, and
because they usurp the role of Native Americans in creating their own
images of themselves, they often become part of the problem rather
than the solution. In other words. Native Americans are neither dead
nor invisible, and they are often resentful at the fact that their past is
being colonized all over again by film-makers like Kevin Costner and
Oliver Stone. To quote Alex Kuo, "For the dominant culture,
self-representation is never an issue, it appears everywhere; but for
people of color, however, self-representation is particularly important,
not necessarily because what the white culture imagines us to be is
not true, but because we want to be in control of our self-inventions.'"^
In Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa In The
Philosophy of Culture (1992), many of these same problems are dis-
cussed in the context of traditional African culture/ art and its appro-
priation by postmodern (i.e. Western) society for purposes of finan-
cial gain. Specifically, Appiah warns against the dangers inherent in
peripheral cultures filling the void left by a now-defunct modernist
1 aesthetic, crassly "manufacturing alterity" (356), or cynically produc-

^ ing otherness for popular consumption in the First World. ^ For this

r reason, Appiah applauds a scene from Yambo Ouologuem's Bound To

Violence , in which a West African artist/ shyster mass-produces tribal
masks that are aged by soaking for a few weeks in a nearby pond-
and then sold in Europe and America. In the context of an encroach-
ing and nearly total multinational or global capitalism, the dangers
\ for peripheral groups seem clear: As George Yiidice has put it, how

does one prevent one's culture from being "destabilized and overrun
I by by centrifugal currents deriving from the metropolis"?" Or, how

does one scale back the restructuring and resemioticizing of one's
culture by a largely indifferent when not utterly hostile signifying
system? In this context, films like Oliver Stone's The Doors and Natu-
ral Born Killers , as well as Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves , may
seem deeply threatening and aggressive. Besides reinscribing popu-
lar myths about Native Americans, such films may promote what AIM
(the American Indian Movement) and Vine Deloria, Jr. have called an
"Outsider-influenced Insider perception of self," making it increas-
ingly difficult for indigenous peoples to differentiate between their
own self-determined inventions of personal identity and those that
have been imposed upon them by their Euro- American colonizers. ^^

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIIl, 1995 45

In the case of Stone's films, however, if the shamanic ceremonies
reenacted are not "really" Native American, and if Stone is in fact
offering us a wholesale, stereotypical, and packaged account of Na-
tive American religion, as I have suggested so far, it does not make
the task of analyzing The Doors or Natural Born Killers any less urgent
or perplexing. In other words, the question nevertheless remains: if
Stone is not really showing us an "authentic" form of Native Ameri-
can Shamanism, what is it that he thinks he's showing us? I am there-
fore proposing, in the phraseology of Marx, to reform Stone's reading
of Native American culture through the analysis of that mystical con-
sciousness-in this case Stone' s-which has not yet become clear to it-
self.'^ In this sense, while the shamanic rites reenacted in his films
may not be "really" Native American, they are obviously something
else that calls itself Native American, and that may very well share
certain affinities with "authentic" Native American objectives, despite
the obvious limitations of Stone's political imagination.

Vietnam and The Doors

In his essay "Periodizing the 60s," Fredric Jameson has argued that
the 60s may be defined as

a moment when the enlargement of capitalism on a
global scale simultaneously produced an immense free-
ing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious re-
lease of untheorized new forces: the ethnic forces of
black and "minority," or Third World, movements ev-
erywhere, regionalisms, the development of new and
militant bearers of "surplus consciousness" in the stu-
dent and women's movements, as well as in a host of
struggles of other kinds . 14

Hence, Jameson argues that the political mission of the First World in
the 60s hinged upon resistance to imperialist ventures in the Third
World, like the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, which were directed at
harnessing these "untheorized new forces" and "social energies" (P60s,
p. 180). For Jameson then, as for Sartre, the 60s signaled an important
historical moment when the various "natives" of the world, includ-
ing minorities, marginals, and women, at last became "human be-
ings," not literally, of course, but in the political imagination of the
First World (P60s, p. 181). In this light, Jameson proposes a thematized

46 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

reading of the 60s in terms of "the emergence of new 'subjects of his-
tory' of a nonclass type (blacks, students. Third World peoples)" (P60s,
p. 181).^^ The first portion of my essay will build upon Jameson's
"periodization" of the 60s, especially insofar as I will seek to demon-
strate the significance of the film The Doors as it pertains to popular
resistance movements to the Vietnam War.

By most accounts, what characterizes the films of Oliver Stone is
his obsession with 60s political themes, especially the Vietnam War.
In fact, Stone himself has often remarked that he primarily makes
"Vietnamers," much as John Ford had once insisted that he primarily
made Westerns. Though Stone was well-known in Hollywood as the
writer of Midnight Express (1977), it was not until the success of Pla-
toon (1986), an autobiographical account of the Vietnam War, that he
became a significant figure in the public imagination. Following
Sylvester Stallone's Rambo films. Stone's stark depictions of the
graphic violence of day-to-day combat in Vietnam provided a healthy,
if relatively moderate, palliative to the disturbing logic of many 80s
Hollywood war films. As an actual Vietnam veteran. Stone also lended
i a certain authority and aura of "reality" to his film, as opposed to

r Stallone's mere posturing and machoistic war-fantasizing; in other

^ words. Stone had actually done his time in Vietnam; he had earned

t the right to show us how it really was, even if this meant enlisting the

e generic conventions of Hollywood slasher-films to get his message

across.

Besides Stanley Kubrick's Full-Metal Jacket (1987), the only other
Hollywood film that approaches the popular impact made by Platoon
was, of course, Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), which, not
coincidentally, employed The Door's most famous song, "The End,"
on its soundtrack. Nor is it a coincidence that Stone himself was a
Doors fan in Vietnam, along with many others in the military. Stone
has also stated that, in filming the motion-picture The Doors , he at-
^ tempted to capture something of "the way he felt about Jim [Morrison]

^ in the jungle in Vietnam" (LK, p. 198). In fact. Stone has even stated

c that the major theme of the film, which is "Morrison as shaman, the

t tribe's medicine man, or priest," evolved from his experience with

t The Doors' music while serving in Vietnam (LK, p. 197-198). Accord-

c ing to Stone, this was the film's major "hook," the most crucial thing

he wanted to get across to his audience (LK, p. 198). But whatever
Stone's creative logic, there are many other reasons to consider the

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXUI, 1995 47

Vietnam War's function in The Doors , especially in relation to the film's
"shamanic" theme. First, it is well-known that Morrison's father was
one of the major American military figures of the Vietnam War, serv-
ing both as an Admiral in the United States Navy and later as Deputy
Chief of Operations at the Pentagon. Stone emphasizes this point in
the film when Patricia Keneally, one of the minor characters, confronts
Morrison about his father's role at the Gulf of Tonkin during the out-
break of the war. Morrison himself avoided service by claiming he
was homosexual,^*' and many of his songs reflect his emphatic anti-war
views, especially "The Unknown Soldier." Because of his stance on
the Vietnam War, there has even been a documentary made speculat-
ing that Morrison was killed by the FBI, which kept an extensive file
on him (BOT, p. 464).

In any case, Morrison remained estranged from his family until
his death, and there is a sense in which his most controversial lyrics in
"The End," about a young boy who wants to kill his father and have
sexual intercourse with his mother, may be understood not only in
their obvious oedipal connotations but also in the context of Morrison's
own father's role in the Vietnam War. Nor does Stone fail to empha-
size the Vietnam War throughout the film The Doors , most notably
through television news shots of bombing raids, combat scenes, burn-
ing monks, and student protests, as well as through dramatic scenes
emphasizing Morrison's own resentment towards his father.

However, as we will explore below, the unifying thematic of the
60s for both First and Third World societies, which is described by
Jameson in terms of "the emergence of new 'subjects of history'" (P60s,
p. 181), plays itself out in Stone's film, not only in relation to the Viet-
nam War, but also in relation to Jim Morrison's appropriation of Na-
tive American religious beliefs. In other words, if the 60s may be char-
acterized by Jameson's proposed thematic of "the coming to
self-consciousness" of culturally marginalized subjectivities, as well
as by the various failed attempts to connect the experience of
marginalized individuals within a larger context of "group" or "col-
lective" experience (P60s, p. 181), we may now begin to clarify with
more precision the cultural logic of Morrison's professed "shaman-
ism" in Stone's The Doors . To repeat, 60s "liberation" movements in
First World nations hinged largely on the emergence of a new
"nonclass" subject: a subject found not only in remote Third World
villages but also in places like Berkeley, Watts, and the Oglala Reser-

48 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

vation. Hence, Stone rightly subordinates his film's narrative to the
apparently obscure theme of Morrison's occult philosophy a popu-
larized conflation of shamanic religion and Nietzschean aesthetics. In
fact, without the formal structuring principle of Morrison's "shaman-
ism"-Stone's chief "strategy of containment" in The Doors -his
film-product itself would be incoherent; which is to say, unavailable
for popular consumption.

Far from coincidental then, the mythic logic of Native American
shamanism constitutes The Doors's basic entelechy, its dynamic
inner- forming principle. Not surprisingly, the same religio-mythic
pattern recurs in nearly all published writings on Jim Morrison and
The Doors. The dialectical theme of the historical simultaneity of "lib-
eration" and domination that characterizes the 60s is operative in The
Doors 's narrative both overtly and latently: First, Stone chooses to
emphasize Morrison's belief that he was "possessed" by the dislo-^
cated spirit of a Native American shaman who literally spoke through
the vehicle of Morrison's body. In this sense, the "native" at last be-

1 comes a "human being," as Sartre originally theorized, but only at
.T the price of giving up its own corporeality. Second, the ideologeme of
X the Wordless Native American may also be said to function as a re-
^ pressed cultural sign that both empowers and enables Stone's film
1^ narrative.

The Uses of Shamanism in The Doors
I

2 When the film begins, we see an older, bearded Jim Morrison re-

r cording his poetry into a studio microphone. Morrison, who is played

by Val Kilmer, announces that "the ceremony is about to begin," as
Stone immediately shifts the film's setting to a deserted road in New
Mexico, the highway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. From the
backseat of his parents' car, the five-year old Jim Morrison witnesses

^ a fatal car accident involving several Navahos who lay injured and

dying on the roadside, one man in particular bleeding from his head.
The man with the wounded head is strikingly bald, even reptilian.

^ Later, we discover that he represents the dislocated spirit that Morrison

believed "leapt into his body" after the accident. Another older man,

t who seems to be dying, bleeds from his mouth as the Morrison's fam-

c ily car passes by. In Stone's version of the "Morrison as shaman" myth,

the older Native American will later become the guiding shamanic
spirit which leads Morrison through the underworld, or through the

]Nest Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 49

land of the dead, during his own initiation rites. The theme of
Morrison's possession by the spirit of a Native American, a man who
resembles a lizard, henceforth unifies the narrative until the film's
conclusion when the "lizard spirit" literally discards Morrison's body
before walking off into a spiraling abyss. Throughout the film the "liz-
ard spirit" appears during the most crucial moments, particularly those
moments fraught with chaos and Dionysian excess: He appears at
Morrison's various concerts, at orgiastic parties in Manhattan, and at
acid trips in the desert of California. Stone's contribution to the
"Morrison as shaman" myth consists in his linking the actual
Morrison's employment of lizards in his own concerts to his alleged
demonic possession by a Native American spirit.

However, Stone deviates from previous accounts in that he locates
the spirit's "departure" at Morrison's actual death, whereas most bio- j f

graphical versions have suggested Morrison's "possession" ended '/

during his final concert in 1970. According to band-member Ray 'i

Manzarek, for example, during The Doors' s last show in New Or- i

leans, he saw "all of Jim's psychic energy go out the top of his head"
(BOT. p. 439). Biographers James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky are
even less subtle. They suggest that "the spirit that powered Jim
Morrison, the spirit that changed him from a man to a shaman [and]
hounded him incessantly every moment of his life. ..left him that night
in New Orleans" (BOT, p. 438).^^ But, Stone also establishes Morrison's
intellectual background to cornplement the more primary shamanic
possession theme. First, Morrison's intellectualism is affirmed with
long takes focusing on the books strewn about the floor of his apart-
ment, including Rimbaud's A Season In Hell and Artaud's The Theater
and Its Double . We are also informed that the name of the band comes
from a poem by Blake about the "doors of perception," and that The
Doors play Brecht compositions as a part of their nightly performances.
In addition, Morrison in The Doors, like Rimbaud, tells us that he aims
for a "'prolonged derangement of the senses' to attain the unknown";
and, like Nietzsche, he believes the world is a "'will to power' and
nothing besides." The effect of Stone's emphasis on Morrison's intel-
lectual prowess is to bolster the integrity of Morrison's vision, and it
is a marker by which to judge Morrison's later fall into consumer cul-
ture.

In particular. Stone emphasizes the dual influences of Native Ameri-
can religion and Nietzschean aesthetics in shaping Morrison's own

50 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

beliefs that an ordinary rock-and-roll concert could be transformed
into a redemptive ceremonial communion, even a "Dionysian" shat-
tering of individuality aimed at ecstatic fusion with being itself. In
early scenes of The Doors , Morrison tells us that "in seance, the sha-
' man leads a sensuous panic. He acts like a madman, a professional

hysteric." We are also told that the shaman "gets into a peyote trance,
deeper and deeper, and then he has a vision, and the whole tribe is
healed." Nietzsche's theory of Greek tragedy is at once conflated with
shamanic religion both in a film that Morrison makes as a student at
UCLA and when he later remarks that "all cultures have a version of
I [the shaman]. Greeks have theater, the gods. [And] the Indians... call

; him the one who makes you crazy." Accordingly, Stone evokes the

deus ex machina of the Native American "lizard spirit" which appears
I during various Doors's concerts, often flanked by naked concert-goers

j and other Dionysian revelers. As the shows progress, the concert stage

! is often transformed into a tribal bonfire, a primordial riot presided

over by Morrison as "Lizard King." In fact, Morrison in The Doors
T thinks of himself as a kind of Dionysus whom the audience wants

i "ripped to pieces." And, because he believes the audience wants his

r death-his ritual dismemberment as atonement for the primordial trag-

\ edy of human individuation-death itself becomes an obsessive theme

t of his concerts and songs.

However, Morrison's employment of Nietzschean aesthetics in The
Doors is ultimately subordinated to Stone's more primary theme of
"Morrison as shaman, the tribe's medicine man, or priest" (LK, p.
197-198). While this is not the place to engage the complexity of "au-
thentic" shamanism, especially as it has been practiced for unknown
centuries in both Siberia and North America, it may nevertheless be
worth noting that Stone correctly emphasizes a number of significant
features of shamanism in The Doors : First, shamanism has been de-

1 fined by western scholars as a "technique of ecstasy" often involving
S the use of narcotics, ritual drumming, and bodily deprivation (SMN,

2 p. xiii). Second, shamanic vocation is often construed in terms of a
2 "demonic" possession, involving the ritual "death" of the candidate
t and his subsequent rebirth (SMN, p. 85). Finally, the shaman's terri-
t tory is indeed the mystical geography of the underworld, or the land
2 of the dead, replete with mythical snakes lurking about in the pri-
j mordial garden (SMN, p. 272-273). Stone draws upon many of these
I elements in constructing The Doors 's narrative, both by contextualizing

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIU, 2995 51

Morrison's frequent use of hallucinogenic drugs and by situating
Morrison's imagined journeys to the underworld in a Navaho burial
site.

Yet, as Stone also demonstrates, Morrison later came to feel that
his efforts were misguided at best, that rock performance could never
hope to transcend its basis in consumer culture. In other words. Stone
rightly perceives that Morrison's appeal consists largely in his ability
to manufacture alterity, both through revitalizing an exhausted
high-modernist aesthetic and through appropriating Native Ameri-
can religious ritual for popular consumption. Morrison in Stone's The
Doors therefore functions as a veritable "otherness machine," a First
World hybrid of the modern and the postcolonial. But, Morrison's
popular appeal has less to do with his own personal genius, as Stone
seems to suggest,'^ than it does with the very real historical contradic-
tions that existed within the specific situation of the 60s, a situation in
which First World "liberation" is ultimately predicated upon "a whole
new wave of American military and economic domination through-
out the world." ^"^ Only within such a context is Morrison's gesture of
"going native" comprehensible, especially in opposition to the
ahistorical mystification offered to us by Stone in The Doors . Just as
the character of Kurtz in Coppola's Apocalypse Now is unimaginable
outside of its basis in imperialist ideology, or outside of the situational
context of western colonialist ventures into new and "uncharted" re-
gions, the character of Morrison in Stone's The Doors is finally un-
imaginable outside of its basis in, what Jameson has defined as, the
political mission of the First World in the 60s: namely, "resistance to
wars aimed ... at stemming the new revolutionary forces in the Third
World" (P60s, p. 180).

Hence, Morrison is "the tribe's medicine man or priest" only inso-
far as the tribe itself is renegade, a collection of alienated misfits from
within the dominant ideology of late capitalist society. Additionally,
Morrison's shamanic trips to the mystical realm of the dead, the final
"undiscovered country," may at last escape their basis in occult fan-
tasy only when dialectically estranged by acknowledging the central-
ity of the economic in global or multinational terms. Morrison's sha-
manism is therefore less a commentary on the demonic or supernatu-
ral than it is on late capitalism in the 60s, especially as "a process in
which ... the last vestiges of Nature which survived on into classical

52 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

capitalism are at length eliminated: namely the Third World and the
unconscious" (P60s, p. 207).

The Return of the Economic in The Doors

As Stone demonstrates, Morrison's professed aim to heal a
wounded and dying culture through transforming rock performance
into a religious ceremony was a failure on nearly all levels (not the
least being Morrison's own psychic health). The subsequent
commodification of Jim Morrison in the late 60s serves as an example
of the greater economic process of the autonomization and reification
of both the "sign"-in this instance, the sign being Jim Morrison-and
of culture itself, as it occurred at this time. While Stone's illustration
of the fall of Morrison into consumer culture does in fact dramatically
reveal the way in which the advent of postmodern culture is experi-
enced by Morrison as a "pissing away" of the revolutionary promise
of the mid-60s,-^ Stone himself seems to understand the dynamic logic
of this process, while remaining merely exploitational, as opposed to
T Morrison who is "creatively" exploitational. In other words, I am sug-

<{ gesting that Stone has in some ways been able to intuitively depict

r the superstructural dynamics of economic expansionism in the 60s,

^ the break signified by "postmodernity," without himself grasping its

t internal logic. Nowhere is this more clear in The Doors than in the

g opening sequences when we are shown a recreated excerpt from one

^ of Morrison's own student films at UCLA, which is described by Kyle

2 MacLachlan, who plays Doors organist Ray Manzarek, as "nonlinear,

poetry, everything good art stands for." Manzarek and other students
even compare Morrison's short student-film to the films of Godard
and Warhol. However, as if apologizing for inflicting this nonlinear
monstrosity upon his audience. Stone himself immediately follows
Morrison's brief clip with the tritest montage of his film: a romantic

1 stroll along the beach with Jim and girlfriend Pam, a sequence which
might safely be inserted into any Redford-Streisand film.

2 But before more fully cataloging the decline of Morrison in Stone's
e film, it will be worthwhile to briefly clarify the central thematic of the
t economic level in the 60s, as proposed by Jameson, in an effort to
t more precisely delineate its material reverberations within the super-
g structural realm of First World cultural production in the 60s. In
J "Periodizing the 60s," Jameson borrows from Ernst Mandel's Late

Capitalism (1976) to suggest that the central economic thematic of the

]Nest Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIU, 1995 53

60s, alluded to above, may be characterized in terms of a wide-scale
"mechanization of the superstructure," or even a "generalized univer-
sal industrialization ."-^ In Jameson's formulation, the 60s are there-
fore indicative of the beginnings of a "momentous transformational
period when a systemic restructuring takes place on a global scale"
(P60s, p. 207). As discussed in the previous section, for Jameson, this
systemic restructuring signals the moment when "the last vestiges of
Nature [especially] the Third World and the Unconscious" are at length
penetrated by the capitalist mode of production in its multi-national
form. Additionally, the phenomenon of the mechanization of the su-
perstructure as it develops in the superstructural realm of cultural
production is most clearly evident for Jameson by way of the prodi-
gious growth of both the media apparatus and the culture of consum-
erism (P60s, p. 190). It is here where the project of connecting previ-
ously marginalized subjectivities within a larger context of group
praxis, the old dream of unifying disparate alienated subjects within
a larger "collective" subject position, is now crushed from "the shock
of some new, hard, unconceptualized, resistant object... which thus
gradually generates a whole new problematic" (P60s, p. 191).

The level of the economic hereby asserts its priority but its sys-
temic coherence is not, as Jameson reminds us, at first comprehen-
sible in any existential sense to the bewildered individuals who find
themselves at its mercy (P60s, p. 206). In Stone's The Doors , we are
offered a privileged glimpse into the nature of this process, the
so-called "the mechanization of the superstructure" in the 60s, through
observing the documented failures of Morrison and The Doors. First,
Stone shows us how Morrison in the beginning of his career attempted
to manipulate the media but then fell victim to the autonomization of
his own image in the realm of popular culture. In other words,
Morrison's various attempts to deconstruct his own image were patent
failures; hence, Morrison ends by lamenting in the film that he is a
"clown" who goes on stage to "howl for people." The older Morrison,
who in Stone's account deliberately grows overweight and slovenly
to subvert his status as a sexual icon, states bitterly "I'm a joke the
gods played on me, a fake hero." In fact, in the final concert scene of
The Doors , a recreation of the Miami riot of 1968, Morrison exposes
himself to the audience primarily as a means of ridiculing the Morrison
public image. In the actual recorded text of the Miami concert, from
which Stone borrows his dialogue in The Doors , Morrison even shouts

54 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

to the audience: "Hitler is alive and well in Miami. I know, I fucked
her last night"; and, even more astutely, he quips "You'd all eat my
shit, wouldn't you?"

By the end of the film, Morrison says simply that "Rock is death.

There's no longer belief." But Morrison's disillusionment does not

occur without the media first appropriating his image and music with

his mostly naive participation and co-operation. In a scene borrowed

from Antonioni's Blozv-Up , Stone has Morrison photographed by a

young fashion photographer, played by actress Mimi Rogers, who

aggressively "makes love" to Morrison with her camera. The Doors

I also take advantage of press conferences, deliberately manipulating

the media but with little awareness of the media's newfound power

and cultural significance. Finally, Stone changes the biographical facts

j of Morrison's life to have the Doors' s song "Light My Fire" bought by

I Ford Motor Company for a television commercial, an offer which

I Morrison actually vetoed in disgust. In the film, when Morrison sees

the commercial, he hurls a television across the room in anger and

1 tells the other band members that "something has been lost" in their

I selling-out.

r However, perhaps the clearest example of the impact of the eco-

'^ nomic in the realm of cultural production occurs in The Doors when

^ Stone positions Morrison at an Andy Warhol party in Manhattan.

Warhol, who is played in the film by Crispin Glover, is introduced to
Morrison by Truman Capote, who is played by Paul Williams. In op-
position to Kilmer's Morrison, the characters of Warhol and Capote
in The Doors approach both parody and the pastiche in their deliber-

^ ate heavy-handedness: they are more cardboard figures than histori-

cal representations. The contrast between Morrison and Warhol is strik-
ing, and it is emblematic of the waning of the modern in the face of an

^ encroaching postmodern aesthetic sensibility. For example, when

1 Morrison goes to see Warhol, he must first walk down a corridor where
s he encounters a Morrison look-alike or parody. Upon meeting Warhol,

2 Morrison is given a gold telephone, so he can "talk to God." Warhol
e himself tells Morrison that he doesn't have anything to say to God,
t and then he promptly leaves Morrison to speak with a new guest,
^ apparently Michel Foucault. In the film Morrison throws away the

telephone and promptly receives a salute from the "lizard" spirit who
^ rushes by him in a horse-drawn carriage. The implication, however,

is that Warhol's postmodernity is also a post-theological aesthetic as

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 55

Opposed to Morrison's essentialized modernist aesthetic. In other
words, while Morrison laments the death of "faith," Warhol simply
has nothing to say to God; in the postmodern, God has become a ci-
pher, a redundancy. Warhol, whose paintings and films hinged on the
manipulation of the media apparatus and the growing culture of con-
sumerism, embodies the new order in the realm of cultural produc-
tion, the avant-garde artist in the era of multinational capitalism, as
opposed to Morrison's rear-garde modernism, the waning logic of
the old-fashioned imperialist order.

We may say then that while crassly appropriating Native Ameri-
can religion for reasons that are far less "innocent" than those of Jim
Morrison (whose use of Native American Shamanism in the late 60s
was relatively well-intended though naive), Oliver Stone's The Doors
paradoxically succeeds in recreating the historical situation of the 60s
in a deliberately politicized and suggestive way, hence forefronting
issues that few other mainstream film-makers in the U.S. are now
willing to approach. Even more importantly. Stone suggests that op-
positional politics in the late 60s /early 70s lost direction for clearly
economic reasons rather than strictly cultural ones (i.e. burn-out, bad
LSD trips, free-love gone bad, etc.). The problem of the modern, how-
ever, which is to say the problem of life under monopoly capitalism,
consists largely in the fact that individuals within it are commonly
blind to the real or historical basis of their economic affluence: the
oppression of the subaltern masses of the third world, but also ex-
ploited labor down the street. The unsavory realities of empire,
whether one chooses to speak of the systematic incarceration of in-
digenous peoples in the United States or imperialist ventures in South-
east Asia, are often unavailable in any existential or purely ontologi-
cal sense to those who live within such a society. However, as we
have seen, the human misery created by such a culture, both within
and without, can generate "clearings" of the most unexpected sort, to
borrow a Heideggerian term, wherein the struggles of oppressed
peoples are revealed for what they really are: interdependent." For a
brief moment, perhaps. Stone's film then enables us to see the direc-
tion resistance must take: the forging of a practical, working alliance
between peoples across the globe who are oppressed on the basis of
their class, race, gender, or sexual orientation (though this list is not
by any means exhaustive). Of course, this also means resistance to the
false consciousness of contemporary, postmodern cynicism, to bor-

56 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

row from Peter Sloterdijk, the smug assurance that surrounds us (and
that is within us), promising us that such projects can be dismissed as
"politically correct" or simply unrealistic-bad grooves from the 60s.

Ethics and Media Culture in Natural Born Killers

If Stone's The Doors demonstrates a universal or wide-scale mecha-
nization of the superstructure (i.e. the startling growth of the media
apparatus as well as the autonomization of the photographic sign in
the domain of popular culture), which was historically commiserate
with the demise of a now-dated form of monopoly (i.e.
Euro- American) imperialism, as well as the advent of a more prop-
erly global or multinational form of capitalism in the early 1970s,
Stone's later film Natural Born Killers takes us to the mid 1990s wherein
the tyranny of the media apparatus is now made more explicit for us,
more unavoidable and repulsive. Most obviously, in the formal com-
position of Natural Born Killers , Stone avoids the generic conventions
] of classical Hollywood cinema, more closely approximating Morrison's

r own film as a student at UCLA: that is, to quote the Manzarek charac-

ter from The Doors , "non-linear, poetry, everything good art stands
for." In fact. Stone even deliberately integrates clips from the film he
imagines Morrison to have made as a student into the composition of
his own film: specifically, black and white images of a Native Ameri-
can shaman in the throes of religious ecstasy.-^ Natural Born Killers is
I therefore more daring, even better art, than The Doors though it nev-

ertheless refuses to adopt postmodern aesthetic strategies itself, opt-

1 ing instead for the well-worn modernist and "homeopathic" approach
r of imploding the simulacrum by injecting it with ever greater doses
C of its own poison: in this case, popular media's glorification of mind-
t less violence is "healed" through ruthlessly completing its own vague
T and half-articulated logic. In short. Stone depicts postmodern media
g culture (at least in its present form) as wholly deranged, pathological,

2 evil . Following the lead of Morrison, Stone also relies upon Native
g American shamanism to provide the axiological basis of his ethical
. critique of popular American culture. However, despite its visual
. powerfulness. Natural Born Killers flounders inasmuch as Stone him-
self catechrestically violates Native American culture to facillate his
own ethical but, finally, narcissistic-critique of postmodernity. In
other words. Stone seeks to "go outside"the vacuous logic of contem-

]

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 57

porary American culture by appropriating a convenient Indian Other,
which is a mere epistemological expedient for him. One problem with
Stone's approach is that an "outside" of this sort is largely fictional-a
romantic myth that tends to annihilate the very culture it seeks to
prioritize.

The first image of Natural Born Killers is a rattlesnake, henceforth a
symbol of Mickey and Mallory the film's anti-heroes (not unlike the
"lizard king" of The Doors), whose rampage of murder, rape, and
mayhem make Charles Merriweather and his baton-twirling girlfriend
(of Badlands fame and Bruce Springsteen's album Nebraska ) seem
almost benign. The snake symbolizes pure evil, born from an irre-
sponsible media culture that glorifies violence for the cheap, voyeuris-
tic thrills it provides-and of course for the high media ratings which
may be translated into capital. In this regard. Stone makes abundantly
clear that it is the postmodern media apparatus that summons forth
the evil duo, Mickey and Mallory, who themselves realize that they
are creations of the media-" Frankenstein monsters," they assert, who
were invented by the media's own Dr. Frankenstein, Wayne Gale, a
pop newsman and Geraldo Rivera look-alike. Throughout the film.
Stone reiterates the theme that the media is the truly insane party-
rather than killers Mickey and Mallory, who at least retain the ability
to distinguish between good and evil, "but just don't give a damn"
(as a pop psychologist informs us). During the final shoot-out at the
federal penitentiary, for example, the killer Mickey even confiscates a
gun from the reporter Wayne Gale, who at this point also shoots at
prison guards but for no apparent reason: Mickey states to Wayne,
"Give that to me. You're not sane." When Mickey and Mallory ex-
ecute Wayne, the implication is clear: even psychotic killers and vio-
lent criminals are able to make fundamental ethical distinctions that
are wholly lacking in those who control the popular media appara-
tus. For Stone then, if a Baudrillardian or anarchistic reign of the ob-
ject characterizes postmodern media culture, the automated sign pre-
vails not because the modernist subject has been imploded, but be-
cause those who control the media have themselves abdicated their
most basic ethical responsibilities to the communities that they serve.
Like Morrison, Stone therefore remains a die-hard modernist, hence
the resiliency of his own ethical stance, but he is only able to sustain
this high moral position by appealing to a mythical outside, an

58 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

Amerindian and Utopian form of subjectivity rather than a purely
Kantian or bourgeois one.

Perhaps the most repulsive character of the film is Mallory's fa-
ther, played by Rodney Dangerfield, who not ironically cheers for his
favorite professional wrestler by bellowing into the tv screen, "Kill
the fucking Indian!" Like Mallory's father, Mickey initially has little
respect for Native American culture. Driving through Monument
Valley, Mickey yells to a reservation cop, "Cochise, Go eat some more
fry bread!" Mickey, who butchers meat for a living, comes to revise
his views about Indians later in the film. In fact, both Mickey and
Mallory seem to be equally lacking in any ethical sensibility until their
car breaks down, and they are taken in by a modern-day shaman.
Red Cloud, who lives with his son in a primitive structure in the middle
of the desert. Red Cloud (or Mahpiua Luta), it will be remembered,
was one of the greatest Amerindian chiefs, specifically of the Oglala
Sioux, who led one of the few successful Indian wars against the U.S.
Army (directed at that time by General William T. Sherman, who had
1 better luck in Atlanta). Like Mahiua Luta, for whom he was named,

X Stone's Red Cloud firmly holds out against white American culture

r by preserving a sacred space within which he can live, while sur-

rounded on all sides by total insanity. When Mickey and Mallory
stumble into his dwelling, a simple, open-air hut with no electricity, we
see them through the eyes of Red Cloud (played in the film by AIM
founder Russell Means), with clear dictionary labels attached: they
are "demons" whose sickness Red Cloud reads as "too much tv." To
further emphasize the way in which Red Cloud stands against the
I values of popular American culture. Stone places an upside down

^ U.S.A. flag in his home. As in The Doors , Stone again connects U.S.

^ global imperialism and the Native American contexts by showing us

t a framed letter indicating that Red Cloud's older son was killed in the

1 Vietnam War. Red Cloud tells his younger son that Mickey and Mallory
S have the "sad sickness," that they are "lost in a world of ghosts." When
c the boy asks if they can be healed. Red Cloud states, "Maybe they

2 don't want to be."

|- Besides the obvious inversion of American values that Red Cloud's

^ life represents, the simplicity and environmental harmony of his

^ lifestyle, we see that rattlesnakes peacefully inhabit Red Cloud's dwell-

ing. If the rattlesnake symbolizes pure evil, as we have seen, the im-
plication then is that evil of this sort is an inevitable aspect of human

YJest Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIIl 1995 59

existence, that Red Cloud can live comfortably with evil in a way that
mainstream Americans cannot. In western culture, pure evil-that is,
anything that opposes our own socially constructed belief system-
must be cathartically eliminated, expulsed from the collective body-
which inevitably leaves a "remainder" [le reste ], to quote Jacques
Derrida. The existence of this remainder must be denied at all costs;
that is, intolerable "evil" must be removed to the reservation, the con-
centration camp, the gulag, the state or federal penitentiary (Mickey
and Mallory's eventual fate). Czech author Milan Kundera, who him-
self was expelled from a largely oppressive and totalitarian regime,
similarly speaks of "the denial of shit" that is characteristic of west-
ern ethics and politics today. Red Cloud can therefore live with "shit"
(or "evil") in a way that white American culture cannot; he does not
seek to totally banish it to the gulag, or to the reservation-where Na-
tive Americans themselves are "set apart"-but he instead attempts to
heal Mickey and Mallory's "sad sickness," despite his awareness of
the near impossibility of this task. However, during Red Cloud's at-
tempted exorcism of Mickey and Mallory, we find that the "tv sick-
ness" runs too deep: believing that Red Cloud is his own abusive fa-
ther, Mickey mistakenly kills the shaman during the healing ceremony.
At this point, rattlesnakes attack the couple outside of Red Cloud's
dwelling, evil consuming evil, which forms a kind of profane
ouroboros, but also initiates a homeopathic pharmakos, pointing to-
wards the ultimate success of Red Cloud's ceremony.

In other words, Mickey and Mallory's healing, that is the recovery
of their ethical sensibility, comes at the price of Red Cloud's death.
Red Cloud is therefore a messianic figure but also a scapegoat. We
may conclude then that the redemption of American media culture
that Stone urges, most obviously in the lyrics of the final song of the
film that call for "repentance," is predicated upon the pilfering of the
values of indigenous culture to reinvigorate a largely bankrupt and
ethic-less postmodern media culture. Now, for the first moment in
the film, Mickey and Mallory are aware that they have done some-
thing wrong, that they have committed an act of evil, a realization
that never comes to Wayne Gayle. After Red Cloud is shot, Mallory
calls Mickey, "bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!" She states, "You killed life!
He fed us, took us in!" Mickey also is aware that he has done some-
thing evil; later, he tells Wayne Gayle in a live interview that the only
thing he regrets is that he killed the Indian, the person who "saw the

60 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

demon." "The only thing that kills a demon is love," Mickey tells
Wayne, and it is Red Cloud himself who gives this love by offering
his life in an act of perfect charity.

We may say then that, for Stone, the inherent or in-dwelling posi-
tivity of Native American culture, especially its philosophical and re-
ligious wisdom, but also its environmental awareness (voiced by
Mickey in his criticism of corporate businessmen as "environmental
predators"), offers the possibility of an ethical critique of postmodern
or "mainstream" media culture. However, like Cooper's Noble Sav-
age Uncas, Stone's messianic Red Cloud finally reveals next to noth-
ing about "true" or "ordinary" Native American culture in the United
States today, instead functioning as a convenient screen-icon upon
which Stone can project his own Utopian ideals and fantasies. If Red
Cloud is admirable, as opposed to the bad-guy savages of the early
Hollywood Westerns, he is nevertheless more a racial and romantic
type than a humanized or "real" person in history. He is an "outside"
that never really ceases to be "inside" all the while.

r Conclusion: Postmodern Ethics and the Damaged Subject

r Earlier in this essay, I indicated that there may be a point at which

\ the agendas of filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Native American

t activists converge, despite the limitations of Stone's approach. In fact,

g the Native American community in general, if one can speak so

broadly, has been divided over recent Hollywood films such as Stone's,
as well as Dances With Wolves , The Last of the Mohicans, and Pocohantas,
some arguing, with Russell Means (of Natural Born Killers ), that tire-
some "political correctness" debates, rather than authentic Indian
concerns, have motivated much of the criticism of the above films
and others. Other Native Americans have countered that Indians like
Means, also the voice of Pocohantas' s father, have "sold out" their

1 heritage for profit. While Means is surely correct that much critique
^ of Native Americans in recent Hollywood film criticism tends to pro-

2 mote a kind of vulgar ideological analysis, a neo-Stalinism of sorts
2 that dogmatically mandates the proper criteria for "authenticity," the
t fact remains that many deeply harmful and racist attitudes about
t Native Americans have been fostered in U.S. society by Hollywood
2 films throughout the last eighty years. For example, it is difficult even
J today for many "white" Americans to understand how "heroic" fig-
ures like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Wayne, to cite but a few

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIU, 1995 61

examples, can hardly be considered as appropriate role models for
Native Americans. Additionally, many "mainstream" Americans com-
pletely fail to understand how repulsive it is for Native Americans to
encounter sporting teams with names like the Braves (or the Chiefs,
the Indians, the Redskins). It is no wonder then that even moderately
stereotypical films like The Doors and Natural Born Killers are often
well-received by significant portions of the Native American popu-
lace as "progressive": Many Native Americans, in fact, are simply re-
lieved that the days of Roy Rogers are gone (at least for most of us).
Still, it is irritating to have to celebrate one's cultural exploitation and
misrepresentation as "affirmative."

In the case of Stone's appropriation of Native American culture,
the various shortcomings of his approach should nevertheless not
blind us to the positive, even Utopian, dimensions of his films. If it is
true, as Claude Levi-Strauss has argued, that all cultural artifacts con-
tain significant Utopian, as well as ideological impulses-that is, all
cultural artifacts function in the first instance as symbolic "questions"
posed to history in a creative effort to resolve the dilemmas of mate-
rial neccessity^^-even outright fascist film narratives, like Stallone's
Rambo films or, say, the fatuous and Gingrichesque Forrest Gump ,
may teach us something about the direction an oppositional politics
should take. We must therefore broaden our conception of ideology
to mean something more than "false consciousness," or simply "wrong
thinking," so that it may include, in a more properly Althusserian
and neutral sense, our "imaginary relationship" to the real material
environments that we inhabit. In other words, as long as oppositional
filmmakers, critics, and theoreticians continue to endorse a strictly
negative conception of contemporary Hollywood film as inherently
ideological (in the bad sense), it is unlikely that an effective coalition
or broad power base of support for socialist issues can be established
within popular culture. As Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan have
asserted in Camera Politica (1988), "[t]o a certain extent, culture pre-
cedes and determines politics. If this has clear implications for under-
standing conservative ascendancy in the political realm, it also has
implications for formulating a socialist alternative to that power."^^
KelLner and Ryan rightly urge that the Left must "overcome its tradi-
tional distrust and disdain for popular culture"; or, as Jameson has
similarly argued in Postmodernism , the Left must seek at present to

62 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

develop a "positive conception of ideology as a necessary function in
any form of social life" (PM, p. 416).

Stone's films, I would assert here, offer a modest beginning in this
direction. For example. Stone differs from Jim Morrison and other
political modernists of the 1960s in at least one important sense:
whereas Morrison was completely crushed by the media apparatus.
Stone himself is a proven master at controlling the media to promote
his own political ideals and agendas, some that are simply idiosyn-
cratic when not a complete waste of time (i.e. the stillborn ]FK ). In
this regard. Stone has much more in common with Andy Warhol than
Jim Morrison, or Stone has inherited Morrison's modernist sensibil-
ity (i.e. his ethical, political, and religious concerns), while learning
important lessons from "postmodernists" like Warhol, Godard, and
others. It must be emphasized then that, while Stone demonizes main-
stream and postmodern media in both The Doors and Natural Born
Killers , he himself never ceases to rely upon and deploy the tools of
the "beast" in offering his own apocalyptic critique of postmodernity-
all this in an effort not to miraculously "will" tv culture out of exist-
ence, but rather to seek its ethical regeneration. Similarly, Stone's
deployment of Native Americans in his films differs from previous
racialist art and literary works (i.e. Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans ,
Hollywood Westerns, Beverely Doolittle's paintings) in that the pas-
tiche Indians of Stone, especially in Natural Born Killers , are not only
romanticized types, but they are also symbolic utterances (or indexic
signs) in a complex social discourse that Stone himself "speaks" with
great skill. In this sense, unlike Cooper's Uncas, Stone's Red Cloud is
not simply homo Americanus (as opposed to homo Sinicus, homo
Arabicus, homo Africanus ) in an elaborate racialist and Eurocentric
typology, ^^ he is also, to quote from Edith Wyschogrod's Saints and
Postmodernism , a more general "signifier ... that fills the discursive
plane of ethics. "^^ Hence, Red Cloud and Stone's other Indians are
interesting figures not necessarily because of their logocentric and his-
torical actuality (which is questionable), but because of the ways in
which they impose realizable and cogent ethical demands on Stone's
film viewers (SP, p. 28-29).

However, as we have already seen in our discussion of The Doors ,
this does not necessarily imply that the historical or the "real" should
be "bracketed off" as simply undecidable, as Wychogrod herself ad-
vocates (SP, p. 28), in favor of a "flattened out" or purely synchronic

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 63

postmodernity, which, in properly Derridean fashion, tends to
reinscribe the text itself as a new mastercode or ideology in its own
right. In opposition to the anti-hermeneutic thrust of postmodernist
ideology, one might instead assert that "the truth" of the postmodern
situation is only available hermeneutically, that is by adopting inter-
pretive tools that may enable us to uncover the traces left by history
itself within the cultural documents that define us (like The Doors and
Natural Born Killers ). History, in this sense, can only be recovered al-
legorically: the reading of any cultural document is therefore, in
Benjamin's phraseology, like a nightmarish "return to the scene of a
crime" (REF, p. 226), wherein the overwhelming evidence of history's
existence is everywhere present but nowhere visible; or, to borrow
from Althusser, history is never available directly but only as an "ab-
sent cause" that must be hermeneutically recovered in interpretive
acts. Edith Wyschogrod, who has articulated the most coherent and
systemized postmodern ethics to date, must then be challenged inas-
much as she insists (with the neo-liberal American philosopher Rich-
ard Rorty, but also with the "renegade" Frankfurt School theorist
Jiirgen Habermas) that, in the realm of ethics, the spheres of the pri-
vate and public are not related, and that to continue to insist upon
this relationship is a "sentimental pretension."-*^ For this reason,
Wyschogrod's postmodern ethics reject a "deontological moral prin-
ciple" (SP, p. 42-43), instead relying heavily upon Emmanuel Levinas's
hypostatized metaphysics of the human face.

In opposition to Wyschogrod, whose ethics are imaginatively lim-
ited to the realm of the ontological, a truly politicized "postmodern"
ethics (that is an ethics that is "post" the postmodern) must therefore
prioritize those unsavory historical realities that are rarely available
in any purely existential sense to the inhabitants of postmodern (i.e.
first world) culture. Wyschogrod's postmodern ethics, which purport
to address the concerns of the "wretched of the earth," but with few
references to Marx (who coined the phrase in "The Communist Mani-
festo"), and without a single reference to Frantz Fanon (who wrote
the renowned study of colonialism. The Wretched of the Earth ), may be
effectively politicized by insisting upon what is neglected in her own
ideologically motivated foreclosure of the "deontological" and the
historical. In fact, the actuality of a "postmodern" ethics depends upon
both, for as Fanon himself puts it, "in a very concrete way Europe
[and the United States] have stuffed [themselves] inordinately with

64 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America,
China, and Africa .... [The first world] is literally the creation of the Third
World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from
underdeveloped peoples. "^'^ Obviously, the recovery of this "truth"
of the postmodern situation depends upon not only a "deontological
moral principle" and the category of the historical (which theorists
like Baudrillard and Francis Fukiyama would have us believe is in its
last throes), but it also depends upon a profoundly ethical identifica-
tion with the struggles of the subaltern masses of the third world, as
well as oppressed subjectivities here in the United States (i.e. ethnic
minority, gay /lesbian, women, working class whites, and others).

However, if Sloterdijk is correct in his suggestion that
postmodernity may be characterized by a peculiar deafness to such
"old-fashioned" ethical appeals (which is certainly true for
Wyschogrod herself), or by a kind of neo-solipism, it may be more
productive to insist upon the epistemological (rather than the ethical)
priority of oppressed forms of subjectivity, which-according to the
terms of Hegel's classical master-slave dialectic-have greater access
to the totality of their distinct historical situations. "The view from
the top is epistemologically crippling," as Jameson has reminded us,
"for it reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented
subjectivities, to the poverty of the individual experience of isolated
monads, to dying individual bodies without collective pasts or fu-
tures bereft of any possibility of grasping the social totality."""^ An-
other way to say this might be agree with Barbara Harlow, author of
Resistance Literature, who has argued that "the First World is [now]
being called upon to assume a certain responsibility-a responsibility
not for others, for 'the other,' the 'Third World,' the 'oriental,' or how-
ever it chooses to designate the unfamiliar, but for the limitations of its
own perspective [my emphasis]. "^^ Whatever the problems in Stone's
films, there can be no question that Stone himself insists upon the
epistemological priority of Native American forms of subjectivity.
Furthermore, Stone's Native American subject differs from past ro-
mantic representations of the Indian as Noble Savage in that Stone's
Indians, like the historical Red Cloud (quoted at the beginning of this
essay), are besieged subjects who do not really exist in a state of pri-
mordial "purity" and natural "innocence."

It only remains to be said here that, whatever the epistemological
and ethical advantages of oppressed forms of subjectivity like that of

^

YJest Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIIl, 1995 65

Native Americans and others, or the variegated and distinct "views
from below," to quote Jameson, no such identity standpoint approach
can hope to realistically accomplish its political objectivities without
some more general heuristic wherein the multifaceted and specific
subjectivities in question can somehow be brought together into a
practical, working alliance, which can effectively challenge the hege-
monic structures of late capitalist society. What is needed at present is
a reconstructed form of "proletarian" subjectivity, which is to say a
reconstructed Marxism, in which the insufficiencies of previous left-
ist theory are corrected, namely the workerism of more dogmatic and
Eurocentric avatars of Marxism. The writings of Edward Said, Abdul
JanMohammed, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Perry, and many other
postcolonial (but also Marxist) theorists already offer significant ad-
vances in this direction. While we must avoid overly vague, Hegelian
(and outdated) syntheses which hearken to the concerns of another
era, especially those that would deny the specificity of the oppression
of each identity position, the possibility of a "collective subject,"
formed out of the emphatically historical experience of damage, to quote
JanMohammed, may be said to offer us the hope for a collective eth-
ics yet to come: an ethics that is truly inclusive, as opposed the ethics
of Republican politicians such Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Pat
Robertson, and so on. Among other reasons. Stone's films are impor-
tant because they show us how badly such a collective ethics is needed
in the United States today. Though Stone's Indians may not be "real"
or "authentic," they are nevertheless Utopian figures that are located,
like the "collective subject" of postcolonial theory, at the other end of
historical time.

References

^ Walter Benjamin, Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 181. Henceforth
cited as REF.

^ Dee Brown, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (New York: Henry Holt and .Com-
pany, 1970), p. 97.

^ See Jim Morrison, Wilderness (New York: Villard Books, 1990), where he writes "The
Politics of ecstasy are real / Can't you feel them working / thru you / Turning
night into day / Mixing sun with the sea" p. 173. Hencefort cited as WDN.

* Dylan Jones, Jim Morrison: Dark Star (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 185.

^ Jerry Hopkins, The Lizard King (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), p. 192.
Henceforth cited as LK.

66 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

" Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963).
Henceforth cited as SMN.

' It may be noted that I am hereby subsuming the obviously vague and homogeniz-
ing category "Native American Culture"-which of course cannot do justice to the
hetereogeneity of American Indian peoples and their widely divergent lifestyles-
under the vaguer still (and even less satisfactory) concept of the "postcoloniaI,"or
the problematic of global colonization (or imperialism) and its aftermath. My rea-
sons for adopting this interpretive tact, it is hoped, should become clear by the
conclusion of this paper. Briefly, however, I will note here that such a strategy may
be justified inasmuch as the interpretive violence unavoidably committed in such
theoretical acts may further the political objectives of those peripherial groups in
question like Native Americans-but also African- Americans, Asian- Americans, ho-
mosexuals, and others. Such, in any case, is the ideological motivation for my es-
say, for which no apology shall be forthcoming.

^ Cooper's inscription at the opening of his novel is taken from Shakespeare's The
Merchant of Venice , in which the North African suitor Morocco pleads "mislike me
not for the color of my skin." Morocco's plea for tolerance of racial difference is
borrowed by Cooper to insure his readers' admiration of Uncas, "the last of the
Mohicans." This strange transposition of orientalist discourse into the North Ameri-
can context suggests obvious parallels between Edward Said's theses on orientalism
and European writing about indigenous Americans.

'Alex Kuo,"Beverly Doolittle: Trans-racial Re-invention of the Noble Savage: Danc-
ing With Wohes and Reaganomics," 1993 Pacific Northwest American Studies Con-
ference, Bend, Oregon, April 2, 1993.

'" Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: African In The Philosophy f Culture
(New York /Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 356.

" George Yiidice is quoted from an as yet unpublished manuscript in John Beverely,
Against Literature (Minneapohs/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) p.
111.

'- 1 am indebted to Alex Kuo for this point. It may also be worth comparing AIM's
position with Frantz Fanon's discussion of the manichean nature of the colonized
world in The Wretched of the Earth .

'^ See Marx's "Letter to Ruge" (1843), "So our campaign slogan must be: reform of
consciousness, not through dogma, but through the analysis of that mystical con-
sciousness which has not yet become clear to itself. It will then turn out that the
world has long dreamt of that of which it had only to have a clear idea to possess it
really. It will turn out that it is not a question of any conceptual rupture between
past and future, but rather of the completion of the thoughts of the past." Quoted in
Fredric Jameson Marxism and Form (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1971), p. 116. Henceforth cited as MR

'"* Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the 60s," The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986,
Vol. 2: The Syntax of History . (Minneapolis /London: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), p. 208. Henceforth cited as P60s.

^^ Jameson's view, however, does not presuppose the 60s as an "organic unity at all
levels," as he puts it, "but rather [as] a hypothesis about the rhythm and dynamics
of the fundamental situation in which very different levels, develop according to

West Georgia College Studies in Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 67

their own internal laws" (P60s, p. 179). Jameson does not therefore abandon histo-
riography as such, as much as he, like Althusser before him, attempts to "reorga-
nize its traditional procedures on a different level" (P60s, p. 180).

'^ Jerry Prochnicky and James Riordan, Break On Through: The Life and Death of Jim
Morrison (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991) p. 69. Henceforth
cited as BOT.

'^ Given New Orleans's reputation as an anomalous North American site of cultural
diversity, or as the United States' s gateway to the Afro-Caribbean world. Stone's
deviation in this instance is not really coincidental, not if it is true that Morrison's
"possession" has less to do with grotesque lizard-men than it does with the "pro-
digious release of untheorized new forces" in world history (P60s, p. 208).

'^ For example. Stone's film misguidely closes with dramatic takes at Pere Lachaise
cemetery of the grave sites of other creative "genuises" such as Moliere, Honore de
Balzac, Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt, andfinally James Douglass Morrison.

'^ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Durham,
North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 5. Henceforth cited as PM.

^ I am quoting here from the following Morrison poem: "The horror of business /
The Problem of Money / guilt / do I deserve it? / The meeting / Rid of managers
& agents / After 4 yes. I'm left w/ a mind like a fuzzy hammer / regret for wasted
nights & wasted years / I pissed it all away / American Music" (WDN, p. 208).

2' Ernst Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: NLB Press, 1976), p. 387.

^ One might also evoke Walter Benjamin's concept of "the profane illumination."
For more in this regard, see Christopher Wise's "The Profane Illumination: Reflec-
tions on the Benjamin-Adomo Debate," Arena Journal , New Series, No. 2 (1993/
1994): 195-214.

^ It may be worth noting that, near the time of his death, Morrison himself was writ-
ing and directing a film with a remarkably similar plot to Natural Born Killers . One
might also compare Morrison's the lyrics of Morrison's "Riders On The Storm"
with the events of Stone's film.

^'^ Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York /London: Penguin Books, 1992),
p. 196-197.

^^ Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Con-
temporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1988), p. 292.

^^ See Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) p. 96-97. Also see
Anwar Abdel Malek's seminal essay "Orientalism in Crisis," Diogenes 44 (Winter
1963): 107-108.

^^ Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1990) p. 52. Henceforth cited as SP.

^^ Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, The MIT Press, 1991) p. 28-29.

^' Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991) p. 102.

^ Fredric Jameson, "Third World Literature and The Era of Multinational Capital-
ism/' Social Text 15 (1986) p. 85.

68 Christopher Wise: The Politics of Ecstasy: Postmodernity, Ethics, and Native American

^' Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (London/ New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987), p.
65.

3^ Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, The Nature and Context of Minority Dis-
course (Oxford /New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 9-10.

Destiny without Destination (?): Un
Coeur en Hiver, The Double Life of
Veronique, and the Question of
Postmodern Ethics

by Marc J. LaFountain

... there where you would like to grasp your timeless
substance, you encounter only a slipping, only the
poorly coordinated play of your perishable elements.^

The infiniteness of abandonment, the community of
those who have no community^

I. Introduction

Living ethically is a burden and a riddle. Not only do ethics have
to be lived up to, but they have to be lived to be known and con-
structed in order for them to be lived up to. There is a reflexive rela-
tionship between "living," "constructing," and "living up to," how-
ever, that makes a distinction between them impossible. That is, to
live up to ethics is to construct their reality, and to affirm their reality
is to construct them. The latter reversibility requires some sense of
resources upon which the living-up-to and constructing processes
must draw. I suggest here that postmodern ethics must contend with
a growing sense that now the latter reflexivity and reversibility are
acutely troubled notions.

What we draw on as resources in the process of living up to and
constructing can be pursued as a way of approaching the problem of
ethics from a modernist and a postmodernist stance. Both stances do
not assume this reflexive process, and what exist as "resources" for
living ethically differs drastically with each. The intent of this essay is
to explore this difference. This inquiry requires an understanding of
some of the peculiarities of modernist and postmodernist experience.
To insinuate these experiences, I will offer a rendition of two contem-
porary films, Un Coeur en Hiver (hereafter UCH) and The Double Life of

70 Marc. J. LaFoimtain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeiir en Hiver

Veronique (hereafter DLV). Special attention will be given to the music
which mediates and communicates the relations, moods, and expres-
sions of the protagonists. Via the music we can approach the ways in
which the protagonists are "in tune" with each other, and we can ac-
cess the ethical implications of their attunement. Efforts to understand
divergences between "modern" and "postmodern" can lead to an
essentializing of those differences; that emphatically is not a goal here.
Only against the backdrop of the musically mediated ethical relations
of the films' performers will any effort be made to distinguish the
context of modernist and postmodern ethics. I do not aim to establish
the historical or cultural contingencies or factors associated with a
distinction between modern and postmodern; the concern rather is
with the philosophical and experiential aspects of the latter and what
they tell of sociality and ethics.

After a brief synopsis of the films a phenomenologically oriented
interpretation of the protagonists' experiences will be developed.
Drawing upon figures as diverse as Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas,
Blanchot, and Bataille, among others, questions of the nature of com-
munication, meaning, intersubjectivity, intimacy, proximity, and com-
munity will be considered. Via the music questions about the pro-
tagonists' singularity and communality will be raised along with other
questions about the very possibility and viability of community and
ethics and whether ethics are can be intentional or only accidental.
My intent is not to treat UCH as a modernist film or DLV as a
postmodernist film. Rather I aim to explore the sense of the ethical in
each for clues about intersubjectivity, sociality and the problem of eth-
ics in postmodernity.

II. Synopsis

The Double Life of Veronique and Un Coeur en Hiver are about con-
temporary individuals struggling in contemporary times. DLV, di-
rected by Krzysztof Kieslowski and released in 1991, is simultaneously
set in Poland and France. DLV sketches the lives of two young women,
one Polish and one French, under the assumption that they are in fact
two different individuals living synchronously. DLV begins in Poland
where the Polish Veronika and the French Veronique encounter each
other in a square in Krakow. Veronique has boarded a bus and is shoot-
ing photographs of a crowd of protestors. For a fleeting moment she
and Veronika notice and even seem to recognize each other. Later it is

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIIl, 1995 71

revealed that Veronika shows up in one of the photographic images
Veronique has taken.

The film then moves to an enigmatically disjunctive series of
glimpses of the individual and mysteriously intermingled lives of the
two women. It begins with Veronika who is pursuing a career as a
singer of classical music. She is a plain and simple young woman
who, despite her lack of success, lives an apparently happy life. She is
a gifted singer even though she is not well trained or technically skilled.
It is uncertain whether or not a career will ever happen for her and
her frustration is evident. Her relationship with her lover is discon-
certing and seemingly not worth the effort. With regard to material
comforts and possessions, she is a minimalist due more to lack of pros-
perity than to choice. During the first performance which will hope-
fully launch her career, she collapses and dies while singing an ex-
quisitely haunting song. The music and the haunting persist through-
out the film.

At the very moment Veronika expires Veronique is overwhelmed
with grief. It unclear to her why this is so even though she already
knows she is unhappy. Her unhappiness is not at all due to lack of
accomplishment or of being desired. She too is a gifted musician -
though skilled and competent, unlike Veronika - and she supports
herself as a teacher. She lives comfortably surrounded by art, a lovely
city, and handsome suitors. Her lover is an acclaimed author of
children's stories and a talented puppeteer. Nonetheless, Veronique
experiences a void in her life, a lack she continually tries to overcome
with all the things the successful and fortunate have at their disposal.
Her obsession is for meaningful connection with an other. Her frivol-
ity and aching search for passion and substance thus figure her exist-
ence. Having given up her singing career, she is ultimately confronted
point blank with the poverty of her existence when she sees herself
caricatured in one of her lover's marionette plays. Throughout her
days and nights she is afflicted and solicited by a shatteringly sweet
muse, perhaps having something to do with the photo of Veronika
she discovers among the traces of her trip to Poland. At the end of the
film she seeks out her father for a sheltering we know will not end her
torment.

Ostensibly the film is a exploration of the doppelganger motif - the
idea that our double exists somewhere simultaneously, whether in
this universe now or in some other in some strangely parallel place.

72 Marc. }. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

Such themes are not unusual for Kieslowski, perhaps best known for
the triptych WJtite, Blue, Red. In the latter, mood and music are the
primary substance around which the tales are fashioned. Earlier films
such as No End and The Dekalog, a ten hour version of the Ten Com-
mandments, likewise explored life and interaction as an ambience
through which pass any number of bodies, spirits, apparitions, and
tonalities in vivid ambiguity. The invisible and the tenuously present,
oddly juxtaposed and often coupled, fascinate Kieslowski much as
they did de Chirico and Breton. That there is a puzzling visibility and
familiarity to the veiled and the unintelligible also recalls Camera Buff,
where a worker who purchases a camera to film his infant daughter
ends up obsessed with snagging images of a world which will only
bring him trouble. The visibility and invisibility of the subtle and the
obscure which visit us in uncanny ways are Kieslowski' s fascination.
For those who demand narrative clarity and plot, Kieslowski is trouble-
some. For those for whom life is mysterious and poignantly opaque,
his work is a gift.

Un Coeur en Hiver, the story of a wintry or hibernating heart, di-
rected by Claude Sautet and released in 1993, occurs in Paris where a
threesome (Maxime, Stephane and Camille) struggle with love and
friendship. Maxime, an elegantly handsome merchant, co-owns a
business with Stephane, where violins are made and repaired by
Stephane. As extroverted and exuberant as Maxime is, Stephane is
equally an imperturbable loner. He lives in a small room in the rear of
the repair shop. He lives a spartan life, as scant with items in his ward-
robe as he is with words. He is a gifted craftsman with an extraordi-
nary sensitivity to sound and music which makes possible his skill at
rendering violins capable of delivering the passion their players wish
to communicate. Maxime and Stephane say they are only partners
and not friends, but Stephane never tries to best him at racquetball.

Maxime has fallen in love and is leaving his wife for a ascending
young virtuoso, Camille. Camille appears to be committed to Maxime,
but when she meets Stephane she falls in love with him. Stephane at
first seems attracted, which we only know from the music modulat-
ing their encounters. Stephane's response to Camille's throwing her-
self at him is reticent and even frigid, but it is not clear if he has cho-
sen not to seek her, or is incapable of feeling (we know he has given
up playing music in favor of creating the objects which make it), or if
there is some other secret. Camille's advances spumed, she angrily

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 73

retreats from Stephane. Maxime becomes aware of Camille's attrac-
tion to Stephane and even encourages him to pursue her. Stephane
silently refuses. Upon witnessing an encounter where Camille is irate
with Stephane for refusing her, Maxime slaps Stephane's face.
Stephane later tries to explain himself to Camille, but now she rejects
him.

Stephane breaks his partnership with Maxime and begins a busi-
ness of his own. When apparently lonely, he goes to the country house
of Lachaume, the great teacher who taught the three protagonists to
play violin. When Lachaume is near death, it is only Stephane who is
capable of performing the euthanasia Lachaume desires. Stephane
reveals it is love that makes this possible. Maxime goes to Stephane's
atelier and their "friendship" picks up again as if it had never been
broken. At the close of the film, Camille still pursues her career, Maxime
is with her, and Stephane continues to prefer the instrument to the
music, a seeming broodiness to passion's entanglements, the secrecy
of spaces within communication to their evocative effects.

The vicissitudes of friendship and love are themes revisited in
Claude Sautet's previous films. People move in and out of each oth-
ers' lives, become unexpectedly and profoundly entwined with each
other, and then remain friends or lovers when everything would seem
to indicate they shouldn't, or they split when everything would seem
to indicate they should be together. In particular he seems intrigued
with romantic love and threesomes. In Les Choses de la Vie Sautet ex-
plores how a man's relationship with his wife and a mistress forces
him to reckon with himself, and in A Simple Story, a woman chooses
to make dramatic changes in a life that already is very comfortable
and secure. In Cesar and Rosalie two men having separate affairs with
the same woman become friends as the years pass. Vincent, Francois,
Paul and the Others explores the consoling delight of friendship shared
by three middle-aged, bourgeois men who are exemplary in the de-
grees of disillusionment and failure in their lives. Sautet seems fasci-
nated with the notion that c'est la vie! is all that can be discerned at the
core of relationships. Romance, love, infatuation, friendship, and com-
panionship are haphazard and fickle, without reason. Whether we
are thrown into situations, or arrive there by our own devices, life is
arbitrary, and remaining in tune with each other is a slippery and
unpredictable matter. The social world is no more ruled completely

74 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

by chance than by amity or enmity, and the most unusual entangle-
ments are, without being bizarre or eerie, the most mundane.

III. The films via phenomenology

Erving Goffman's distinction between focussed and unfocussed
interactions offers an opening through which to approach these films.
His perspective permits us to raise phenomenologically related is-
sues even though such issues are not his concern. Focussed interac-
tion occurs in encounters "when people effectively agree to sustain
for a time a single focus of cognitive and visual attention.. .sustained
by a close face-to-face circle of contributors".^ Focussed interaction,
also possessing a concerted flow of emotion and affect, produces an
emergent "we" feeling marked by a permeable "membrane". This
membrane, or "frame," defines a space where ritual and ceremony
are acted out by both drawing upon and creating a reserve of rules
and resources. When the rules operate effectively, "emotional energy'
and "cultural capital" are produced which permit "interaction ritual
chains"^ to stretch over time and space to be used as resources for
negotiating successive encounters. Unfocussed encounters, on the
other hand, "consist[s] of interpersonal communications that result
solely by virtue of persons being in one another's presence" (E, p. 7)
where each other's presence forces modifications of the other's activ-
ity. Unfocussed interactions are fleeting, spontaneous, and lack clo-
sure, that is, there is no membrane which emerges and is sustained.
Nonetheless, unfocussed interaction is pervaded by normative orien-
tations governing demeanor and deference. For Goffman both realms
of interaction require and generate mutuality, trust and integration,
however tenuous. A perusal of the phenomenological aspects of these
interactional spaces yields a glimpse of their implications for ethics,
at least as configured in these films. I shall argue that these consider-
ations assist us in appreciating the question of ethics when
"postmodernity" is approached as an experiential, interactional event.

The dramatic space of DLV is generally unfocussed interaction
given the transient, fragmented scenes occurring in Veronique's life.
Each film, especially UCH, is presented almost as if a stage play, so
tightly defined are the interactional sites. Even in the briefest of en-
counters clear shared meaning seems to emerge. It is interesting to
note, however, that UCH, arguably the less puzzling of the two films,
more curtly defines its scenes. The effect is that even though the scenes'

lest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995

75

revity conveys the unfathomable, e.g., Stephane's heart, the interac-
ons that transpire still permit a context in which coherent sense of
thical sensibilities can emerge. DLV's scenes, however, are both brief
nd protracted, and infinitely more indefinite, as are the contours of
s ethical context.

For instance, Stephane and Maxime are business partners, and
espite disclaimers, they seem also to be friends who honor each other,
/hen Stephane tells Maxime he is having an affair and will soon be
laving his wife for Camille, Stephane exhibits no concern to chide
laxime or to alert his wife. Stephane realizes he is attracted to Camille,
nd even when he is encouraged by a confidant to pursue her, he
laintains an aloofness that belies the heat between himself and
amille. Of course, it is difficult to know whether he is compelled by
?ar or emotional impotence or a sense of honor. Likewise when
laxime himself urges Stephane to seek out Camille, he refuses. And
^hen Stephane spurns Camille in view of Maxime, Maxime slaps him
) preserve both his own honor and that of Camille. Stephane's re-
house is to remove himself from their situation. However difficult it
light be to accept, from the viewer's point of view, it is understand-
ble that Maxime and Camille would remain together.

Numerous other scenes reveal similar moral or ethical constraints.
lS the story unfolds and Stephane and Maxime resume their friend-
lip and come to know each other even more deeply and idiosyn-
ratically, it is clear each respects the other and acts as if he needs the
ther. Camille, who lives with Regine, her agent, who is at least jeal-
us of Camille, if not erotically interested in her, maintains a carefully
leasured though respectful relation with Regine, and she with
'amille. Lachaume is treated with great reverence by Stephane,
laxime, and Camille, and even the quirky, strained relation between
achaume and his housekeeper is obviously bound by mutually sup-
ortive tissue. When it is necessary Lachaume be given the fatal injec-
on, it is clear there is a consensus among all involved that both the
me and the one who will do it are the only and appropriate ones.

Whatever the particularities of the relationships between the vari-
us individuals, however difficult to figure the motivations and rea-
Dns behind their actions and talk, one thing is very clear - they share
/^hat Schutz referred to as a "communicative common environment".^
he peculiarities of each person's biography have lent themselves to
"we". While the viewer is left to decipher why this or that is chosen

76 Marc. J. LaFoimtain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

in the passion of various situations, or is left to decide if in fact certain
events were not inevitable, it is still obvious that Stephane, Maxime,
and Camille were in tune with each other.

When the viewer considers the ethical nature of the relationships
between the various characters there is a sense that the world they
inhabit is an ordered world whose order is predicated on a mutual
and reciprocal embodying. While each of them may do things the
viewer would not expect or hope for in a given scenario, that does not
detract from the sense that their intersubjective space is as understand-
able to them as it is to the viewer. If asked for an account of the tacitly
held "practical knowledge" each deploys, each could easily discur-
sively articulate it despite the fact that the more occluded domain of
their "cohesion" to each other and the world might remain vague. To
say UCH's characters are in tune with each other suggests that there
is a complementarity to each character's action which, when juxta-
posed to others' actions, permits what Schutz referred to as a "typi-
cal" thematic framework which organizes their actions continuously
and consistently. That they share a common communicative space
implies that the particularity and anonymity of each character are
woven together as a common sense of space and time ("here and now")
and in the "vivid present" [they] grow older together". *" The latter,
for Schutz, as for Weber and Mead before him, is the foundation of
what we take for granted as "society". Giddens, echoing the latter,
suggests that as individuals interact they engage in a "structuration"
process which both produces and reproduces the sedimented stocks
of knowledge and coherent meanings which comprise "society".^

The typically interpreted thematic space that individuals share,
however, does not make completely visible the more primitive to-
getherness they share. The intersubjective reality that Schutz describes
is a thematically, reflectively constructed set of meanings which de-
pend on the intentional acts of consciousness which are situated within
everyday "projects". This intersubjectivity, according to
Merleau-Ponty, is grounded in a more primordial relatedness indi-
viduals share when in each other's copresence. By virtue of their open-
ing onto and sharing the same "here and now" their immediate expe-
rience of each other and their own world is already preobjectivley
intersubjective and meaningful. Such relatedness for Merleau-Ponty
is an intercorporeal intertwining that is prereflectively lived, and this
'lived-world" is the lush matrix of meaning out of which thematic

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 77

meaning arises. For Merleau-Ponty, however, unlike Schutz, for whom
meaning arises only in the reflective acts of consciousness, the
lived-world is a nascent logos whose medium is the lived-body. That
is, it is already meaningful; it is already intersubjective "flesh" and it
is dependent only upon the dialectic of time and proximity for its
meanings to be more fully built up. Ostrow suggests that "society" is
embodied or resides in the "social sensitivity" lived prior to differen-
tiations between subjects and objects. Retrieving the sense of social
sensitivity reveals that we are "inextricably interwoven"^ with each
other long before "we" is articulated as "a relationship". We are
complicit at a level of meaning that precedes knowledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others have taught us that reflection can
only go so far in recovering the full immediacy of immediacy. UCH
plays on this later notion, for the ambiguity we experience vis-a-vis
our thematic knowledge of Stephane and Camille, as well as Camille's
of Stephane, and Stephane and Maxime's of each other, is perplexed
by its immersion in the thickness of lived-experience. Yet we do,
though not fully and not ironically, sense what things mean to them.

Despite the unity of the embodied world that Stephane and Camille
each inhabits, which simultaneously is intercorporeal and embryoni-
cally intersubjective, it is clear that as time progresses she will go on
without Stephane - he will not be hers and their cohesion will wither.
She returns to Maxime, but why if she did not really love him? Is
comfort more desirable than unfulfillable passion? There are other
nagging questions: were Stephane and Maxime really friends? Just
what is Stephane' s problem or secret, or does he really even have a
problem? Maybe he is wise enough to know that only a fool licks
honey from a sharp blade?

While these questions do arise, they nonetheless arise against the
backdrop of what Merleau-Ponty termed a "presumptive unity," or a
"cohesion without a concept". That is, we viewers, like Stephane and
Camille, understand that while the primordial world they intensely
inhabit together will never fully thematize itself, that world never-
theless is already in motion as a world. Returning to Schutz, as each
moves into other projects in other here / nows the cohesiveness of their
vividly shared present moves from zones of relevance to irrelevance.
Their "we" relationship fades, they no longer grow older together,
but this does not erase the fact that for a particular expanse of time
they were one, intercorporeally and thematically. It is this very one-

78 Marc. }. LaFotmtain: Destiny ivithout Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

ness, especially at its most original moment, as well as its ethical im-
plications, that UHC explores. It is this very original moment, and
thus ethics, that will later be seen as problematic in our consideration
ofDLV.

The music of UCH is particularly poignant. It is not just background
or a story-enabling subtext - it is the very substance of the tuning-in
Stephane and Camille share. In "Making Music Together: A Study in
Social Relationship" and "Mozart and the Philosophers," Schutz dis-
cusses how it is that making music together describes the "paramount
situation"'^ of face-to-face communication. In UCH music not only
punctuates Stephane and Camille' s encounters, it is the "polythetic"
medium (CPU, p. 172) in which they grow older together. Phenom-
enologically, they grow older together in that the inner stream of con-
sciousness of each synchronizes with that of the other. This "sharing
of the other's flux of experiences in inner time, this living through a
vivid presence in common, constitutes. ..the mutual tuning-in relation-
ship, the experience of the "We"" (CPU, p. 173). The We is actually a
"pure We" in that each experiences the other as a consciousness like
itself, and out of this milieu the We-relation as a concrete social rela-
tion in face-to-face situations makes sense. Schutz tells us that when
individuals tune-in to each other the meaning structures or "thematic
kernel" (CPU, p. 169) experienced are not capable of being expressed
in conceptual terms while they are lived in the vivid present (CPU, p
159). Nonetheless these meanings assume a primitive communica-
tion and indicate a community of time and space (CPU, p. 26).

Schutz suggests that the pure features or "vivid phases" (CPU, p.
27; CPI, p. 173) of relations can only be grasped in reflection. This is so
because even though the We-relation is the most "direct" experience
individuals can have of the other, it is through and through a "medi-
ate" experience. That is, the other is apprehended though an interpre-
tation of various expressions given off by the other which are indica-
tive of their subjective states. These expressions, grasped within the
inner flow of the I's experience as perception, have their fuller mean-
ings fleshed out only in reflection. It is via reflection that I define and
assess the other in terms of the stocks of knowledge I bring to the
situation and the typifications I draw upon. While there is a richness
to the perceptions of the other which makes this experience the para-
mount template against which relations with all others (ancestors,
successors, contemporaries) are understood, Schutz is quite clear that

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 79

what is available to us in direct, immediate experience only makes
sense retrospectively. While his phenomenological account concedes
that meaning that is lived is fertile, what he suggests is that for the
"typical" individual meaning is only accessible via schemes of typifi-
cation and objectification. Merleau-Ponty's view of the typical
individual's immediate experience, on the other hand, suggests that
prior to reflection this meaning is much more available. The distinc-
tion here is subtle but crucial. For Merleau-Ponty does not require
that the line between immediate experience and reflection be drawn
so sharply for individuals to know just what is happening. The full
subtlety of Merleau-Ponty's notion of "reflection" is couched within
his studies of embodied "perception".^"

For Schutz, the I is that which immediately and reflectively per-
ceives the world. Such a view gives the I a certain autonomy and sig-
nificance in the constitution of meaning despite its immersion in im-
mediacy. For Merleau-Ponty, the I is being-in-the-world, an incorrigi-
bly more ambiguous situation, even in the most clarified reflective
moments. Like Schutz, Merleau-Ponty turns to art, especially to paint-
ing and music, to grasp the birth of meaning in "perception". Percep-
tion for Merleau-Ponty is not a relation between a subject and an ob-
ject. It is a primitive experiential field, an opening onto the world where
embodied being stands out against the world. It is "the background
from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them" (PP, p.
xi). Here the body, simultaneously an embodied world, is also an "ex-
pressive unity" better thought of as a work of art than as an object.
For Merleau-Ponty existence is synonymous with expression (PP, p.
xviii).

The particular aspect of expression relevant to our discussion here
is that of "authentic" expression - that which "formulates for the first
time" (PP, p. 178, n. 1; p. 179, n. 1). There is a creativity and spontane-
ity in this expression akin to art, which is nothing less, according to
Merleau-Ponty, than our very being-in-the-world at its most primor-
dial moments. It is this original expression which makes of percep-
tion and expression art. It is also what artists do - attend to and par-
ticipate in the birth of meaning - "the joy of art lies in its showing how
something takes on meaning... by the temporal and spatial arrange-
ment of elements"." Merleau-Ponty suggests that modern painters,
and the same could be said for musicians, "have introduced the allu-
sive logic of the world". ^^ Thus, when he offers existence involves a

80 Marc. J. LaFonntain: Destiny loithont Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

"singing" of the world (PP, p. 187) he suggests, as does Sautet about
Stephane and Camille, that music is their very life and intercorporeal
attunement. That additional symbolic structures accrue around their
connectedness, for them like the irritation that produces the pearl,
only makes possible Sautet's rendition of their personal and interper-
sonal lives. The music's skitterish flitting aptly reveals the din and
turbulence between Stephane and Camille, just as it expresses the tran-
quility and harmony of moments of mutual affection and consonance.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of intersubjectivity makes the
prethematic nature of their interconnectedness available to us in a
way that Schutz's does not. Schutz's reflections, however, lend the-
matic context to the more primal couplings of Stephane and Camille,
and Stephane and Maxime. Sautet reveals both the primordial and
grown-older dimensions of their relationships; music elegantly brings
these to us. We also note how, both in the space and time of
vivid-presence and in the growing older process, a backdrop of
intersubjective resources is habitually secreted and drawn up. These
resources double as a community whose tissue and texture form their
ethical milieu.

Beyond their mutual pragmatic interest in and need for each other,
it is clear Maxime does not truly understand Camille, nor she him.
There is little music between them, or what there is is uninspired.
Camille and Stephane, however, understand each other intensely. We
only know this though via the music and the materiality of the violins
and piano. Camille is intrigued by Stephane's hands and drawn by
the gentle care and strength he brings to tuning or repairing a violin.
She respects his acute ear. Stephane is keenly attentive to Camille's
every victory and fault when practicing or recording. He is as sensi-
tive to the wood and strings as to the music they facilitate. The vari-
ous selections from Ravel are thus telling. Whether pleading, aching
sweetly or agonizingly, flowing effortlessly and joyfully, agitated, or
just out of tune, at every moment it is evident what is happening with
Camille and Stephane. They know it better than everyone even though
neither is terribly adept at conventional communication. We witness
two people who, because of their shyness or caution, remain distant
to each other even though their primordial intimacy is ever so sensu-
ously palpable.

UCH is about music, or life, and what happens when cacophony
and accord happen. For music to be possible, its grammar and syntax

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 81

must lend the original pregnancy of various combinations of singular
and conjoined gestures, sounds, juxtapositions, etc, a coherence and
sense over space and time. When music happens, despite what or
how it communicates, it conveys that something is being shared. Such
shared meaning and sensibility can be named intersubjectivity and
sociality. The music of UCH is more though than a language or me-
dium of communication. It more profoundly reveals Camille and
Stephane's mutual embodiment. That is to say, as they embody the
music, and the music them, a world, a nascent logos, comes to pres-
ence which they inhabit and know. Entwined, they "sing the world,"
they become the very world that makes sense of their individual
worlds. They open onto the same world at the same time and have an
occult knowledge of each other and that world. And that is the very
point - their singing the world together, their making music together,
is their intersubjectivity. It is against this intersubjectivity, this being
tuned-in, that their morals and ethics are worked out. They are the
"flesh" of the world that they can later be said to "flesh out" with
their ethics and other activities.

In considering the unity of meaning and knowledge, Luckmann
suggested that as subjects or agents individuals are not just "froth" ^''
on the sedimented structures of society or history. Rather we both
sense and constitute the latter; we are not just puppets or what Schutz
called "homunculi". Here, however, is just where DLV enters to con-
found understandings of sense and meaning, and significance and
knowledge. For DLV presents us to ourselves as the froth of some
thing other than what can be safely herded into a scheme of knowl-
edge. DLV confronts us with ourselves as being summoned by some-
thing ever so familiar and proximate, yet infinitely remote, something
whose rupturing anonymity cannot be transformed into something
typical. Whatever that alterity it escapes our best efforts to locate it as
even a primordial cohesion or presumptive unity prior to reflective
schematization. The "habitus" Bourdieu describes^"^ as our location in
space /time and society /history, however well rehabilitated by flesh-
ing out its prethematic features, which Ostrow has begun, is never
able to make sense of the alterity which torments Veronique. DLV's
ambiguity is different than that of UHC, so different as to almost be
incoherent. But "almost" here is deeply perplexing. For in DLV we
witness a rending of the reciprocity or reversibility (of agents and re-
sources) which forms intersubjectivity, and thus society.

82 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

For Schutz and Merleau-Ponty, what is initially anonymous and
obscure is viewed as in some fashion coming to light, to presence.
What comes to light in DLV is that the hidden throws itself toward
light without becoming signification.^'^ DLV presents us with the trou-
bling notion that the cohesion or belonging to the world Merleau-Ponty
described (and Schutz assumed) does not exist, or if it does, perhaps
only as an accident, a fiction, or even opening void. The lived-world
of Veronique is unstable, accidental, unruly. Unlike Schutz' individual,
the polythetic interweaving of consciousness she experiences never
permits their original anonymity to rise to the typically familiar. The
perceived world Merleau-Ponty described as an "ensemble of [the]
body's routes," ^^ where the various levels and particularities of those
routes are intertwined, does not appear to Veronique to be governed
by a presumed unity. The allusive logic of the intertwining of world
and body as the flesh of invisibility - the "mirror of Being" ^^ - be-
comes an illusive "logic" of becoming without being. This irrepress-
ible event is taken by many now to be the postmodern condition.

The habitus Veronique experiences, and thus her self/ body, does
not resemble a community of space and time. More like Pilgrim in
Slaughterhouse Five, she is unstuck in time. Bataille articulated a simi-
lar idea as part of his notion of "communication," where communica-
tion is an intimacy with the other where time "slips" and becomes
"unhinged," plunging the I into an abyss where it and the other, ironi-
cally, become "one".^^ Likewise, as Blanchot offers in Death Sentence,
When the Time Comes, The Space of Literature, and other works, when
Veronique arrives where she thinks she wants to arrive, and there
where she thinks she is, she finds herself in a somewhere named
"here," which is nowhere yet is intimately familiar. When Blanchot
suggests, counter to what Schutz and Merleau-Ponty assume, that the
self, representing the law of the Same, is "fractured in advance,"'^ he
alludes to the effect of the law of the eternal return, which "will never
allow you, except through a misunderstanding, to leave yourself a
place in a possible present, not to let any presence come as far as you'
(SN, p. 11). Veronique is indeed nowhere, for she never finds herself
"here" in a present she is able to know or control - it is always in
excess of her. She is but a trace of something else she can not know.
We grapple with this notion simplistically by assuming that Veronique
has a "double".

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 83

The "here" Veronique is unable to inhabit does not persist as an
unfathomable enigma for either Schutz or Merleau-Ponty. For both
music and sociality have a metaphysical nature that is experienced
by humans as an ensemble - unified - the visibility of some invisibil-
ity available to us via some form of remembrance and transcendence
which overcomes raw, perpetual immanence. "Quality light, color,
depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken
an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them," offers
Merleau-Ponty in "Eye and Mind,"^ his meditation on Cezanne and
painting, a theme also worked out in The Visible and the Invisible. The
intertwining of the latter allows Merleau-Ponty to posit that the em-
bodied world is the expression of Being, that being-in-the-world per-
mits a glimpse of the "mirrors of Being". The event of Being seems
too to be governed by sort of primal oneness, for it is that unity which
echoes in being-in-the-world which embodies it in perception. Schutz
too, in his essay on "Mozart and the Philosophers," submits that
Mozart's brilliance was his ability to generate an ecstacy that tran-
scends the practical consciousness of the "everyday" and returns us
to that inner flow where the polythetic intertwining that makes We
possible occurs. Schutz argues that Mozart's main concern was "the
metaphysical mystery of the existence of a human universe of pure
sociality" (CPU, p. 199). In further suggesting that Mozart's world
"remains the human world even if the transcendental irrupts into it"
(CP, p. 199), Schutz advances that music is a communal expression of
the inner life of the spirit. Here the fusion of inner flows of time per-
forms in such a way as to make intersubjectivity a "mirror of Being".

It is this very ensemble, and all that flow from it, that is in question
in DLV. Through a consideration of Levinas' phenomenology of "the
face of the other" and Blanchot's notions of desouvrement, we can ap-
proach Veronique's social world. Levinas' work stands in stark relief
against the views deployed by Schutz and Merleau-Ponty. For Levinas'
phenomenology presents human experience as impossible to under-
stand either as being or as having an essence. Rather experience is
turned toward an "elsewhere" and "otherwise" and unsettlingly finds
itself inhabited by a "metaphysical desire" that is not motivated by
lack or a movement toward some telos which arises in some archaic
condition (TI, p. 33). Unlike Odysseus, there is no return home - there
is no habitus or chez-soi in which one can find oneself situated so as to
make sense of what happens. This is Veronique's world, one that has

84 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

much more in common with that of Abraham or de Chirico's
Hebdomeros or Aragon's Telemachus in The Adventures ofTelemachus. It
is not that Veronique's world is absolutely random or accidental. Her
world is instead the event of journeying which emanates from no
home, has no home to return to, and which never leaves time for rec-
ollection or self-knowledge.

Veronique's experience is an-archic; she inhabits a world of traces.
Traces, according to Levinas, are all we can encounter on the way
toward meaning and knowledge, and traces continually unsettle
knowledge and meaning. Veronique's story is the story of what it is
to be summoned toward a yonder by an alien yet intimately familiar
"out-side-oneself" {hors-de-soi) (TI, p. 33). Once one is summoned, the
summoning itself is a troublingly pleasant affliction. For being sum-
moned requires that one abandon chez-soi, that domain of meaning
and comfort described by Schutz and Merleau-Ponty as one's self and
world. Chez-soi (also "the Same") is the environment or structure where
the body is localized and intentions and projects are realized. It is the
world the I moves in, feeds upon, enjoys, and uses. The I, or subjec-
tivity, moves into the world from chez-soi and returns to it, seeing its
destiny unfolding from itself. Even though the I here requires satis-
faction and completion, its needy and dependent nature does not
thwart its capacity to see itself as autonomous. Veronique initially
seems to dwell comfortably in chez-soi and has the world comfortably
arranged around her in what Schutz referred to as "zones of relevance"
capable of being dominated. She begins, however, to experience her-
self as lacking, incomplete. She seeks out others who might permit
her to fulfill herself, others she might appropriate. Levinas suggests
there is an imperialism and totalitarianism to such acts of the I which
we witness as Veronique's efforts to control her world. It is in her
encounters with others though that this very activity falters, for in the
face of the other she finds she is drawn outside herself, outside the
totality she so carefully attempts to orchestrate. She is summoned by
an infinity resistant to totalizing, and thus comprehension. The music
she hears renders her capacity to listen moot. It is in listening that we
make sense of what we hear. Veronique, though, forever hears the
music without gathering what it expresses. The infinity of the saying
undoes the said.

What Veronique experiences is metaphysical desire, which is not
the desire of the I situated in chez-soi. Metaphysical desire happens

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 85

when the I encounters the other. Because metaphysical desire is not
based in the neediness of the I it craves no completion or satiation.
But it does incite the I to evacuate chez-soi. Upon vacating itself the I
finds it is not the foundation or origin of its acts or meanings. All that
can be found are "traces" - that which has passed and which exceeds
the present. The trace is the an-archic movement of the Infinite, of the
Other, which surpasses all initiatives of the I to structure it. The most
profound and moving encounter with the alterity and exteriority of
the Other occurs in the "face" of the other person (TI, pp. 177-178,
187-193). The face of the other is, of course, the naked face of the other
in my presence, but it is more. It is also the excess that destroys the
ideas I have of the other. For instance, Veronique has numerous af-
fairs and amorous encounters. They cannot quell the metaphysical
desire that summons her. It is this desire that DLV explores, not the
desire of lack which always accompanies the incorporation of others
into each others' lives and communities (what Sartre named "useless
passion"). In these affairs we feel Veronique's craving and torment,
for we recognize too that only in turning to others can we make our
worlds meaningful. Yet such turning also sets us on this endless jour-
ney.

Erotic intimacy and voluptuousness, Veronique seems to sense, and
Levinas suggests (TI, pp. 256-266), are not scenes where the alien
nature of the other is tamed or that which haunts from a distance is
grasped so as to satisfy the I's need to know. They are not the site
where being is secured; they are where the I abandons itself. Lingis
notes, "it is on the contrary a presence of what is irreducibly remote,
:ontact with what can never be present or represented, tangency to
the other without intermediaries".^^ The intimacy of lovers is not then
a community of time and space. Instead it is the experience of "fecun-
dity" (TI, p. 267), of being thrust into infinity without return to a place
A^ithin which one can gather oneself. Again Lingis, "The approach of
:he other is dismemberment of the natural body, fragmentation of the
phenomenal field, derangement of the physical order, breakdown in
iniversal industry" (L, p. 72). It would be a mistake then to consider
/eronique as Sartre's sadist or masochist, or as one whose hands and
:aresses are those of an assassin (L, p. 27), one whose passion is futile,
lather, her "caress opens upon a future different from an approach to
he other's skin in the here and now," and thus her facing the other
turtles her into "the mystery of relations between lovers [that] is more

86 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

terrible, but infinitely less deadly, than the destruction of submission
to sameness".-^ Such is Veronique's world, a world she cannot man-
age because she insists upon the succor of chez-soi, embodied in her
ultimate return to her father and some semblance of "home," i.e., a
place where a sense of Law or the Same prevails.

Perhaps then Veronique is not driven by nostalgia or melancholy?
Perhaps instead it is Kieslowski's own sense of the latter which likely
arises from his sense that the viewer is uncomfortable with such mys-
tery and enigma and thus instead insists upon a conventional love
story, which he will not offer, where love, sex, and relationships are
projects rather than voluptuous experiences of the excess which sur-
passes the need to know and control?

In such intimate encounters the I advances upon what is impos-
sible: it's very essence as well as the possibility of knowledge. Its ca-
resses - tactile, auditory, visual - do not grasp possibility. For the I -
the subject - is wholly passion. The I here is voluptuous, but its desire
never becomes a matter of gratification - just interminable desire. That
this voluptuosity demands that the I abandon itself amounts to a "pro-
fanation," for the I, having evacuated itself, "discovers the hidden as
hidden" (TI, p. 260), and can only dissipate in response to the sum-
moning of the other. Bataille articulated the latter as a strange dialec-
tic of savoir and non-savoir (IE, pp. 51-60), a "profound complicity" of
law and transgression.-^^ Blanchot, echoing Bataille and Levinas, fur-
ther introduces us to Veronique's world, one where Veronique's ef-
facement is presented as desouvrement.

Desouvrement is an idleness or inertness which irrupts when the
passion of fascination and obsession sets in upon the I as it desires to
make something, someone, accessible, graspable or knowable. "Fas-
cination is the relation the gaze entertains - a relation which is itself
neutral and impersonal - with sightless, shapeless depth, the absence
one sees because it is blinding".^'* Desouvrement is an arresting pas-
sivity that happens when one finds oneself in close proximity with
what seems to be ever so near and intimate but yet remains at an
immense, untraversable distance. The space of intimacy and proxim-
ity, which is "here," but nowhere, is a space where autonomy dis-
solves into le dehors - a void which is strangely within - which forever
holds the I at a remote distance from that to which it seems to be ever
so close. It occurs when meaning escapes "into the other of all
meaning... [where] nothing has meaning, but everything seems mean-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIU, 1995 87

ngful" (SL, p. 263). In the various scenes of her intimacies with oth-
ers, Veronique creates an endless stream of images of what she hopes
night be possible. Images sometimes do give us the power to control
hings, but as Blanchot notes, "the image intimately designates the
evel where personal intimacy is destroyed and... it indicates in this
novement the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside,
he deep, sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in
heir disappearance" (SL, p. 254).

What Veronique encounters in the events she sets in motion is not
vhat she imagines or phantasizes, but rather the "perpetuity of that
vhich admits of neither beginning nor end" (SL, p. 261). Veronique,
)till consumed by the notion that the I is sufficient and efficacious,
levertheless witnesses her own insufficiency. Her struggle is not to
wercome this insufficiency, but to contend with the fact that affirm-
ng life demands that one commit oneself to encountering the immo-
bility and insouciance that arise in proximity to what is "absolutely
lear" (DS, p. 67) yet forever distant. The proximity that "hollows [the
] out from within"^^ is akin to the other of Levinas which summons
he I to vacate chez-soi. Bataille suggested that such evacuation is an
'acrobatics" and "ridiculousness" (IE, p. 66-67) which is unavoidable
f one is to live a life that is fervent and not servile. Thus, while
/eronique seems to be one who is lost and wandering, she is one who,
jecause of her passion, is unavoidably thrust into the void by her
/ery own projects which are never realizable, except in the realm of
he image. For images open onto a great murmuring; they are but
imits at the edge of the indefinite. Much like Blanchot's writer, the
everyday actor's project makes "oneself the echo of what cannot cease
)peaking," for what murmurs is interminably distant and only a si-
ent solitude is possible, though it itself is even impossible. It is im-
possible because "solitude has begun to speak, and I must in turn
jpeak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a
greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still
greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and
ilence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo"
DS, p. 33). What returns on these echoes' however, is "everything,
ave the present, the possibility of presence" (SN, p. 16). Veronique
:an never bring her world to presence, and thus cannot represent it,
!xcept in image and project, which never arrive, or when they do,
hey never resemble themselves. It is this that undercuts her identity.

88 Marc. J. LaFonntain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

her solace in her success, her things, her lovers. And so it will be when
she returns to her father. Veronique has encountered the "eternal re-
turn" of the Same which is forever different.

So it is that Veronique, afflicted and tormented, encumbered by
her constant recommencing self, which is perpetually young, with-
out history, identity or community, is endlessly on the way to else-
where. She experiences terrible moments of fragility and vulnerabil-
ity, fear and immobility, "weakness [and] miserable impotence" (DS,
p. 75). Yet her singularity and solitude are not just endless suffering
and supplication, nor are they signs of an alienated or anomic exist-
ence. She is also inspired. Without an I to reflect, it long having dissi-
pated, she is nonetheless haunted by the immense immediacy of that
to which she cannot be present, she is overwhelmed with exorbitant
intensity. It is not a passion she can own or direct though, it is "the
passion of the outside" (EI, p. 64). Such passion Levinas named "in-
spiration", and it is "incarnation" and "deliverance".^^ It is how "I"
becomes a subject even though that subjectivity is an exile or foreigner.
Inspiration is how "I" is saved from its boredom and self-absorption,
its tautological, suffocating immersion in distractions, games, and
sleep. Inspiration is having "the other in me," "the other in the same,'
"the other-in-one' s-skin" (OB, pp. 125, 111, 115, emphases Levinas).

The profuse returning of the other and of passion, which beckon
the I to vanish, in favor of its self, is thus a moment of both affliction
and radiant immensity. Veronique is a "torch lit to illuminate a single
instant... turning [days] into a pure dissipation and each event into
the image of a displaced episode. ..wandering among images and
drawn along with them in the monotony of a movement that appears
to have no conclusion just as it had no beginning" .^^ Then again, "such
days are not devoted to an unknown misfortune, they don't confirm
the distress of a moribund decision;... they are traversed by joyful im-
mensity, a radiant authority, luminescence, pure frivolity..." (WT, p.
69).

The music of DLV dramatically conveys Veronique' s life as that
"infinite movement" through which expression and action are "al-
ways ready to unfold in the multiple exigencies of a simultaneous
series [which] contests itself, exalts itself, challenges or obliterates it-
self...".^'^ Bataille noted in Death and Sensuality that such expenditure,
which happens in both erotic and religious intimacy, has a sacred
quality. It opens the individual to a realm of "interior experience'

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 89

which is in excess of his/her ability to know or use it. Such expendi-
ture, or "waste," is what makes us whole, but to be whole, to have
that anguishing and sublime intimacy which ends in nothing (yet
everything), demands destruction of the self and its projects. The music
of DLV portends this experience. The music seems a nostalgic and
melancholic longing, but it is also an epiphany: the entrance of some-
thing whose proximity cannot be overcome, which exists as a trace of
something already long gone and never ascertainably here.
Veronique's "double" is not an identical other whom she cannot con-
nect with; it is her experience of this very proximity and trace. She
does experience and imagine this other, but as Blanchot suggests, the
image, produced in desire's passion, can help us grasp something ide-
ally Yet "at the level to which its particular weight drags us, it also
threatens constantly to relegate us, not to the absent thing, but to its
absence as presence, to the neutral double of the object in which all
belonging to the world is dissipated" (SL, p. 263, emphasis mine).
Thus the photograph Veronique finds of Veronika is only a hedge
against the inescapable flood of the obscure and the opaque.

DLV's music is that of solitude - plaintiff and evanescent. It is the
music of the evocative. The murmuring of something veiled steals
away from Veronique, opens on to a neutral space, and in this space -
here and home - she is immobile despite her wandering. She oscil-
lates strangely between herself, the other, and no one - she in neuter,
neutralized. Compelled, she suffers patiently and ecstatically, with-
out hesitation, and in fascination, enters a radiant darkness. Veronique
experiences her essence - her utter impossibility.

DLV's music is then haunted by an essential solitude, an impos-
sible sovereignty. Weiss notes, reprising Bataille and Blanchot, that in
the space of solitude one is utterly solitary yet excessively full.-^*^ It is
an experience where nothing happens yet ruinous everything hap-
pens. Veronique's experience of others is doubly empty and effusively
fecund. This strange intimacy and communion with the other - ironi-
cally unsayable - is expressed in Veronique's tears, laughter, and si-
lence. The metaphysical quality of music Schutz and Merleau-Ponty
alluded to, which expresses the mystery of sociality, thus sings the
songs of elsewhere and nothing, which are all that can be said of "here".
This music, like Blanchot's images, is a "murmuring" at the edge of
the indefinite. The present which Veronique strives to figure, and thus
grasp, escapes, leaving her nowhere to arrive, yet infinitely in mo-

90 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

tion. Her destiny is an exorbitant, inclusive totality that is impossible
and which doubles as her self/ world. "Whirl, the celestial canopy
spreads its milky rivers, 1 succumb, I roll a long, long time numb in
the waves of my own flesh unfurling over the earth". ^'

It is important to recognize, following Schutz and Merleau-Ponty,
that all social relationships are made possible (at least minimally) by
the musical features described above. What makes these films and
their music interesting is that by focussing on the phenomenological
aspects of Stephane and Veronique's prethematc, lived-worlds, they
take us to the most subtle and intricate ways they, and we, experience
others, our selves and the world. The ambiguous and enigmatic na-
ture of the characters and plots arises from this exploration of
lived-experience. Of course, greater transparency and thematic detail
could be provided. Given what the films chose to explore, however,
the detail is exquisite. It is also from this level of immersion in life that
the issue of postmodern ethics can be approached, for through these
films we are presented differing experiences of what it means to find
oneself alive and with others.

IV. Postmodern Ethics?

When Merleau-Ponty said, "The social is already there when we
know it or judge it ..." (PP, p. 362), he, like Schutz, posited an emerg-
ing, yet nonetheless unified, social world. While that world can be
endlessly elaborated, there is still something there which permits such
elaboration, something which acts as a ground, even though it is am-
biguous and anonymous. For others such as Bataille, Levinas, and
Blanchot, it is difficult to say that there is a world with some
self-referential intactness "here". What can be said though is that there
is something here whose proximity and familiarity I /we take as "so-
cial" connectedness, something which permits images to be con-
structed so as to function as simulacra of that opaqueness and thereby
make it useful and amenable to articulation. Yet because of the enor-
mous remoteness and obscurity of this proximity, in which the I ef-
faces and dissipates itself as a condition of being social, it is a vexed
sociality. So what then can be said of ethics when sociality is vexed,
when at its very "core" sociality is traversed by traces, saturated with
excess, and immobilized by fascination and expenditure, all of which
serve to highlight only the insufficiency and disappearance of the I
and intersubjectivity?

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 91

UCH and DLV both explore how sociality, as love and friendship,
are taken to express a apparent primordial undividedness with the
Dther, even though there can be cacophony in that order. As we have
jeen though, DLV forces us to question this sociality due to the incur-
sion of incompleteness advancing from the impasses of proximity,
ntimacy, and passion. DLV raises the question of whether or not, from
J stance here called "postmodern," it can be said that "we" in fact are
zonnected. Sartre, who identified consciousness as nothingness, of-
fered that the social can only be conflict ("the essence of the relations
between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein; it is conflict" .^^^ Such con-
flict, however, is itself predicated on connectedness wherein one must
appropriate the other for the sake of one's own identity. Thus, strapped
:o dialectical reality, the I is always in conflict with others and this
relation is nonetheless a form of intersubjectivity. But in DLV the dia-
ectic which strings moments and spaces together to make them sen-
sible has collapsed in impossibility. Veronique's world, unlike Stephane
and Camille's, is not a world of conflict, despite the fact it has those
episodes.

Several closely related ideas arise here vis-a-vis postmodern eth-
ics. One is that ethics are accidental, and two, we are always in search
di the ethical. These together suggest ethics are impossible. Care must
3e taken, however, in establishing what it is meant by their impossi-
bility. To begin, let us consider ethics as a modernist might view them.

Much of modernist thinking on ethics derives from strains of
Kantian and analytic philosophy where a search for universal or gen-
sralizable principles, maxims, or rules prevails. Habermas' commu-
nicative ethics arises out of and in reaction to the latter, as does the
work of Rawls. John O'Neill's privileging of common-sense, mutual
knowledge has in turn arisen as a reaction to the rationalist approaches
Df both scientific and Frankfurt School constructions of ethics. Mod-
2rnist ethics also derive from certain Neitzschean and existentialist
perspectives which highlight the situational and individualistic qual-
ity of social action, as well as from variants of Hegelian dialectical
thought where history and reason are crucial to the determination of
what it means to live ethically. There are also strains of neo- Aristotelian
thought, such as Gadamer's hermeneutics or Maclntyre's
contextualism which accentuate tradition and local practices. While
the latter is terribly abbreviated, modernist ethics spans thinking that
stresses universalism, historicism, individualism, and radical relativ-

92 Marc. J. LaFonntain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

ism. What is crucial, however, is that all draw upon some
self-referential framework which is variously situated in some sense
of history, tradition, large or local intersubjectivity or community, or
individual consciousness. In each of the latter scenarios there is a pre-
vailing relational or reflexive framework which makes possible dis-
cussion of goodness, happiness, rightness, and the like whether that
discussion originates in body, emotion, consciousness, or language.
That is, all lean upon some structure or process whose primary fea-
ture is feedback, reciprocity, or reversibility where a doubling hap-
pens which ties fragments and particulars to each other in some
self-referential scheme.

What is striking about the ethics DLV implicates is that the very
notion of referentiality or reflexivity no longer holds. Whether ethics
are situated in the realm of legalist or general principles, or are his-
torical, local and particular, or highly individual and circumstantial,
that very situating lends them a materiality and an end. Regardless of
how they are identified, they are nonetheless identified as rules, prin-
ciples, modalities, practices or resources. Out of the latter emerge ways
of contemplating the classic sociological question about how social
order is established. Rules and resources are something which can be
represented, identified, and thus known, however problematic that
knowledge might be. Debates about that knowledge, and how those
debates are to be resolved, are, of course, emblematic of the modern-
ist ethical demise. It appears now, however, no one is quite sure any-
more what is to be done, or how. From the latter condition, an "ab-
sence" of the ethical is described. To seek assurance and insurance of
an ethical environment in (post)modernity would be to implicate the
untenable condition of a totalitarian enforcement of a particular view.
In such a scenario the reflexivity of ethics, rules, and power would be
terribly disturbing.

The absence DLV insinuates, however, is bom of a dissipation of
reflexivity. Here the question of the autonomy of the I (including the I
as either a subjective or intersubjective space), whether positioned in
large historical traditions or local communal practices, is seen to have
wilted in the inadequacy and futility of its ability to be productive,
useful, efficacious, practical, heroic. Veronique's ethical situation, un-
like that of Camille, Stephane, and Maxime, is not a matter of com-
munal determination or individual desire or selfishness. Her demise
does not derive from a highly subjective or narcissistic relativism or

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 93

solipsism or even from the typical postmodernist notion of exhaus-
tion. It stems rather from the ironic insufficiency and impossibility of
such a project of sovereignty. For such sovereignty demands a
transgressiveness in which the self and community must disappear
as a condition of establishing themselves. It would be a mistake though
to think the latter means that only cynicism or nihilism is possible or
that the self is relieved of the necessity of attempting to be sovereign.
To be ethical in postmodemity is to expend what is considered "ethi-
cal" in favor of an ethics yet to arrive, which likely can never and will
never arrive. In this sense, ethics are ironic and impossible.

Following the lead of Blanchot and Levinas, and especially Bataille,
postmodernist ethics figure as a site for and event of sacrifice.
Postmodern ethics are not just an altar where this happens, they are
also the sacrificial victim. The consequence of such a practice is to
give death, expenditure, and transgression a place in everyday life - a
place they once prominently held but for various historical reasons,
which are not the subject of this essay, have been lost and misunder-
stood. Bataille's studies of simple and archaic cultures have revealed
the significant relationships between death, the erotic, and the sacred.
The intimacy and communication that transpire in scenes of sacrifi-
cial death, in the "little death" of erotic abandon, both assure the con-
tinuity of those societies while at the very same time affirming their
impossibility. There is a need, of course, for productivity in human
affairs, but Bataille also asserted the "fundamental right of [humans]
...to signify nothing. ^^

The perplexing juxtaposition of production and the signification
of nothing ("waste"), a problem Bataille and Blanchot both struggled
with and elegantly articulated, has revealed terrible consequences in
modernity. Among them glare Auschwitz, the Gulag, and Hiroshima,
along with assorted instances such as lustmord (sexual murder) in the
Weimar Republic and its current incarnations in literature, film and
music video, contemporary urban youths' gang violence, ethnic cleans-
ing, and the demise of Utopian communities (e.g., Jonestown, the
Coresh family). The latter atrocities are now being complemented by
nuch less violent conflagrations of community and intersubjectivity.
Though less violent, I suggest the sacrifice of ethics falls into the same
pace where production and expenditure are juxtaposed.

These days, where the place of religion and sexuality in daily life is
lifficult to figure, ethics have unwittingly become a sacrificial victim.

94 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

In one sense they are not sacrificed with the same intention as the
Mayans sacrificed a human victim or Blanchot sacrificed writing. Yet
they are sacrificed in that they are used up and expended in pursuit
of establishing their very being and meanings. The postmodern ethi-
cal scene is one where social interaction does not end by depositing
an intersubjective sensibility as a corpus of resources for subsequent
action. It ends rather by trying to establish that corpus as it goes along.
It espouses what Bataille referred to as a "general" rather than a "re-
stricted economy/' one where expenditure and loss are essential to
determining cultural life. If modernity has in fact succeeded in prolif-
erating a surplus of rules and resources, postmodernity is that which
takes them not as a supply to be increased, but one to be expended.
The postmodern ethical scene is thus somewhat of a potlatch in which
rules and resources are wasted. Postmodernity thus requires and can-
not escape loss, dissipation - an enigmatic uselessness. One conse-
quence of this is that we are in search of our resources but our very
effort to establish them mutilates and consumes them prior to sedi-
mentation, leaving both the meaning of the present and the future in
question. We no longer know whether or not, however, such a prodi-
gal existence is useful or useless. In Veronique's life we experience
this movement, but we also experience something sacred and erotic
which recedes in advance of us. Like Veronique, we too greet this
movement, both in viewing the film and in daily life, with laughter,
tears, and silence.

The condition of this impossibility is an endless wandering. Such
wandering only dissimulates community and identity. So what com-
munity and identity then can be spoken of here? When Bataille sug-
gested in both Inner Experience and Death and Sensuality that "commu-
nication" and "intimacy," and thus community and communion, are
the site where the I and other tumble into an abyss - unknowable and
unusable - he suggested that the self must be thought of as loss. While
in a way this means the self must be lost, expended, more fundamen-
tally it suggests the self is loss. When it is not loss, it is not sovereign,
and it becomes stupid and servile given its dedication to utility's "des-
picable destiny" (IE, p. 40). Essence, Bataille notes, is impossible, and
I and we expend ourselves in establishing it. Herein ethics, established
and taken for granted as productive resources, whether erotic, reli-
gious, or literary, become both an extreme limit to be exceeded and an
impossibility. Levinas, echoing the latter, suggests the self, caught up

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 95

in its project of knowledge and self-persistence, becomes "totalitar-
ian". Only by going to the extreme limit, or being summoned there,
does one achieve an ironic "totality" which is impossible but which
also doubles as community and as identity. Again this is the double
Veronique experiences.

Because the self can only "slip" (IE, p. 97), community, as well as
identity, is "only a stopping point favoring a resurgence" which
"reflect[s] for an instant the flash of those universes in the heart of
which you never cease to be lost" (IE, p. 95). Veronique's life is lived
as a surplus or plentitude in excess of any totality capable of being
known through community or identity. Her transcendence of herself
is immediate and infinite, and offers no respite where meaning can
establish itself against the flood of an inaccessible though proximate
present. Her experience is thus an-archic - without even a ground in a
present, and without an telos or end. Veronique's life is the event in
advance of "Veronique". In such a scene Veronique never arrives de-
spite her opaque nearness - she is desoeuvre. Veronique is the absence
(or double) of Veronique as she "produces" herself. Much like writ-
ing for Blanchot passes through the book, where the book is not the
destiny of the writing, Veronique's identity and relationships with
others are not the destiny of her passing through. The voluptuous-
ness of this experience engulfs those with whom she interacts. We can
then speak of an "intersubjectivity" here. DLV's music - the accom-
plice of voluptuousness - is a "benediction and malediction in the
night" (WT, p. 60).

The relationships and intimacy individuals share in such scenes
are what Blanchot named an "unavowable community". An
unavowable community is community that disappears into infinity
in advance of itself. Despite endless commotion, it is idle, as is
Veronique, whose motion is heated but sterile. Community disappears
in the relentless movement that is the event of it coming to presence,
which never arrives. Time and space are irrelevant as threads capable
of yielding Schutz's community of here and now. Similarly,
postmodernity's ethical production is a heated but sterile commotion
in which community and belonging disappear, yet are displaced by
an unnameable and unavowable intimacy.

The community that does form in the vicinity of Veronique's ac-
ivities, as that of individuals in postmodernity, is an interrupted com-
nunity. Its fragmentation is the inevitable consequence of singularities
it the limit of their singularity. At this limit they cannot secure or

96 Marc. ]. LaFountam: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

deposit themselves in a work, i.e., community, capable of assembling
them. When they do interact, "community" is a word that assembles
their actions even though the work of producing community is not
commensurate with the word. The solitude each experiences is never
overcome. If the latter interactions can be named community, then
such community is accidental and incidental, enigmatic and ironic.
The accidental nature of community and communication does not
demand that interaction be conflict, as Sartre would have it, any more
than it demands that it be a nascent logos, as Merleau-Ponty and Schutz
would have it. The accidental character of community inclines it to-
ward incompletion and insufficiency. Its evanescence disposes it to
disappear in the very event which supposedly brings it into being.
The unavowable community is beyond being, without essence.

The condition of being without essence is synonymous with an
absence of the reversibility of resources and agency. When the latter
transpires, intersubjectivity doubles as solitude and proximity. And
when that happens, "working ... the most important form of sponta-
neity [which] constitutes the reality of the world of daily life ... [where
the self] integrates a specific dimension of time ... realizes itself as a
totality.. .communicates with others ... [and] organizes different spa-
tial perspectives" (CPU, p. 212) becomes depletion and vanishes. Such
efforts at integration, communication, spatialization, etc., falter in cre-
ating the "cognitive" and "social mapping" Jameson offered as a cor-
rective to the fragmentation and turbulence of postmodernity.'*^ For
being without essence Levinas named "no man's land" (TI, p. 259).
Veronique suggests such a condition is no woman's land, either.

Those who inhabit the unavowable community do not wander aim-
lessly in a state of alienation or pessimism or exhaustion. Nor are they
extensions of modernist liberalism which makes of them relativists or
radical individualists. They fervently seek the impossible. Impossible
because community, conventionally understood, requires the use of
resources which can be drawn upon to generate community. Such
resources, or practical knowledge, typically located in a conscious-
ness (or unconsciousness) of culture (or in some semiotic code or lan-
guage), and transmitted via socialization and social or semiotic con-
struction, are the stuff out of which sociality is formed. But when that
formative process is traversed by the event of production, which de-
lays and distracts production, resources are not resources. Instead they

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 97

are something incommunicable and heterogenous, something none-
theless sought for so as to then function as resources.

Resources in these scenes thus are ex post facto, or better, belong to
the "paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo),"^ where the status
of the post is taken to be antecedent when in fact it is not. As an event
in advance of itself, postmodern ethics are taken to be those resources
that would lend what appear to be ethically governed actions that
which would make them "ethical". Individuals and groups invoking
or producing postmodern ethics are, as Lyotard suggests of
postmodern writers and artists, "working without rules in order to
formulate the rules of what will have been done" (PM, p. 81, emphasis
Lyotard). The strange and perplexing condition of such ethics is that
their unpresentability resides in the fact that they are consumed and
expended as a condition of their presentation.

Typically ethics are seen as residing in some sense of community,
or polls, which may be local or universal depending on the viewer's
stance. The ethical, as a practical knowledge of what to do and how to
act when, and why, is itself considered to be situated in some larger
pasturage. For the Greeks, for instance, this was nomos. Nomos referred
to a space of convention and custom. Akin to nomos was nomas, which
referred to a dwelling place. Nomas, however, also carried a sense of
wandering and searching for."*^ Thus modernist ethics could be fig-
ured as stressing the sedimented practices which are available and
can be brought to bear to produce meanings in situations.
Postmodernist (or poststructuralist) ethics, however, may be taken to
arise in a infinite wandering within this pasturage, a wandering where
what is sought absconds just when it appears to be available, and no
amount of conjuring or production brings it to pass. It passes and
elapses on its own leaving only traces. Traces double as resources.
When drawn upon, they are found to be furtive, intransitive, insuffi-
cient.

The full problem of the riddle of living ethically is not contained in
the reflexivity of resources and construction leaned upon by Schutz
or Merleau-Ponty. Perhaps the more problematic issue is the desire to
make ethics synonymous with rules. Undoubtedly this tendency has
been intensified by modernity's desire to represent and define "what
is," "the real," "reality," etc., which itself is doubly defined by taking
reality or meaning or even being as a thing or object, and by situating
knowledge within a dialectical framework persistently underwritten
simultaneously by lack and teleologically prefigured becoming. Typi-

98 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeiir en Hiver

cally this tendency takes the form of specifying the methods or rules
or practices (the "how to") by which reality is constructed in such a
way as to give to agency an accent of usefulness and productivity.
Perhaps one of the most extreme forms of the latter is the obsession of
the social sciences, especially political science, with "rational choice"
theory. Such an fixation on practices and technology substitutes the
rules for, or takes them as synonymous with, "reality". Here, the epis-
temological intertwines with the ontological, for rules and practices
are reality. The conflation of rule and reality was perhaps first expressed
sociologically (Durkheim's concern with rules and rituals notwith-
standing) in Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1958), and more
recently, and radically, in the work of the ethnomethodologists. Re-
lated views offered by Goffman, and more recently by Giddens, pre-
sume constructed appearances are synonymous with reality. The nomi-
nalism in the latter microsociologically oriented perspectives is rivalled
by Foucault's interest in discourses and practices. All, including Schutz
and Merleau-Ponty, assume that "practical knowledge" is a resource
situated in or inscribed upon flesh, bodies, and minds. Some thinkers
attribute more to flesh or mind than others do, but nevertheless, the
latter are "the real" where social "reality" is considered to reside.

The story of Veronique suggests that the latter disclosures are
shrouded and opaque and their core is impossible to say. Yet there is a
saying, and that saying is not synonymous with what is said, just as a
book is not synonymous with writing, and rules are not synonymous
with ethics. Veronique lives her life, and in the pure passion of days,
she experiences only her passage toward her world. The event of this
passage, which elaborates itself in distraction and risk, doubles as her
world. The situation of postmodernity also is one where its ethics
double as a risky passing and wandering in search of what to do and
how to do it, often with accident and incident as the only clue to what
could have been right or wrong or what could even double as a world
in which such issues could become problematic.

It seem.s as if the latter is what is inevitable now. From whence this
demand, and why now the weight of its inscription? What of its con-
sequences? Can "we" act any other way but in advance of ourselves,
trying all the while to establish that "we" in fact have destiny as an
ally?

]Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 99

References

' Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York, 1988), p. 94. Henceforth cited as IE.
^Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY:

Station Hill Press, 1988), p. 25.
^Erving Goffman, Encounters: Tzvo Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis:

Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), p. 7. Henceforth cited as E.
^Randall Collins, "On the Micro-foundations of Macro-sociology," American Journal

of Sociology, no. (1981), pp. 984-1014; Theoretical Sociology (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1988), p. 402.
^Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume HI, ed. Use Schutz (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1970), p. 29.
^Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1971, pp. 173-174. Henceforth cited as CPI.
^Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984).
^ James M. Ostrow, Social Sensitivity: A Study of Habit and Experience (Albany: SUNY

Press), p. 19.
^ Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume 11, ed. Arvid Broderson (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1964), p. 178. Henceforth cited as CPU.
^ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). Henceforth cited as PP.
" Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and P. A.

Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 58.
'^ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O'Neill (London:

Heineman, 1974), p. 65.
'^ Thomas Luckmann, "Remarks on Personal Identity: Inner, Social and Historical

Time," in Identity: Personal ami Socio-Cultural, ed. A. Jacobson-Widding (Uppsala,

Sweden: Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 5, 1983), p. 67.
"Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977).
^^ Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso

Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 256. Henceforth cited as

TI.

'^Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 247.
'^ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 112.
^^ Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press,

1988, pp. 37, 59, 73-74, 97-98. Henceforth cited as IE.
^'Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. L. Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992),

p. 6. Henceforth cited as SN.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 164.

100 Marc. J. LaFountain: Destiny without Destination (?): Un Coeur en Hiver

'^ Alphonso Lingis, Libido - The French Existential Theories (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1985), p. 67. Henceforth cited as L.

^Luce Irigaray, "The Fecundity of the Caress," in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Rich-
ard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 234-235.

'^^ Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1986), pp. 17, 36. Henceforth cited as DS; also see Allan Stoekl, Poli-
tics, Writing Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 131.

^'' Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 33. Henceforth cited as SL.

^^ Steven Shaviro, Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille and Literary Theory (Tallahassee:
University of Florida Press, 1990), p. 119.

^"Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 114, 121, 138 respectively. Henceforth cited
as OB.

^^ Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station
Hill Press, 1985), pp. 63, 69-71 . Henceforth cited as WT.

^* Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 338.

-''Allen S. Weiss, "Impossible Sovereignty," in The Aesthetics of Excess (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1989), pp. 12-28.

3Helene Cb(Ous, Souffles (Paris: Des femmes, 1975), pp. 21-22.

^' Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Wash-
ington Square Press, 1956, p. 555.

^^ Georges Bataille, Oeuvres completes, Vol VL La Somme atheologique IL Sur Nietzsche.
Memorandum. Annexes, ed. Henri Ronse and J-M. Rey (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p.
429.

''^Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, of the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New
Left Review, no. 146 (1984), pp. 53-93.

^Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massvmii (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81. Henceforth dted
as PC.

^^For a detailed discussion see Marc LaFountain, "Play and Ethics in Culturus Inter-
ruptus: Gadamer's Hermeneutics in Postmodemity," in The Specter of Relativism:
Truth, Dialogue and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), pp. 206-223.

New Directions in Crime, Law, and
Social Change: On Psychoanalytic
Semiotics, Chaos Theory, and
Postmodern Ethics

By Bruce A. Arrigo, Ph.D.

Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has drawn considerable atten-
:ion to the theoretical and methodological contributions of the
postmodern sciences to interpret diverse social phenomena. Although
Tiore slow in developing, this brand of critical conceptual analysis
low finds increasing legitimacy within the intersecting domains of
aw and criminology. An important, though vastly under-examined,
iimension of postmodern criminal justice research is the question of
Bthics and how crime, law, and social change might be envisioned in
ight of this more deracinating perspective. Accordingly, this essay
xoadly develops several insights found in the seminal work of Jacques
Lacan. In the context of his psychoanalytic semiotics, the role that
discourse assumes in constituting our appreciation for (criminal jus-
ice) ethics is specifically discussed. Where appropriate, some treat-
nent of Lacan's corresponding notions of subjectivity and knowledge
s also integrated into the analysis. We conclude by speculating upon
eplacement vistas for social change in law and criminology and how
uch change might reconfigure justice and morality in light of our
>ostmodem investigation. On these matters, several linkages between

"laos theory and Lacanian thought are outlined which suggest trans-
ormative possibilities.

Introduction

Exploring the ethical dimensions of law and crime has long been a
ubject of considerable scrutiny by philosophers, theologians, soci-
logists, jurisprudes, political scientists, journalists, media analysts,
nd even the occasional barfly. It is not surprising, then, that the bur-
eoning discipline of criminal justice has seized upon such momen-
im and has endeavored to offer its own version of police, court, and

102 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

correctional accountability. The plethora of academy scholarship bears
witness to this trend.' In further support of this commitment to re-
search in ethics, morality, and justice is the popular semi-annual peri-
odical. Criminal Justice Ethics. Its mission statement identifies as its
goal the "systematic and normative analysis of moral choice con-
fronted by all agents of the criminal justice system,"^

The scholarship identified above offers much of interest for the
traditional criminal justician. Regrettably, much of it fails to offer any-
thing approximating critically-inspired analysis. The previous com-
ment is less a virulent attack and more a well-meaning observation
on the nature of current research addressing ethics in criminal justice.
For example, conspicuously absent from this literature is any refer-
ence to the postmodern agenda. This is disappointing especially since
it is this very perspective which increasingly finds itself at the fore-
front of conceptual and applied criminological and legal scholarship
in the academy. For example, a selected cataloging of recent contribu-
tions have considered such diverse themes as policing;^ mental ill-
ness and criminal insanity;^ crime and social control;^ feminism and
the sociology of law;*' organizational behavior/ psychoanalysis and
legal semiotics;'^ legal theory and legal narratives;'^ criminal justice
education;'" rape and social violence." I

Advancing the topical trend to interpret social life beyond conven-
tional modes of scientific inquiry, this essay will sketch the meaning(s)
of criminal justice ethics by incorporating important contributions
from one emerging, though under studied, postmodern tradition. The
heterodox approach we consider encompasses the rich, varied, and
idiosyncratic formalizations of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic
semiotics.''^ Of particular interest will be his regard for discourse and
the interdependent processes through which it structures thought.
Where relevant to our assessment, the related Lacanian concerns of
subjectivity as linked to desire, and knowledge as linked to power
will be examined. This essay will conclude by considering what steps
are necessary to re-constitute ethics in crime and justice;'"* steps which
point to a new direction for social change in the age of postmodernity.
Here, contributions from the new science of chaos theory or orderly dis-
order will be integrated with Lacan's description of both the discourse
of the analyst and the discourse of the hysteric}'^

Before proceeding, a few comments are warranted about the os-
tensibly mechanistic and deterministic forces at work in Lacan's

Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 103

lemiotics and our emphasis on discoursing in the postmodern. In part,
he thesis of this essay rests on the iterative closures or the anchor-
iges {capitonnages) valorized and legitimated in the constitution of
:rime and justice and the intersections upon which ethics is fashioned,
vloreover, underpinning this operation is the recognition that linguistic
ieterminism governs the process. Extending Marx's critique of the
ogic of capital, use versus exchange value theory, and commodity
etishism, several semioticians have advanced the proposition that
anguage is itself a fetishized commodity. ^^ By invoking the distinc-
ion between instrumental (hard) and structural (soft) determinism,
he central issue is the extent to which language defines our interper-
lonal relationships and events in the world. With hard determinism
anguage is the vehicle by which the life-world is constituted. With
;oft determinism language contributes to the structuration of human
iffairs but there is open-endedness; that is, some room for other inter-
vening variables to co-constitute reality (e.g., education, religion, the
amily, personal attitudes /beliefs) is ascertainable.

Focusing upon the process by which discourse is conceived, the
psychoanalytic semiotics of Lacan traverse this delicate balance of po-
sitions. A close reading of his algebraic conceptualizations discloses
)oth a rigid commitment to a deterministic, reductionistic science of
inguistics, as well as a rejection of such absolutism and positivism.
Consider the juxtaposition of the following: "mathematic formaliza-
ion is our goal, is our ideal" '^ and "psychoanalysis is not a science." ^^
\s several scholars have noted, Lacan must be read descriptively rather
han prescriptively.^^ His contributions, then, rest in their capacity to
uel debate and reveal questions rather than to settle disputes or de-
initively offer solutions to queries in the sociology of knowledge. In
his regard, Lacan seems to be suggesting that there are both orderly
nd disorderly processes at work in the formation of discourse, sub-
jctivity, and knowledge. Indeed, while he utilizes mobius strips,
orromean knots, feedback loops, neologisms, topological maps, and
ther non-conventional social scientific conceptualizations as the hall-
lark of his psychoanalytic semiotics, he invites the reader to adopt a
tore intuitive, a more serendipitous, grasp of what his discursive
zhematizations signify.^^ In short, Lacan adopts mathematical orga-
izing principles to construct a theory of discourse situated in mythic
wwledge}^ Thus, the matter of linguistic determinism must be re-
arded as a more plurisignificant and ambiguous dispute; one which
?sists paradigmatic responses or certifiable formulas.

104 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

Our treatment and application of Lacanian thought also straddles
a similar modernist/ postmodernist divide. We accept his mathemati-
cal principles as a point of departure for interpreting human behavior
and social interaction and not as a point of arrival for establishing
ultimate Truths or even the definitive word on a particular truth. Thus,
we reject the application of Lacan's sundry schematizations in any
authoritative or dictatorial fashion. Instead, we utilize sc veral "tools"
contained within his social theory for purposes of generating ideas
and cultivating a narrative relevant to law and criminology and the
tentative illumination of criminal justice ethics.

Psychoanalytic Semiotics and Discourse Construction

The birth and evolution of psychoanalytic semiotics can be traced
to the writings of Jacques Lacan.-^^ Much of what Lacan offers us is^ in
many ways, a reconceptualization of the voluminous writings of
Sigmund Freud.-' Similar to Freud, Lacan was interested in exploring
the deep and murky waters of the unconscious. Unlike Freud, how-
ever, Lacan devoted much of his career to demonstrating how the
unconscious was structured like a language.^^ It was this unconscious
or Other (Autre), which was understood to be the untapped reposi-
tory of language, agency, power, and desire.

For Lacan the careful elucidation of the unconscious and its dis-
course required the application of the postmodern sciences. The meth-
odological tools upon which he relied most especially included the
logic of semiotics.-'* For our purposes, semiotics is the study of lan-
guage as signs and the evolving meanings communicated in and
through these signs and through their unique language systems.^'' To
clarify the matter, all speech, whether verbal, non-verbal, or
extra- verbal always and already occurs from within a language (i.e, sign)
system. For example: there is a specialized grammar in law termed
legalese. The same may be said of other communication markets such
as those found in and among science, sports, and prison inmates. As
subsequent sections will describe, these sign systems are distil guish-
able on the basis of their dominant, pluralistic, and oppositional us-
age governed both by the prevailing culture and the politica
economy.-^

Language systems are coordinated so that meaning, subjecti'^dty
reason, and rationality can only occur when one inserts oneself and/
or is situated within the bounded and signifying sphere of that dis-

/esf Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995

105

ourse in operation.-^ Thus, for example, explaining Baseball's 'in-
leld fly rule' occurs by invoking that speech which reflects the en-
oded, sedimented, and systematized logic of this sport. All accurate
ense-making, regardless of speech code, is contingent upon this
xiom.

The sign begins as a concept through its connection to an acoustic
sound) ima^e.-^'^ This sound image is a trace or representation of the
ign. It is a signifier for the image. The concept itself, however, is the
ign's signified. Peirce has correctly pointed out how the sign-concept
stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity."^'*
'hus, the sign creates in the mind of the interpreter an "equivalent
ign".''" Figure 1 depicts these relationships. Semiotic production
semiosis) is understood, then, as the interactive effects of signifier/
ignified (sign) anchorings, mediated by an interpreter, forming the
lasis of a system of communication.

FIGURE 1: SEMIOTIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE SIGN

IGN =

acoustic image '
concept

signifier
,, signified

baseball

Or

Adapted from Milovanovic RSL p. 33)

The sign (and its signification), however, does not appear in a ran-
lom arrangement. To reiterate, users of unique grammars are predis-
)Osed to borrowing from the available, pre-structured linguistic forms
>f that language. This is a reference to the systemic or structural level
tf semiotic production. Thus, before we can describe how, according
0 Lacan, language structures thought, some preliminary observations
elevant to this first sphere of semiotic activity is pivotal to our analy-
is.

^.. Sphere of Structural Semiotic Production and Circulation

n order to delineate the systemic level of semiosis and its operation
vithin a particular sign system (such as criminal justice and its rela-
ionship to ethics), we rely upon Marx and his distinction between

106 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

commodity production and circulation. In the case of law, for example,
linguistic production originates in higher courts (including state ap-
peals courts, state supreme courts, U.S. appeals courts, and the U.S.
Supreme court). It is in such arenas that the ideological sign is reduced
from multi-accentuality to uni-accentuality.^^ In other words, all the
possible contents for the signifier find expression in the articulation
(production) of one precise meaning.''^ The signifieds for such ex-
pressions as "wrongful," "willingly," "mens rea," "duress," etc., are
compatible with the capitalist and repressive mode of production.
Alternative constructions which may resonate deeply within the psy-
chic apparatus of one's unconscious are silenced, are denied affirma-
tive codification, in the juridical sphere. As we have shown in the
context of mental illness,'*'' criminal insanity, '*'* and punishment^^ the
dominant hegemonic group will exercise linguistic control to stave
off crisis tendencies,''^ ensuring the stabilization of the signified as
"consistent with the internal dynamics of capital logic.^^

To illustrate the matter, the signified for the signifier "mental ill-
ness" borrows from the available linguistic forms compatible within
psychiatric medicine.''*^ Typical meanings include words or phrases
such as "diseased" "in need of treatment" "dysfunctional," to convey the
concept. These characterizations arguably suggest that the mentally
ill can only be understood as objects of scientific and dispassionate
inquiry, as an assortment of maladies, or as the sum of their fallibilities.
De-stabilizing accentuations such as "consumers of psychiatric services"
"mental health citizens" and "the differently abled" although infused in
the formation of the sign, slumber in despair and await legitimation
in a battery of signifieds outside the hierarchical realm of juridic pro-
duction. Such codifications borrow from the lexicon of medicine but
envision the mentally ill as active, empowered participants in the psy
chiatric marketplace. Thus, these linguistic forms challenge the pre
vailing power differential in mental health law and must be quickly
neutralized through semiotic cleansing. In order to avoid a legitima-
tion crisis, these latter terms or phrases do not appear in the pertinent
case and statutory law describing the mentally ill.'''^

Once the ideological sign and its precise codification has under
gone linguistic structuration in the higher courts, such meanings cir-
culate to lower courts, to administrative tribunals, to classrooms, and
to the public. Thus, we have the fetishism of the (linguistic) commod-
ity. We are surprised and uncertain by such depictions of the men-

Yesf Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 107

ally ill as consumers or citizens because they fail to reflect the estab-
ished and sedimented relationship between law, medicine, and the
)sychiatrically disordered. Again, ossified signifieds are constituted
n such ways so as to be beneficial to hegemonic group interests (e.g.,
aw, medicine). We are left with the appearance of equality, individu-
ility, proprietorship, etc., emanating from the sphere of circulation,
rhe hierarchical and repressive dimensions found in the sphere of
production are unconsciously understood to be beyond incrimina-
ion.^

The preliminary implications for ethics in a criminal justice con-
ext at this structural level of semiotic production are quite profound,
f ethical principles flow from the overlapping effects of crime, law,
md justice, and if the meaning of such constructs is pre-structured to
;ustain the demands of advanced capitalism, then it follows that cir-
cumscribed ethics are endorsed and enforced! Put another way, the sys-
emic sphere of semiotic production and circulation embodies prin-
:iples of (ethical) accountability which linguistically (and therefore
:ulturally) sustain the prevailing political economy and social order.
Ml other discursive constructions in law and criminology, all other
)ystem-destabilizing configurations of normative behavior, are alto-
gether dismissed or re-languaged and made compatible with the co-
)rdinates representing the (dominant) language system in use.

5. Sphere of Intra-psychic and Intersubjective Semiotic
Production

According to classical Lacanian theory, the language of the uncon-
scious is over-determined and polyphonic, much like the poetic dis-
:ourse of the novelist.'*' Thus, all discourse is laden with metaphori-
:al, paradoxical, hyperbolic, etc., allusions awaiting symbolization and
egitimation through the sign process. In the Lacanian topography,
:he construction of discourse can best be conceptualized as a semiotic
^rid. Figure 2 depicts the grid. It reflects the descriptive dimension
oy and through which internal (intra-psychic) and interpersonal
^intersubjective) thought processes are re-presented in the act of speech.
Re-presentation is a reference to the structural level of semiotic pro-
duction which first accents the sign consistent with the logic of capi-
tal.

108

Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Laiv and Social Change

FIGURE 2: SEMIOTIC GRID AND SPEECH PRODUCTION

Plane of More
Consciousness

AXES

Paradigm Syntagm

Metaphor Metonymy

Condensation Displacement

Plane of More
Unconsciousness

(Adapted from B. Arrigo {DCJE, p. 117); D. Milovanovic (RSL, p. 39).

In the psychic apparatus of the unconscious, three different, though
interpenetrating, axes (also called tropes) coordinate language in us-
age and sedimentation. The inter-workings of these tropes produce
certain signifier-signified relationships, embodying subjectivity or
one's desire in language.^- In Lacanian theory the desiring subject as-
sumes an essential role in re-creating discourse and thereby structur-
ing thought. Briefly stated, the Lacanian version of subjectivity chal-
lenges the mainstream Cartesian notion which claims that individual
subjects are purposeful, rational, stable, active. Thus, as autonomous
agents, we are at the center of all human affairs and architects of all
human events. This position is summarily contained in Descartes'
famous dictum: "Cogito ergo sum." Contrarily Lacan claims that the
subject is de-centered; that is, the plenary and unitary "I" or cogito is
divided or slashed ($).'*^ As we have suggested, individual actors sub-
mit to and are situated within a floating stream of signifying practices
located within the repository of one's unconscious. These signifying
practices preliminarily coordinate or "accent" the desiring subject's
linguistic reality, resulting in the articulation of a specialized code
conveying preferred meanings. Thus, following a Lacanian reading,
individual subjects are more determined than determining, more un-
stable than stable, more disunified than unified.

Returning to the three tropes, it is this very (subjective and re-
pressed) desire which seeks expression and affirmation in the sphere

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 109

of linguistic production and circulation. Accordingly, these axes must
be seen as organizing what we say and ordering the meaning(s) we
communicate, intended or otherwise, by our selection of language. In
what follows we sketch the operation of each paired axis, discuss the
interactive effects of the semiotic grid, and then comment upon the
application of the grid to the constitution of ethics in matters of law
and criminology.

1. Paradigm-syntagm semiotic axis - In order for speech to occur,
certain linguistic forms must be selected from an available inventory,
subsequently coordinated in some coherent pattern. In his posthu-
mously published work. Course de Linguistique Generale (1966),
Ferdinand de Saussure originally conceived of the
paradigmatic-syntagmatic axis in terms of "selection" and "combina-
tion." Discourse (realm of parole) is chosen from a community of lan-
guage (domain of la langue). On the paradigmatic level (vertical axis)
words are grouped together by their "comparability."'" Comparabil-
ity refers to the homologous relationship words share. This relation-
ship includes degrees of similarity or dissimilarity (e.g., procedural
standards of proof in law such as beyond a reasonable doubt, clear
and convincing evidence, preponderance of evidence, scintilla of proof;
substantive guidelines for involuntary civil commitment such as clear
and present danger, dangerous, obviously ill, in distress or deterio-
rating). Hence, the paradigmatic level delimits a range of options from
which we may select.

The syntagmatic axis represents the horizontal plane in this paired
trope. The syntagm is the actual speech chain and reflects the signify-
ing process of word placement in a sentence. Thus, in conversational
speech we find that the speaking subject (Lacan's letre parlant or
parletre) chooses words (paradigms) and arranges or orders them into
a particular phrase or series of sentences (syntagms). The interactive
effects of the axis creates an ephemeral and imaginary space where
meaning (much like a picture or slow moving film) is constructed
and conveyed to the receiver of the message.

In law (particularly the construction of the "what happened" in a
trial) the inter-workings of the paradigm-syntagm are most evident.
Milovanovid^ and Arrigo*^ have each described this process in the
context of how the "what happened" in a criminal case is created.
During direct examination a prosecutor seeks to elicit testimony from
a witness, consistent with the attorney's version of the defendant's

110 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

culpability. The careful selection of words and their ordering produces
a flow of questions which leads to anticipated witness responses. The
prosecutor hopes that the questioning coupled with the direct testi-
mony will foster that imaginary and temporary space, filled in by
jurors, establishing "a plausible flow of events that ostensibly or
self-evidently" identifies the defendant's motive, means, and oppor-
tunity for committing the crime. ^^

On cross-examination the "what happened" is once again
semiotically constructed. Much like direct examination where the
prosecutor endeavors to elicit the appropriate response without op-
posing counsel's objection, previously introduced information is
re-assembled. The chosen paradigms (words selected) and ordered
syntagms (chains of speech) are now shaded, ever so slightly or
broadly, to be consistent with defense counsel's version of the case.
Once again, the attorney attempts to arouse in the minds of jurors a
picture. In this instance, doubt as to the defendant's complicity in the
crime is the essential goal. Verbal cues such as changing the position
of words in previously elicited testimony, non-verbal cues such as
facial or bodily gestures, and extra-verbal cues, including expressions
such as, "Hmmm", "Ah", "Oh", are intended to shatter^^ the previous
image created during direct testimony, without invoking prosecutorial
objection. At the same time, the defense advocate transmits another
picture to the jury; one that re-assembles the events in the case. Thus,
following the paradigm-syntagm dimension of intrapsychic and
intersubjective semiotic production, we see how courtroom
storytelling is a process in which the fact-finding process is semiotically
re-constructed again and anew through the use of semantical dis-
course.

2. Condensation-displacement semiotic axis - In the Lacanian to-
pography, this second axis is not examined in detail. Notwithstand-
ing, Lacan, once again reconceptualizing Freud, is essentially con-
cerned with the psycho-linguistic process by and through which the
desiring subject communicates plenitude (meaning). Condensation
represents that psychical mechanism whereby unconscious but deeply
felt wishes (desires), denied expression during one's ego formation,
receive articulated legitimation through manifest signifiers. These
stated utterances are clues to one's unconscious longing and, when
decoded, identify latent signifieds. Displacement entails the shifting
of internalized energy from unacceptable objects or persons to accept-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 111

able objects or persons. The following statement is illustrative of this
axis's interactive effects: 'I would characterize his testimony as
relaughable'-- an obvious case for condensation formed by the words
laughable and reliable in which a latent perception about an other is
made manifest in an assessment of testimonial evidence. The speaker's
seemingly harmless comment concerning the quality of the witness's
information can more appropriately be identified with a signified in-
volving some humorous or ludicrous dimension.

3. Metaphor-metonymy semiotic axis - Metaphor is that creative,
structural device establishing a linguistic equivalence (the same sig-
nifier) by invoking two entirely different signifieds.'*'^ As Morgan tells
us, "metaphor creates meaning by understanding one phenomenon
through another in a way that encourages us to understand what is
common in both."^ Consider this statement used by an employer,
evaluating the performance of a worker: 'She's running on empty'
Here we have reference to a machine (more particularly the technol-
ogy of an engine) as well as the enervated performance habits of an
employee. Although these signifieds are different, they are brought
under one signifier. Through the use of metaphor as a "constructive
falsehood"^^^ the signifier harnesses thought and, when uttered, tele-
graphs one's regard for people and events in the world. The machine
image conveys the message that people are valued more for how much
they can produce and for how long they can last, and less for who
they or what they have already accomplished.

Metonymy is the substitution of an object with the constituents of
that object. Put another way, the meaning of a thing is communicated
by reducing the thing to the naming of its parts or attributes. Con-
sider the following: our country's flag, a box of Kleenex, reference to
the "King". In each instance, the things identified (the signifiers "flag",
Kleenex", and the "King") are elements/ attributes of something else.
In the case of the "flag" one more than likely associates it with the
United States or "Old Glory" (the signified) than with the cloth by
which it is made. In the instance of "Kleenex" one probably thinks of
tissues (the signified) rather than the Paper Company which produces
them. In the example of the "King" one is apt to link it to the Rock'n
Roll legend Elvis Presley (the signified) than with any person of sov-
ereign nobility from a foreign land.

In the Lacanian schema, the metaphoric-metonymic trope is situ-
ated within the Symbolic Order. This is the saturated linguistic realm

112 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

in which culture, particularly the political economy as phallocratically
conceived, is given ideologically-derived and materialistically-based
form and substance (see endnote 42). In other words, figurative speech
reflects the means and relations of production consistent with the pre-
vailing culture. Thus, this axis mediates and facilitates between the
paired semiotic tropes of paradigm-syntagm and
condensation-displacement. Metaphorical and metonymical images
anchor discourse, signifying the parameters of a society's existent his-
tory and technology.

4. The semiotic grid and its interactive effects - Returning to Fig-
ure 2, we see the interplay of the semiotic grid. The paired trope of
the paradigm-syntagm is governed by every day speech (i.e., gram-
mar). The metaphor-metonymy axis is outside of everyday discourse.
It is anchored by the preconfigured linguistic coordinates represent-
ing a given epoch or culture. The condensation-displacement trope is
constitutive of speech (articulated desire) expressed symptomatically
(e.g., parapraxis, neurotic communication).

In Lacanian psychoanalytic semiotics, the construction of reality
originates in the language of the unconscious. This Other contains a
stream of signifiers awaiting the release of excitatory energy. Within
an imaginary space, this psychical force, radiating from the uncon-
scious (the Other), produces images. These images laced with the
Other's metaphorical-metonymical constraints, receive temporary
psychical clarity delimited within particular spatio-temporal bound-
aries. Through this process, a view of reality (desire) is given birth.
The act of paradigmatic-syntagmatic speech re-presents the structured
and languaged thoughts originally conceived in and residing among
the floating signifiers inhabiting the primary process region (the place
of the unconscious or Other).

The interpenetrating effects of the grid can also be understood on
the basis of narrative coherence and knowledge construction.-^-^ All
discourse is about storytelling. Thus, when speaking or writing we
communicate certain (scripted) meanings, intended or otherwise,
through our selection of language or through our interpretation of
the text. Here, meaning refers to the constitution of knowledge as sub-
jective desire. Lacan was to make considerable reference to this no-
tion of subjectivity or desire in discourse in both static form in his
famous Schema V^ and dynamic form in his Graphs of Desire or Schema
R.5*

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 113

The Lacanian notion of subjectivity situates the person into a quad-
rilateral depiction of human agency. For Lacan, rather than a subject,
le offered the idea of a "speaking being" {parletre, or letre parlant). The
speaking being is constituted by three Orders: the Real, Imaginary,
md Symbolic. The Real Order is the domain of felt but inarticulable
experience; it is beyond symbolization or speech. The Imaginary is
the domain of images (imagos). These are specular constructions of
self and others. The Symbolic Order is the domain of language, cul-
ture, and the unconscious. It is through this Order that the subject
speaks.

As children, following inauguration into the masculine encoded
[ogic of the Symbolic Order, we search for completeness (plenitude).
rhe speaking being "sutures" what is perceived to be existential gaps
in one's being. Objects of desire {objet petit a) offer the possibility for
experiencing this sense of identity fulfillment. Words, speech, language
are the very mechanisms by and through which this longing may be
realized. In order to suture, the subject, once again, is situated into or
inserts her /himself into some relatively stable, though circumscribed,
:oordinated language system. The encoded logic of this discursive
process embodies a limited form of knowledge which, when ex-
pressed, reflects the desiring voice (storytelling) of only certain col-
iectives.

In law narrative coherence is a function of subjects embodying
desire within legal categories of reason and within acceptable seman-
tic and syntagmatic structures.^^ In psychiatric medicine when hospi-
tals determine the need to involuntary hospitalize a person because
of an acute or chronic disorder, narrative coherence relates to patients
embodying or failing to embody desire within psychiatric categories
of acceptable language-thought-behavior patterns. ^^ In gang cultures
khere membership and allegiance are often in question, narrative co-
herence is embodied in the use of a specialized language known most
especially to the indoctrinated faithful. Those who fail to rely upon
:his code may be subjected to ostracism, banishment, or death. In these
and other) scripted dialogues, many stories (ways of knowing) are
ilenced (e.g., minorities, the disenfranchised, those engaged in alter-
lative styles of living). It is in such instances as these that linguistic
)ppression is made manifest.

5. The semiotic grid and ethics in crime, law, and justice - Follow-
ng our preliminary reading in which the barest essentials of Lacanian

114 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Laiv and Social Change

psychoanalytic semiotics were outlined, the question is how might
the sphere of intra-psychic and intersubjective semiotic production
operate in the context of criminal justice ethics. In other words, what
contributions, if any, can Lacan make to our understanding of "the
what happens" (the storytelling) in law and criminology? The posi-
tion taken is that the sequencing of normative accountability in crime,
law, and justice unfolds much like the construction of any story. ^^ Thus,
much like any narrative, the assessment of professional conduct en-
gaged in by police, court, and correctional personnel requires that the
audience (e.g., the public) recognize, indeed embrace, certain
knowledge-truth claims.

Recalling the structural level of semiotic production, the linguistic
parameters of this story are always and already pre-arranged. This is a
reference to the encoded and circumscribed logic constituting the
criminal justice paradigm. Further, at the level of intra-psychic and
intersubjective semiotic production, participants (agents of the crimi-
nal justice system) unconsciously contemplate a number of interre-
lated questions. Integrating all that has been said thus far, the ques-
tions are as follows.

a) paradigm- What words present themselves to police officers, law-
yers, judges, jurors, prison guards, etc. (from a limited inventory with
uniaccentuated signifieds), to support the criminal justice strategy or
intervention taken? Put another way, when the subject situates her/
himself and / or is inserted within the linguistic coordinates defining
police, court, or correctional practice, what words announce them-
selves to the subject such that the person's speech acts are compatible
with those coordinates defining ethical (criminal justice) behavior?

b) syntagm- What sequences of thought speak through the individual
such that s/he can articulate a normative position or raise (ethical)
questions (again, in support of the prevailing sign system in crime,
law, and justice) without challenges or scrutiny levied against such
analysis from the press, the public, or from congressional, religious,
and civic leaders? Moreover, what additional lines of thought (com-
bination of words) reveal themselves to the criminal justice profes-
sional, allowing this agent to neutralize oppositional discourse?

c) metaphor- What desiring images appear before the unconscious of
litigators, officers, wardens, or judges, etc., which, when articulated
through such individuals, unwittingly situate others (the public most
especially) into the story (adopting the intervention or strategy) so

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 115

that they regard its logic as compelUng, true, and ethical (i.e., a con-
vincing narrative)?

d) metonymy- what lines of thought announce themselves to crimi-
nal justice professionals and when uttered arguably re-direct the pub-
lic, the press, and others to an element of police, court, and correc-
tional institutional practice thereby deductively linking said element
to the efficacy of a larger ethical principle? For example: the O.J.
Simpson double murder case is a constitutive element of the trial pro-
cess which is itself a feature of the criminal justice system. When de-
bating the broader issue of whether the overall system is ethically
bankrupt, proponents rely upon the illustration of the O.J. Simpson
trial. To amplify their position they cite the star-struck behavior of
several jurors (and witnesses); the legal chicanery and jockeying by
defense and prosecuting attorneys; the exorbitant (and extraordinary)
cost of litigation paid for by Mr. Simpson and the state respectively;
the lack of a "gag" rule issued by the judge as contributing to inces-
sant media coverage exploiting the drama of violence, death, and
human tragedy; and the protracted duration of the case billed as the
"trial of the century." The stated example assumes a metonymical func-
tion in that the whole (the lack of ethics in criminal justice) is under-
stood through the function of" the illustrative part (the O.J. Simpson
double murder case).

Social Change and Replacement Discourse(s): Toward a
Transformative (Criminal Justice) Ethics

Thus far we have shown how discourse is constituted at both the
systemic and intra-psychic/intersubjective spheres of semiotic pro-
duction. Further, we have considered the implications for such semiotic
activity in the context of criminal justice ethics. Notions of law, crime,
md justice are (unconsciously) coordinated within a language sys-
:em embodying that desire compatible with the knowledge aims of
:hose who regulate the criminal justice apparatus. All other expres-
sions of desire, all other ways of knowing, are repressed or are denied
affirmative codification through the logic of police, court, and correc-
ional categories. Thus, attempts at semiotic resistance are quickly
leutralized; linguistic control and repressive practices perpetuate
hemselves, the moral ascendancy of that sub-sign system in opera-
ion are unwittingly validated as above reproach.

116 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Laiv and Social Change

In this section we outline what postmodern (Lacanian) steps exist
which, when implemented, suggest the possibility for transcending
the imposed parameters of conventional (criminal justice) ethics. In
other words, we explore the necessary conceptual steps which ready
the way for a more inclusive, more participatory, form of social jus-
tice. We contend that such postmodern theoretical work is essential
for establishing a more honest construction of ethics in law and crimi-
nology as well as a more complete vision from within which to acti-
vate social change. Accordingly, we briefly examine chaos theory and
its "orderly disorder" theorems as well as the combinatory effects of
Lacan's discourse of the analyst and hysteric.^^ The former suggests a
new basis for cultivating being while the latter creates new pathways
for engendering change.

A. Chaos Theory

Chaos theory is a challenge to all over-arching and totalizing prin-
ciples of reason, rationality, judgment, and intellect.'''' The theory fun-
damentally questions the veracity of Newtonian physics, Euclidean
geometry, Aristotelian logic and all approaches guided by principles
of deterministic and positivistic science. The essence of chaos theory
can be conceptualized on the basis of several interdependent propo-
sitions. The most relevant of these propositions are outlined below.

1. Non-linearity - There are no essential structures, no permanent
stabilities governing space-time mapping.^ Thus, the social order is
situated in unpredictability and natural systems are understood to
stably perpetuate themselves "precisely because they are 'unprin-
cipled,' i.e., they behave nonlinearily.^^ Thus, minor or incremental
changes (inputs) can produce major or substantial results (outputs).
For example,a young boy (Ryan White) contracts AIDS, and an entire
nation, ensconced in denial, instantly realizes the devastation of a dis-
ease which refuses to discriminate on the basis of age, gender, race, or
class.

2. Fractal space - According to conventional science and philoso-
phy, space is understood on the basis of whole integers (e.g., 1, 2, 3,
4...). Chaologists recognize the fractional dimension of space (e.g., 1
1/8, 2 1/4, 3 1/2, 4 3/4...). Extending this rationale to (criminal jus-
tice) ethics, normative accountability is measured in degrees. In other
words, contrary to the binary formula found in Aristotelian logic, chaos

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Scie?tces, XXXIII, 1995 117

theory posits that ethics is more appropriately about fractal values; it
is not an all or nothing equation.^-

The televised beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles County po-
lice officers illustrates the previous notion. Despite the repeated and
incessant media display of Mr. King's trouncing, we still question the
ethics of the situation (e.g., was Rodney King resisting arrest? Did he
have a right to resist? Did the officers follow customary law enforce-
ment practices? If so, were (are) such practices inherently unjust? If
not, what role, if any, did race play in the use of force?, etc.).

3. Attractors - Chaologists envision the mapping of dynamic sys-
tems (e.g., law, criminology) in a non-linear fashion.''^ Attractors are
cumulative patterns of behavior or trajectories that plot out and point
to where a system through movement ("phase space") tends. There
are maps which depict linear trajectories. These are called limit or point
attractors. Other maps portray non-linear movements. These are called
torus or strange attractors. These latter trajectories behave in ways con-
trary to Newtonian physics. They represent both order and disorder;
predictability and unpredictability. Consider, for example: the sun-
dry designs of windblown snowscapes; the pattern of waves wash-
ing up against a coastal shoreline; the symmetry of brain activity dur-
ing bouts of dissociation. In other words, there is structuration (pre-
dictability) at the macro (global) level, stemming from conditions of

ux (unpredictability) at the micro (local) level. Thus, order emerges
out of chaos.

4. The torus and iteration - Figure 3 depicts the tube-like nature of
the torus attractor. Cross-gaps of the torus are called Poincare sec-
ions. They represent events isolated at a particular time. At the macro
evel or in terms of global phase-space there is overall order. This pre-
iictability is the tube-like torus itself. However, at the micro level or
n terms of local, positional phase-space, there is indeterminability. In
)ther words, "pinpointing specific occurrences within this slice with

FIGURE 3: THE TORUS ATTRACTOR

118 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

exactness is an illusory exercise."*''^ In speech we can appreciate this
process through iteration}''^ Every signifier has a multitude of signifieds.
Meaning explodes and scatters. It is not fixed, static, or closed. At best
there are only approximations. There is no -precise fit.

Assigning (criminal) blameworthiness following illegal or ques-
tionable conduct illustrates the effects of the torus and iteration. At
the macro level stealing is a crime in which one is subject to prosecu-
tion, conviction, and sanction. However, the signified for "criminal
theft" is unstable; it depends upon the age, mental state, race, gender,
and class of the defendant, as well as the situation, position, and con-
text in and out of which the behavior is perpetrated. The same may be
said regarding the ethics of stealing. There are a range of possible
meanings for "criminal theft." The slightest variation in factual cir-
cumstances alters the iterations (signifieds) given preferred meaning.
This is an instance of non-linear dynamics at work.

5. Far-from-equilibrium conditions - According to chaologists, dy-
namic systems continually break down but are spontaneously
re-constituted. Chaologists term such conditions dissipative structures.^
These structures are characterized by their sensitivity and responsive-
ness to variation, contingency, perturbation. Dissipative structures are
receptive to change, chance, indeterminacy, and flux. The generating
mechanisms for such fluid systems are far-from-equilibrium conditions.^^
These conditions make possible the establishment of new master
signifiers, embodying replacement narratives (ways of knowing)
wherein the de-centered subject's desire finds greater expression and
legitimacy.

Systems which tend toward stasis (including the criminal justice
apparatus), promote predictable paradigmatic/ syntagmatic
anchorings, restrictive and unilateral discourse, and circumscribed
knowledge forms within which desire finds embodiment. Impeded
in such repressive practices is the establishment of new master
signifiers, alternative bodies of knowledge, replacement expressions
of desire through which to consider social change, multiple ways of
being, and intersubjectively verifiable ethics in law and criminology.
However, systems governed more by randomness, continuous varia-
tion, and unpredictability suggest the birth of new consciousness; a
replacement discourse compatible with the spontaneities, ironies, fan-
tasies, and absurdities of social life and being human. Such a system
would embody multiple discourses; desire(s) understood as provi-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 119

lional, positional, and relational, and standpoint epistemologies sub-
ect to iterative variation.

3. On the Discourse Of the Hysteric and Analyst

Elsewhere we have shown haw Lacan's discourse of the hysteric in
:ombination with the discourse of the analyst may collaborate with the
)ppressed (e.g., those subjected to the constraints of a unilateral eth-
cs) in fostering social change).^^ The thrust of this analysis is that dif-
erent forms of desire (jouissance) can find embodiment in the struc-
ure of alternative grammars. Recalling our description of the four
elements constituting each of Lacan's four discourses (see endnote
)2) we can outline the discursive formation of the hysteric discourse
md that of the analyst.

The hysteric represents the oppositional subject (e.g., the rebel
idvocate assisting the poor and disenfranchised, the social /commu-
lity activist addressing political injustices) as well as the more acutely
'ill" subject (e.g., the paranoid schizophrenic, the sociopathic devi-
mt). This discursive structure for this discourse is symbolized as fol-
ows:

$ >S1

a < S2

rhe despairing subject as slashed or divided endeavors to convey his/
"ler suffering to the other. This other, in the position of agent,
nterpellates the repressed subject in customary ways or offers only
fonventional master signifiers to the divided individual's longing,
hus, that which is left out {pous tout) represents both the source and
)roduct of the subject's unfulfilled and disembodied desire. For Lacan,
le potential for overcoming the dictatorial hold of language experi-
nced by the hysteric exists within the discourse of the analyst:

a > S

S2 < SI

he analyst as a "cultural revolutionary"'''' legitimates the discourse
f the divided subject. S/he develops and seeks to articulate new or
virgin" master signifiers embodying the subject's desire, producing
lythic knowledgeJ^ This product symbolizes the hysteric's truth which
I turn supports what is left out and the process sustains itself in a
/^clical fashion. Thus, following the postmodern prescription of Lacan,

120 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

desire in language can foster multiple discourses, can embody
multiaccentuated desire, can be reflective of different expressions of
reality.

The combinatory effects of Lacan's discourse of the hysteric and ana-
lyst suggest that social change is rooted in the identification and le-
gitimation of new master signifiers, forming the basis of new (mythic)
knowledge. This is similar to the torus or strange attractor in chaos
theory. In the psychoanalytic semiotics of Lacan, replacement
signifiers, embodying multi-accentuated desire, are iterated in differ-
ent contexts yet remain sensitive to "the trace of the past.""' It is here
that we see how far-from-equilibrium conditions (and the strange
attractor) resonate with Lacan's discourse of the hysteric and analyst.
We can also appreciate their relationship to (criminal justice) ethics.

Figure 4 depicts the manner in which the strange attractor
functions. The most celebrated of these is the butterfly attractor ap-
pearing with two wings. These two wings are outcomes basins. The
strange attractor is much more sensitive to contingencies than is the
torus. At the macro level order and predictability prevail; however,

FIGURE 4: THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR

at the micro level disorder is pervasive. In other words, within each
basin accurate, precise prediction is impossible. Notwithstanding, with
repeated iterations (multiple signifieds) a pattern emerges; that is, the
butterfly wings appear. Ethical disputes in law and criminology op-
erate in this manner.''- The police use of deadly force, the sentencing
decision of judges, the correctional practice of paroling inmates, etc.,
are all illustrations of this (ethical) notion. In each instance a decision
is made. Although in some instances only transitory, the subject lin-
gers within the logic of one wing then within the logic of the other.
The phase-space within which undecidability and indeterminacy pre-
vail are moments of open-endedness and receptiveness; that is, they
are periods in which stasis and closure are resisted. These are crucial
points of decision-making! They are not identically fixed even in cases
reflecting similar circumstances.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 121

This activity of continuous iteration (assigning manifold meaning)
and of dis-identifying with established master signifiers, is what the
joint effects of Lacan's two discourses endeavor to fashion. The col-
laboration of the hysteric and analyst indicate a path toward the devel-
opment of new expressions of desire saturated with the subject's
uniquely encoded sense-making. Again, this is contingent, local, and
relational ethics; one which makes possible social change constituted
by disenfranchised citizens. This is a far cry from the conventional
normative accountability of those who manipulate the (criminal) jus-
tice apparatus, regulating the system as they do through hierarchical,
exploitative, and repressive linguistic control. Instead, we are con-
"ronted with the possibility of replacement discourses and a transfor-
mative ethics. Discursive systems of communication (multiple
knowledges) would prevail so that those whose voices (stories) suf-
fered marginalization would no longer surrender to the desperation
of their silence.

Conclusion

Much of what we have attempted here has been a journey, albeit

provisional, into unchartered territory. We have considered what con-

ributions, if any, a Lacanian-informed psychoanalytic semiotics of-

ers to further our appreciation for criminal justice ethics. Our

jostmodern enterprise examined several of Lacan's postulates on dis-

ourse and their relationship to re-presenting thought. Where perti-

lent, several of Lacan's conceptualizations on subjectivity and knowl-

dge were also examined. In an effort to move beyond the sedimented

mguage of law and criminology, we addressed how social change

light by envisioned. Here we considered some relevant contribu-

Lons contained in chaos theory and integrated them with additional

acanian insights. Postmodern criminal justice ethics is about estab-

shing a new vocabulary within which multiple expressions of desire

lay find unencumbered expression and legitimacy. We are not sug-

esting ours is the path which must be traversed; rather, we offer

3me alternative theoretical vistas by and through which to recon-

der the direction discourse can take as our society debates ethical

ilemmas in crime, law, and justice.

122 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

References

' See. e.g., J. Braswell, T. McCarthy, and F. McCarthy, Justice, Crime and Ethics 2 Ed
(Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co., 1995); D. Close, N. Meier, Morality in
Criminal Justice: An Introduction to Ethics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995). P. Jenkins,
Crime and Justice: Issues and Ideas (Pacific Grove CA.: Brooks /Cole, 1984); J.
Pollock-Byrne, Ethics in Crime and Justice: Dilemmas and Decisions (Pacific Grove,
CA: Brooks /Cole, 1989); S. Souryal, Ethics in Criminal Justice: In Search of The Truth
(Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co., 1992).

- Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics, Criminal Justice Ethics (New York, NY: John Jay
College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, 1995), p. 2.

"* P. Manning, Symbolic Communication: Signifying Calls and the Police Response (Cam-
bridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1988).

* B. Arrigo, Madness, Language and the Law (New York: Harrow and Heston, 1993).
Henceforth cited as MLL, The Contours of Psychiatric Justice: A Postmodern Critique of
Mental Illness, Criminal Insanity and the Law (New York: Garland, 1995). Henceforth
cited as CPJ.

'' S. Henry and D. Milovanovic, Constitutive Criminology (London, UK: Sage, 1995),
"Constitutive Criminology: The Maturation of Critical Theory," Criminology, Vol.
29 (1991), pp. 293-315. Henceforth cited as CC.

'' C. Smart, Law, Crime, and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1995), Feminism and the Power of the Law (London and New York: Routledge, 1989);

C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (London: Harvard
University Press, 1987).

^ P. Manning, Organizational Communication (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992).

^ D. Milovanovic, Postmodern Law and Disorder: Psychoanalytic Semiotics and Juridic
Exegesis (Liverpool, UK: Deborah Charles, 1992). Henceforth cited as PLD, "The
Decentered Subject in Law: Contributions of Topology, Psychoanalytic Semiotics,
and Chaos Theory," Studies in Psychoanalytic Theory, Vol. 3 (1994), pp. 93-127,
"Borromean Knots and the Constitution of Sense in Juridico-Discursive Produc-
tion," Legal Studies Forum, Vol. 17 (1993), pp. 171-192. Henceforth cited as BKCS,
"Lacan, Chaos, and Practical Discourse in Law," in Flux, Complexity and Illusion in
Law, ed. R. Kevelson (New York: Lang, 1993), pp. 311-337. Henceforth cited as LCPD,
"Postmodern Law and Subjectivity: Lacan and the Linguistic Turn," in Radical Phi-
losophy of Law: Contemporary Challenges to Mainstream Legal Theory and Practice, eds.

D. Caudill and S. Gold (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), pp. 38-44,
"Rethinking Subjectivity in Law and Ideology: A Semitic Perspective," Journal of
Human Justice, Vol. 4 (1992), pp. 31-53. Henceforth cited as RSL.

^ B. Jackson, Law, Fact, and Narrative Coherence (Merseyside, UK: Deborah Charles,
1991); P. Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Lon-
don: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990). Henceforth cited as LL, Legal Discourse (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).

' B. Arrigo, "[De]constructing Criminal Justice Education: Theoretical and Method-
ological Contributions from the Postmodern Sciences," Social Pathology, Vol. 1 (1995),
pp. 115-148. Henceforth cited as DCJE.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 123

" B. Arrigo, "An Experientially-Informed Feminist Jurisprudence: Rape and the Move
Toward Praxis," Humanity and Society, Vol. 17 (1993), pp. 28-47; V. Bell, "Beyond the
'Thorny Question'": Feminism, Foucault and the Desexualization of Rape," Inter-
national Journal of the Sociology of Law, Vol. 19 (1991), pp. 83-100.

'^ The emphasis on Lacan and his psychoanalytic semiotics stems from our assess-
ment of the leading postmodern scholarship developed in Western culture and
thought. Many of the luminaries of Lacan's era, including: Derrida, Foucault,
Irigaray, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Kristeva attended Lacan's lectures delivered in
seminar fashion during the 1950s through the 1970s in Paris, France. Further, these
same notables integrated several Lacanian conceptualizations into their own cri-
tiques. Thus, it is especially worthwhile to canvass Lacanian thought in the context
of a postmodern reading of crime, law, and ethics. Although more typically the source
of polemical criticism within literary studies, cultural criticism, and feminist thought,
Lacan's postmodern contributions to law and criminology are receiving noticeable
support within these circles. See, for example, D. Cornell, Transformations: Recollective
Imagination and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1993). Henceforth cited as
TRI, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (New York:
Routledge, 1991). Henceforth cited as BA; D. Caudill, "'Name of the Father' and
the Logic of Psychosis: Lacan's Law and Ours," Legal Studies Forum, Vol. 16 (1993).
Henceforth cited as NOF; D Caudill, "Lacan and Law: Networking With the Big
[0]ther," Studies in Psychoanalytic Theory, Vol. 1 (1992); D. Milovanovic, PLD; B.
Arrigo, CPJ, "Toward A Theory of Punishment in the Psychiatric Courtroom: On
Language, Law, and Lacan," Journal of Crime and Justice, Vol. 29 (1995). Henceforth
cited as TTP; P. Goodrich, LL.

'^ The phrase "ethics in crime and justice" is used broadly here. More than an adher-
ence (or lack thereof) to police, court, and correctional rules and procedures, the
expression refers to how on both an individual and component system basis a unique
grammar is articulated and esteemed, embodying a circumscribed knowledge and,
therefore, yielding a specialized understanding of normative accountability. Thus,
the discourse of systemic criminal justice ethics, and the values it affirms, is the
only articulated version which the apparatus and its sub-systems legitimize. This
paper speculates on the constitution of systemic criminal justice ethics as well as its
reconstitution in non-authoritarian, non-sedimented terms.

'* Elsewhere we have explored how chaos theory shares several affinities with Lacan's
formalizations on discourse, subjectivity, and knowledge thereby contributing to a
postmodern appreciation for the social order See, e.g., B. Arrigo (CPJ); (TTP); (DPC).
We intend to investigate several of these linkages. According to chaos theory's un-
derstanding of dynamic systems, order lurks within apparent randomness. This
randomness itself represents a set range of results, an underlying but not predict-
able order; that is, chaos. Chaos theory therefore resists all linear interpretations of
how systems function because they are based upon predictability and permanence.
A key feature of the postmodern agenda is a deliberate debimking of discourse as a
way of preventing the oppression or marginalization of people. Postmodernists
contend that embedded in stable, structured, and ossified speech is the possibility
of devaluing and de-legitimizing other grammars constitutive of different ways of
knowing and languaging the world of experience. See, A. Giddens. The Consequences

124 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); The Constitution of So-
ciety (Oxford: Polity Press, 1984).

'^ See, e.g., F. Rossi-Landi Linguistics and Economics (Netherlands: Mouton, 1977);D.
Milovanovic, "Juridico-linguistic Communicative Markets: Toward a Semiotic
Analysis," Contemporary Crises, Vol. 10 (1986), pp. 281-304; B. Arrigo, "Desire in the
Psychiatric Courtroom: On Lacan and the Dialectics of Linguistic Oppression,"
Current Perspectives in Social Theory, (forthcoming, 1996). Henceforth cited as DPC.

^^ As cited in S. Melville, "Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance." Critical In-
quiry, Vol. 13 (1987), p. 365. Henceforth cited as PPD.

^^ As cited in J.S. Lee, Jacques Lacan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990),
p. 195. Henceforth cited as JL.

'^ See, e.g., D. Cornell, (TRI); D. Milovanovic, (PLD); B, Arrigo, (CPJ).

'" D. Milovanovic (LPD, pp. 313-4).

'^ J. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality. (New York: Norton, 1985) pp. 143-147. Henceforth
cited as FS; J.S. Lee (JL, pp. 191-195); M. Bracher, "Lacan's Theory in the Four Dis-
courses," Prose Studies, Vol. 11 (1988), p. 47. Henceforth cited as LTFD, Lacan, Dis-
course, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993).

^' See, e.g., J. Lacan, L'envers de la Psychanalyse (Paris, France: Editions du Seuil, 1991).
Henceforth cited as LEP, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud's
Theory and the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988). Henceforth cited as SJL, Lacan, FS, The Four Fundamental Con-
cepts of Psycho- Analysis (New York: Norton, 1981). Henceforth cited as FFC, Ecrits:
A Selection, trans. A Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). Henceforth cited as
EAS, Encore (Paris, France: Edition du Seuil, 1975). Henceforth cited as JLE.

^ The early Freudian model extended to about 1920. It was much more fluid, dy-
namic, and process-oriented than his subsequent formalizations. We identify the
early Freudian model as consonant with Lacanian thought. The most semiotically
relevant of Freud's works include: S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York:
Avon, 1965); Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Brentano's, 1916),
and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (New York: MacMillan, 1914). Lacan's re-
vision of Freud reconceptualizes his mechanistic and deterministic schema regard-
ing the psyche and subjectivity. For example: rather than identifying, as did Freud,
the centrality of the biological penis as that instrument which forms the basis of
sexuality in society, Lacan invokes the emblematic phallus as the ubiquitous and
privileged signifier of desire. For Lacan, this emblematic sign forms the basis of all
relationships and experiences.

23 J. Lacan (EAS, pp. 303-316).

2'* Although Lacan himself never described his work as an application of semiotics,
others have positioned him within this school of thought. (For an application to
law and psychoanalytic semiotics see, D. Milovanovic (PLD). For a critique in femi-
nist theory, law, and psychoanalytic semiotics see, D. Cornell (TRI). For a reading
in the overlapping domains of criminal justice and psychology see, B. Arrigo, (CPJ).
The fusion of semiotics and psychoanalysis we intend is both post-Saussurean and
post-Freudian. As was intimated previously, our reading of Lacan incorporates sev-
eral of his more modernist formalizations on discourse, subjectivity, and knowl-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 125

edge to advance a more postmodern regard for (criminal justice) ethics. Thus it
follows that our description of Lacan's psychoanalytic semiotics necessarily includes
this same level of differentiation.

^^ B. Arrigo (MLL, pp. 27-58); R.W. Benson, "Semiotics, Modernism and the Law,"
Semiotica, Vol. 73 (1989), pp. 171-178.

^^ E. Laclau and C. Mouffe Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 1985); V.
Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1986). Henceforth cited as MPL.

^'' D. Milovanovic Webarian and Marxian Analysis of Law: Structure and Function of Law
in a Capitalist Mode of Production (Aldershot, England: Gower Publishers , 1989) pp.
141-163; B. Arrigo (CPJ, Chapter 5).

^* F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); J. Lacan
(EAS, pp. 149-154); M. Borch-Jakobsen Lacan: The Absolute Master (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991), pp. 169-196.

^' C.S. Peirce The Philosophy ofPeirce: Selected Writings, ed. J. Buchler (London: Routledge
and Keagan Paul, 1956), pp. 98-119.

^ For accessible applications to legal semiotics see, R. Kevelson, The Law as a System of
Signs (New York: Plenum), pp. 3-12, Peirce and Law: Issues in Pragmatism, Legal Real-
ism, and Semiotics, ed. R. Kevelson (New York: Lang, 1991).

" V. Volosinov (MPL, p. 23).

^^ We recognize that there are multiple meanings for various signs in the criminal
justice arena. However, within the legal sphere, judges and advocates actively work
to limit the multiaccentuality of signs to interpellations consistent with precise
uniaccentuated meaning. In all such cases we contend that these meanings ema-
nate from the lexicon of the juridical code and are therefore always and already a
reduction. Any non-juridical expressions are quickly objected to by opposing counsel
and declared non-justiciable by the bench.

^ B. Arrigo (DPC), B. Arrigo (MLL).

^ B. Arrigo (CPJ), "Legal Discourse and the Disordered Criminal Defendant," Legal
Studies Forum, Vol. 18 (1994), pp. 93-112. Henceforth cited as (LDD).
B. Arrigo, (TTP), "Subjectivity in Law, Medicine, and Science: A Semiotic Perspec-
tive on Punishment," in Punishment: Social Control and Coercion, ed. C. Sistare (New
York: Lang, 1995), pp. 21-45.

J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A
Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 343-73, Legitimation
Crises (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
D. Milovanovic (RSL, p. 33).
B. Arrigo (CPJ).
B. Arrigo, (MLL).
D. Milovanovic (RSL, p. 34).

S.W. Tiefenbrun, "Legal Semiotics," Cordozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal,
Vol. 5 (1986), p. 152.

Desire in language announces itself through the act of naming (dormer nom). Lacan
was to refer to this process as the name-of-the-father. See, G. Pomnvier "Psychosis

1

126 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

and the Signifier," PsychCrititque, Vol. 2 (1987) p. 143; D. Caudill, (NOF, p. 421). This
is a reference to the male-centered or phallocratic dimension of discourse which
has been the source for much debate among postmodern feminist scholars. See, for
example, L. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell Press, 1985; E. Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psycho-
analysis (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Femi-
nist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); S. Sellers, Language and Sexual Differ-
ence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). In the area of postmodern feminist crimi-
nology and critical jurisprudence see: D. Cornell (TRI) and (BA); C. Smart, FPL); B.
Arrigo "Deconstructing Jurisprudence: An Experiential Feminist Critique," Journal
of Human Justice Vol. 4 (1992), "Rethinking the Language of Law, Justice, and Com-
munity: Postmodern Feminist Jurisprudence," in Radical Philosophy of Law: Contem-
porary Challenges to Mainstream Legal Theory and Practice, eds. D. Caudill and S. Gold
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), pp. 88-110, "Feminist Jurispru-
dence and Imaginative Discourse: Toward Praxis and Critique," In Legality and Ille-
gality: Posmodernism, Semiotics, and Law, eds. I.R. Janikowski and D. Milovanovic
(New York: Lang, 1995), pp. 23-46.

The desiring voice of the subject finds expression in Lacan's Symbolic Order. This
is the saturated realm of language and culture. Thus, naming (discoursing) symbol-
izes that speech consistent with masculine meanings and ways of knowing. Lacan,
endeavoring to explore the formation of an uncultivated feminine discourse (an
ecriture feminine), suggests that women have access to a supplimentary desire
(jouissance) awaiting discovery in a battery of signifier-signified anchors outside
the coordinates which define male-speak. J. Lacan, (FS, p. 144).

J. Lacan(EAS,p. 166).

^ C. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982),
pp. 188-189.

'^ D. Milovanovic (PLD).

^ B. Arrigo (MLL).

'' D. Milovanovic (RSL, p. 36).

^ Ricoeur, commenting on the significance of figurative discourse, has argued that
the aim of language is to "shatter and increase our sense of reality by shattering
and increasing our language." P. Ricoeur "Creativity of Language," Philosophy To-
day, Vol 17 (1973), p. Ill The attorney assimies a similar position in the courtroom,
especially in the context of constructing a story that both denies the plausibility of
opposing counsel's case yet affirms the believability of his/her own narrative. In
the legal sphere, this is the semiotic construction of reality.

'''^ A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. D. Macey (New York: Routledge and Keagan Paul,
1977), pp. 199-205; R. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disorders," in Fundamentals of Language, ed. R. Jakobson (Paris, France: Mouton,
1971), pp. 113-163.

^ G. Morgan, "More on Metaphor: Why We Cannot Control Tropes in Administra-
tive Science," Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28 (1983), p. 602. Henceforth cited
as MOM, Images of Organizations (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1986) pp. 321-344.

5' G. Morgan (MOM, p. 612)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 127

^^ This is a reference to Lacan's 1969-1970 seminar in which he was to describe the
four discourses: those of the master, university, hysteric, and analyst. See J. Lacan,
(LEP). For works of application, see: B. Arrigo. (LDD); M. Bracher, (LTFD, pp. 32-49);
J.S. Lee, JL; S. Melville, PPJ; D. Milovanovic, LCPD. The four discourses are in-
tended to explain how relatively stable systems of communication (e.g., law, medi-
cine, science) maintain their (linguistic) dominance in society as well as their dis-
cursive power over other sign systems.

For our purposes the most relevant of these discourses is that of master. It is the most
repressive and hierarchical of the four schematizations. It signifies that privileged
and discursive form of intersubjective communication representing dominant modes
of speech. The structure for the discourse of the master may be depicted as follows:

SI > S2

In each of the four discourses the speaker and listener are subjected to the interde-
pendent, though changing, dynamics of four elements. These elements constitute
each discursive structure. The four elements include: SI, the master signifier, S2,
knowledge, $, the divided subject; and a, le-plus-de-jouir. In each discourse, what is
above the bar is more conscious. What is below the bar is more unconscious. The
formation on the left represents the sender of the message while the right hand
formation represents the receiver of the message. The upper left hand position is
the initiator of the message. The upper right hand position is the enactor of the
message. The lower right hand position is the effect(s) produced in the unconscious
of the receiver. The lower left hand position is what functions to support the sender's
message as truth.

In the discourse of the master SI sends (imposes) on the other (S2) a message (story)
which the other receives and accepts, thereby subjecting the other to the circum-
scribed knowledge claims of SI. These narratives fail to include the stories (ways of
knowing) of the other and, thus, there is something left out; a lack (or a) seeking
affirmation and embodiment through discourse; speech not yet valorized in the
linguistic coordinates of SI. Thus, that which acts as the truth of the sender's mes-
sage, is only a partial fulfillment of desire. Accordingly, subjects who turn to and
embrace such narrative constructions are divided ($). The effect is a semiotic cleans-
ing of sorts in which the cultivation of alternative or replacement discourses, de-
sires, and ways of knowing are repressed.
3J. Lacan (EAS, pp. 193-4), (SJL, p. 243).
5* J. Lacan (EAS, pp. 310-316).

^ B. Jackson, Law, Fact, and Narrative Coherence (Merseyside, UK: Deborah Charles
Publications, 1991).
' B. Arrigo (CPJ).
' B. Arrigo (MLL, pp. 66-74).

^ There are other postmodern strains of thought relevant to our enterprise not spe-
cifically consider here. These include contributions from: postmodern feminists,
especially their reading of standpoint epistemology and the construction of gendered
roles, J. Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core of Feminist Theory (New
York: Routiedge, 1993), pp. 385-9; K. Bartlett, "Feminist Legal Methods," in Femi-
nist Legal Theory, eds. K. Bartiett and R. Kennedy (Oxford: Westview Press, 1991); D.

128 Bruce A. Arrigo: New Directions in Crime, Law and Social Change

Currie, "Unhiding the Hidden: Race, Class, and Gender in the Construction of
Knowledge," Humanity and Society, Vol. 17 (1993), pp. 3- 27; 2) constitutive theo-
rists, particularly their notion of the coterminous dynamics inherent in the formation
of institutional regimes of domination, A. Hunt, "The Big Fear: Law Confronts
Postmodernism," McGill Law Journal, Vol. 35 (1990), p. 539; 3) S. Henry and D.
Milovanovic, "Constitutive Criminology," Criminology, Vol. 29 (1991), pp. 295-9; P.
Fitzpatrick, Law and Societies," Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Vol. 22 (1984), p. 539;
Lacan's work in topology theory and borromean knots, J. Lacan, JLE, see also }.
Granon-LaFont, La Topologie Ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris, France: Point Hors
Ligne, 1985, Topologie Lacanienne et Clinique Analytique (Paris, France: Point Hors
Ligne, 1990); A. Juranville, Lacan et la Philosophic (Paris, France: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1984); P. Skriabine "Clinique et Topologie," (Unpublished manuscript,
December, 1989); and 4) Lacan's work on the Fourth Order or the Symptom (le
synthome) as restoring (suturing) a fault in the knot, D. Milovanovic, (BKCS); E.
Ragland-Sullivan, "Counting From O to 6: Lacan, Suture, and the Imaginary Or-
der," in Criticism and Lacan, eds. P. Hogan and L. Pandit (London: University of
Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 31-63, "Lacan's Seminar on James Joyce: Writing as Symp-
tom and 'Singular Solutions'," in Psychoanalysis and..., eds. R. Feldstein and H.
Sussman (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp.67-86.
^'' J.F. Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1984) pp. 53-67.

^ See. e.g., J. Briggs and F.D. Peat, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustration Guide to Chaos
Theory and the Science of Wholeness (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). Henceforth
cited as (TM); J. Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books,
1987). Henceforth cited as CMNS; B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature
(New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983).

"'^ T.R. Young, "Chaos Theory and Human Agency: Humanist Sociology in a
Postmodern Age," Humanity and Society, Vol. 16 (1992), p. 445. For applications to
law and criminology see, B. Arrigo (LDD, p. 92-105).

^^ For applications to crime and deviance, see; T.R. Young, "Chaos and Crime:
Non-linear and Fractal Forms of Crime," The Critical Criminologist, Vol 3 (1991), pp.
3-4, 10-11, "The ABC of Crime: Attractors, Bifurcations, Basins, and Chaos," The
Critical Criminologist, Vol. 3 (1991), pp. 2-3; D. Milovanovic, "Critical Criminology
and the Challenge of Post Modernism," The Critical Criminologist, Vol. 1 (1990), pp.
9-10, 17.

^^ J. Gleick, (CMNS, pp. 119-153).

" D. Milovanovic, (LCPD, p. 324).

''^ J. M. Balkin, "Deconstructive Practices and Legal Theory," Yale Law Journal, Vol 96
(1987), pp. 743-786.

^^ I. Prigogine, I. Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books. Hence-
forth cited as (OOC); J. Briggs and F.D. Peat (TM).

^'' I. Prigogine and I. Stengers (OOC, pp. 12-14).

*'^ For applications to the intersecting categories of law, criminology, and psychiatry
see, B. Arrigo (DPC), (TTP), (CPJ), (LDD, pp.102-106).

^' D. Milovanovic, (LCPD, pp. 327-330).

VJest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 129

^ J. Lacan, (FS, pp. 143-147); J.S. Lee, (JL, pp. 190-195); M. Bracher, (LTFD, p. 47).
'^ D. Milovanovic, (LCPD, p. 329).

^^ D. Brion, "The Chaotic Law of Tort: Legal Formalism and the Problem of Indeter-
minacy," in Peirce and Law, ed. R. Kevelson (New York: Lang) pp. 70-71.

I

Ethical choice in a postmodern world:
cognition, consciousness and contact.

Tobin Hart, Ph.D.

Nihilism or fundamentalism, paralysis or cavalier relativism...
Given the indeterminacy of post-modern "truth" and the authority of
modernism how do we navigate through our day-to-day ethical deci-
sions without falling to the extremes? While conceptions of the self
and identity have been altered by postmodern thought, if we look
beyond the products of story, role and action to the process in which
they are realized choice and responsibility remain central to the
postmodern individual.^

Choices emerge, in large part, from what we know. Some go so far
as to say that "All successful human action proceeds from valid knowl-
edge."l At least there might be agreement that the quality of our choice
is affected by the quality of our knowledge, whether in purchasing a
used car or deciding on whom to marry. However, like Nietzsche and
Heidegger postmodernists remain suspicious of valid knowledge as
Truth, and of the moral universals that may stem from it. As such we
no longer need look for definitive, timeless Truth, the search for which
has contributed to the pressure, paralysis, and neurotic at-all-cost
defense of our choices along with a disempowering authority struc-
ture. Without such universals the stage is set for the rise of personal,
decentralized knowing; with it the responsibility of the individual for
his or her ethical choices or actions is heightened. In such a position
we rely on the authority of experience rather than the authority of
form or theory or "other" for our choices (although subjective author-
ity has it's pitfalls as will be discussed below). In this way ethics be-
comes a lived experience, an on-going process rather than an object
or a product.

We also recognize that what we know emerges from how we know;
that is, the cognitive or perceptual tools we use effect how we see and
understand. At present the quality of our knowing may be dulled by
a hangover of the modernist cognitive style. The changes in how we
look at the emerging postmodern world may not have kept pace with
what there is to see. Said another way, there has been insufficient ar-

132 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

ticulation of the development of postmodern knowing (conscious-
ness and cognition) to support postmodern ethics. What is suggested
is that we move the center of cognition and epistemology further from
a modernist bias in order to embody postmodern understanding and
in so doing set the stage to stretch beyond it. As we look at the con-
temporary landscape our cognitive and epistemic styles will delimit
what and how we are able to perceive. As we deconstruct and recon-
struct the contents of our thoughts we too can deconstruct and ex-
pand the tools of thinking. This is a consideration of perceptual and
cognitive processes or the shift in consciousness and thinking that
occurs along with the postmodern situation - our minds change along
with our thoughts. If they do not we may regress into ideological fun-
damentalism of one sort or another or may simply be paralyzed by
multiplicity of perspectives. Our current situation challenges not just
our thoughts but our means of knowing. While postmodernists re-
main suspicious, even dismissive of epistemological and developmen-
tal projects, the incorporation of postmodernism with epistemic - de-
velopmental perspectives may be valuable in forming ethical choices.

Finally, we see that how we know effects our choices. Evidence
about moral decision making implies that cognitive-developmental
style shapes how choices are formed. Kohlberg suggests that we (some
of us) may progress from making ethical choices based simply on
avoidance of punishment to the developmental apex of recognizing
self-chosen universal ethical principles (e.g. justice) that largely defy
context.^ Gilligan's powerful challenge to Kohlberg's universals sug-
gest an ethics and psychology which elevates the importance of rela-
tionships to ethical action.^ Kegan proposes an integrative map that
anchors moral meaning making in the cognitive development elabo-
rated by Piaget.'' Cross-culturally, we find that Buddhist psychology,
for one example, suggests that ethical "positions" such as compas-
sion arise spontaneously from the development of an expanded con-
sciousness or base of knowing cultivated through awareness prac-
tices.

Postmodernism offers technologies for knowing - deconstruction
is predominant, and is joined by fragmentaion, effacement, multipli-
cation among other practices. (I will mainly consider deconstructive
postmodernism in general, and in so doing, run the risk of generaliz-
ing, something deconstructivists warn against.) These technologies
enable us to reconsider and reconfigure what we perceive and con-

Mest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 133

:eive. The same can be said of modernist epistemic "technology" -
he scientific method- although unlike postmodernism its goal is to
ook beneath the surface to the presumed more fundamental levels of
eality. Postmodernism most often rejects the assumption of this depth
n favor of equivalently valuable narratives.

Science can be lively, personal, even deeply touching; at its best its
)rocess begins with curiosity and leads to awe. Yet mostly we see
his manifest in only the youngest children and the most remarkable
dentists. This technology has become sterilized and objectified, made
listant and lifeless - the deeply personal search for empirical contact
las been replaced by the valueless search for facts. How it was sup-
)0sed to function become wildly different from how it actually
vorked.^ Like science, the methods of postmodern knowing (and
inknowing) have the possibility for creating insight, inviting contact
md even awe. Uncovering unchecked assumptions, unseen motiva-
ions, or cultural and personal oppression can be riveting, a moment
)f world collapse when the assumptions we have been living by are
:hallenged and exposed as incomplete or fictitous. These can be deeply
)ersonal experiences, ones that challenge the ground of our values
ind choice, often leaving us off-balance and looking for ethical direc-
ion. However, satisfactory ethical direction seems to be hard to find
hrough postmodern method alone. That is, these confusions are main-
ained by an inadequate technology of knowing.

Formal operational thinking, the cognitive motor behind
leconstruction, limits its range and therefore its ethical ground. As
uch, deconstruction provides some means to unpack the roots of
Tiowledge that serve as the foundation for ethical values but, by it-
elf may not necessarily provide sufficient means for informing ethi-
al action. There is little wonder why we have such confusion, regres-
ion , and a sense of incompleteness in holding postmodern perspec-
ive. Like the child who has just dismantled the prized family clock,
^e learn that we can take "it" apart but we don't know what to do
/ith it when its on the table in front of us.

Modernist materialism and reductionism became a philosophy of
fe, a guide for choices, however incomplete, although it did not
^cognize its own incompleteness. Harmon tells us that: "Experienced
Bality does not conform to the 'reality' they taught us in science class;
"le 'scientific world view' is not an adequate guide for living life or
)r managing a society."^ Postmodernism challenges the scientific

134 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

worldview and its epistemology, inviting us to recognize the construc-
tion and discourse of living. In so doing, it challenges assumptions
about the amalgam of authority, power, economics, sexuality, language
and so forth. However, generally postmodern thinking attempts to
avoid offering replacement master narratives - moral direction.
Lyotard, for example, emphasizes local or "petit" narratives over to-
talizing master narratives.^ (Although some reactions to modernist
values begin to take the form of ideological metanarrative) As earnest
postmodern thinkers we might feel some uncertainty, even existen-
tial guilt, in taking a moral stand, for we can deconstruct our position
and betray its incompleteness. Even with respect to self-definition,
which has been considered a center of moral decision making, we are
encouraged toward maintaining "a multiplicity of self-accounts... but
a commitment to none." (BN p. 180) If we do take a position we might
be accused of being dogmatic, or worse yet, unsophisticated. At times
our postmodern sensibilities seem to need suspension in order to jus-
tify our actions. Some deeply felt ideological perspectives e.g., femi-
nism, environmentalism, or various religious doctrines may provide
an organizing principle, a new moral ground. And while they may be
extremely valuable corrections to environmental degradation, gen-
der oppression, and so forth, they remain other fictions in light of
postmodern conceptions of truth and run the risk of becoming new
imperialistic - ideological doctrines. On the other hand, if we stay true
to a postmodern consciousness we may be paralyzed with the rela-
tivity of any choice, not being convinced in radical relativism or nihil-
ism as a solution, but not being certain about what is left. "The
...poststructuralists have gone from saying that no context, no per-
spective, is final, to saying that no perspective has any advantage over
any other ...".^ We may be left spinning in endless spirals of
deconstruction.

As a way out of this impasse I suggest five interrelated shifts that
may cultivate cognition and consciousness in service of postmodern
knowing and as such, cultivate a process for postmodern ethics. They
are: from theory to experience, from category to contact, from logic to
the body, from external content to internal process, and from the known
to mystery. These continue to nudge us beyond an exclusive modern-
ist rational empiricism and beyond the current range of the knife of
deconstruction while including both, and in so doing they shift the

Vest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 135

)rocess of knowledge and ultimately the process in which we make
ithical choices.

From the authority of forms to the
authority of experience

The starting point begins with the assumption that our ethical
:hoices can best be guided by the authority of our experience. Such
!xperience includes consideration of ideology doctrine, theory and
10 forth, but brings responsibility to the experience of the chooser. It
s not that we discard theories and experts, it is simply that we have
lialogue with them rather than rely on fiats from them.

There is meaningful challenge to institutionalized authority. We
:ome to recognize the disproportional influences of
)Ower-knowledge-economic-discursive amalgams on our ideas and,
ve could say, our choices. ^ Yet we may not have overcome the habit
)f looking primarily outside ourselves for authority - to the church,
icience, leaders, (or postmodern theorists). While this habit is initially
iseful for infants and children, who are shaped by the modeling and
iirection of parents and others (and it is difficult to overemphasize
he role such modeling plays in shaping behavior), it seems less ap-
propriate as the main strategy for mature adults. And unless children
ire weaned from this suckling of decision making their skills do not
nature. Obedience is expected at the cost of insight. "Being as little
:hildren" comes to mean compliance rather than openness to experi-
ence. When our discourse perpetuates this external authority we re-
nain developmentally delayed with respect to our abilities to form
ethical choices.

A culprit (there are others, e.g. poverty.) in our contemporary moral
iifficulties is not the lack of moral guidance or the over-stimulation
)f the information age. It is instead, in part, our practice of reliance
m external moral or intellectual authority that has caused us, as a
lulture, to lose our skill in making up our own minds from the broad-
est and deepest of information. The flood of options and images, of
iiversity and dialogue, that come with the postmodern era has not
:aused this difficulty but has exposed our weakness. The solution,
herefore, is not the imposition of new layers of rules or doctrine, this
vill only exacerbate the problem. Such solutions offer, at best, a moral
un screen that provides some superficial and temporary solution but
loes not address the underlying difficulty, the cause of the hole in the

136 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

moral ozone. We find an analogous process in the classroom in the
difference between memorizing an answer (which generally has
short-term and very circumscribed value - i.e. getting a grade on a
test) as opposed to being able to think critically and creatively in or-
der to problem solve. In the former the answer comes prepackaged
from the outside, in the latter answers and often more questions
emerge from interaction, from experience that can then be used to
solve other problems; both have their place.

Since the 1930s Korzybski's dictum: "The map is not the territory
cautions us about relying on "maps" by themselves. However, as our
ability to make all kinds of maps improved and our faith in an objec-
tive, scientifically knowable world grew, we came to rely increasingly
on the maps or theories as our guiding truths and less dependent on
creating our own views through experience with the aid of such con
ceptions. The concept or map was elevated from its position as me
diator or representation of experience to the experience itself. We be-
came enamored with our concepts and discounted direct experience,
and in so doing lost the sensitivity and trust of experience as a valid
way of knowing.

As we seek to identify and understand various people(s), ideas
and options, new concepts emerge, gather momentum and become
part of our language and culture. They can also become concretized
as a theory, a map or moral prescription. In other words, "Dogmatism
ensues where hypothesis hardens into ideology." (TP p. 59) When our
theory becomes preeminent we lose the chance to experience diver-
sity and consequently pre-judge individuals and ideas. This seems as
true in psychotherapy (e.g. a Borderline is a Borderline is a Border
line) as it is in international politics (e.g. a Jew is a Jew is a Jew). Witli
respect to ideology (e.g. science, Christianity, secular humanism, etc.
postmodernism helps to disrupt these "transcendental totalizing
meta-narratives that anticipate all questions and provide predeter-
mined answers.""

As the process of reliance on external authority becomes person
ally internalized it takes the form of a dependence on theories or doc
trine as opposed to dynamic experience - the authority of form rathe
than the authority of experience. We learn to look for one right an
swer rather than to ask good questions and develop a habit of attach
ing ourselves to and depending on theories or externally generatec
forms which then shape our perceptions and our experiences. Th

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIU, 1995 137

trouble comes when we replace our openness to experience with these
maps or theories of what we expect them to be. We can forget to en-
counter the other in a way that continually keeps our maps open ended
and dynamic, the contact is instead used to reinforce our theory.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that rigid determined forms of behavior, of
the type implied here, are the reflections of a sick organism. ^-^

We know in therapy or in any other intimate relationship, that if
we are open to experiencing another, our assumptions or first im-
pressions of a person often give way to meeting a rich, complex indi-
vidual who is much more intriguing than our initial assumptions or
categorizations betrayed. Unconditional positive regard, non - judg-
mental acceptance or compassion, dialogue, even a sense of commun-
ion with one another may spring spontaneously when we allow our-
selves to experience the other that exists beyond our assumptions and
theories. If we stop at the level of theory (form) then the person is
merely an alcoholic or a Fundamentalist Christian, a Humanistic Psy-
chologist, or whatever. When we are not confirmed by others but
merely categorized we lose our sense of connection, of embodiment;
this is the experience of the schizophrenic in Laing's view.'^ When we
move beyond the mutually exclusive conceptions of observer and
observed toward recognition of relational, constructed knowing then
we learn something about ourselves too; this may be most important
in our evolving multi-sensory, multi-cultural perspective.

We may not get significantly better in making moral choices un-
less we change the way in which the choices are made. The calls for
family values, a return to shame, Victorian ethics and moral funda-
mentals is an attempt to plug the hole. While exposure to a doctrinal
solution may be useful in shaping behavior by discussing and teach-
ing values that are important to the community, it does not provide a
i^iable self-sustaining solution and when imposed as Truth becomes
m act of imperialism which in time breeds repression and revolution
3f one sort or another. Teaching a person how to consider ethical
:hoices, like teaching a person to fish, enables ethical decision mak-
ng to be an on-going growth process. When we rely on the authority
)f some form or theory or person we give away an intimate experi-
ence and responsibility of choosing. Shame, moral values, rules are
lot in short supply, what we lack is encouragement and guidance to
iiscuss, deconstruct, experiment and play with these ideas, evaluat-
ng them through our experience. Postmodernism provides encour-

138 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

agement and tools to challenge moral doctrine. When we are forced
to swallow these ideas whole, without question, we end up doing
just that, or spit them out entirely. When this occurs the rift between
the "moral" and the "amoral", us and them, the smart and the dumb,
the obedient and the trouble makers will grow wider. It is ironic that
in a society that prizes democratic values and self direction we have
not developed a democratic-experiential approach to values. The calls
from our democratically elected leaders are for imperialistic solutions.
The reliance on subjective experience can be misconstrued as nar-
cissistic radical relativism - "This is right because I choose it to be." -
and clearly this does not provide a viable solution to moral decision
making. However, the difference lies in the honing of experiential
awareness as will be discussed below along with a balance between
conception and experience. It is not merely a pendulum shift from
theory to experience that is suggested; experiential strategies are no
more foolproof than conceptual ones as deWit explains." Dynamic
interplay, rather than replacement is encouraged.

From category to contact

Modernism has skewed our cognitive style. We could say that our
thinking process has been dominated by what Piaget called assimila-
tion at the expense of accommodation, and the cost has been to our
understanding, our meaning-making and our empathy. In assimila-
tion new information is evaluated in relation to previously determined
categories of meaning (e.g. me - not me, good - bad, animals - plants,
etc.). This Aristotelian pigeon-holing is efficient for quickly discern-
ing the potential relevance of new information: "Is this dangerous?"
"Do I enjoy things like this?" It enables evaluation of a potential expe-
rience or a piece of information without having the experience. The
trouble comes when those categories become rigid and unyielding
and new information only reinforces the old categories. When some-
thing does not fit, it is marginalized or simply is not seen. If a person's
spiritual or scientific epiphany does not fit the modernist categories
of understanding they are dismissed as pathological, ignored or their
experience is reduced to some regressive psychological phenomena
or neurophysiological aberration. We come to see the world largely
as we expect to see it, as a projection of our categories. Deconstruction
and other postmodern practices help to reconsider and break down
some of those compartments (e.g. gender, power, etc.,) and distinc-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 139

ions between knowledge domains (e.g. academic disciplines) and, if
;ucessful, we come away feeling groundless.

Tied to assimilative style are the particular assumptions about per-
:eption that have dominated the modernist era. The notion of objec-
ive knowing led to a new level of understanding and control of the
latural world. Cartesian subject-object division provided its corner-
itone - our science - "(G)reek science - is based on objectification."^^^
iowever, the maintenance of this separation is reinforced by a cogni-
ive repression. Piaget tells us that an action which "cannot be inte-
grated into the system of conscious concepts ... is repressed from con-
icious territory before it has penetrated there in any conceptualized
orm."^^. Without a recognition of the interplay between knower and
oiown and the distance between theory and phenomenon we remain
leparate from (above or outside) the world we are perceiving. With
iistance maintained through the objectification of the world, assimi-
ation takes the form of a kind of consumerism of objects, whether
hese objects are ideas, persons or the natural world. While some psy-
:hologies have made strides in recognizing inter-relationship, in many
:ases the understanding has remained limited by conceptual or cog-
utive style. Self psychology and Object Relations, for example, draw
rom a Cartesian distinction between self and other, the body and
nind, self and the world, and from this perspective our knowing of
he other becomes dependent on self-centered assimilation. From this
dew "Our understanding of others is ... an inference based on our
oiowledge of ourselves." ^^ Through vicarious introspection we are
ible to know the other person empathically because they are given to
IS in terms of the storehouse of images and memories that we have
icquired.^^

Accommodation reminds us of the importance of our being situ-
ited in the world amidst others. Hegel, among others, has argued for
he shift from isolated self to self dependent on interaction with the
)ther. The kind of self, and with it the values or ethical choices we
nake, depend on the kind of relations we have with others.^'' In con-
emporary psychology, relational theorists like Gilligan (DV) empha-
iize the self-in-relation and its significance in the development of val-
les. In this work we see evidence that constricted relations, for ex-
ample, what Miller refers to as "non-relational" family settings may
ead to isolation and self blame.^" We can make a link between the
ion-relational setting and the lack of "basic security" that is consid-

140 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

ered essential by Karen Homey.^^ Without this solid relational ground,
"basic anxiety" develops and is manifest into personality strategies
that include "moving away", "moving toward" or "moving against"
others. Much of our social concern these days is about the level of
violence, the "moving against" another. We recognize more clearly
how violence may result from failures of early relation. To what ex-
tent does the modernist milieu of hyper-autonomy and objectifica-
tion of the other, including the natural world (environment and body),
contribute to these early experiences and later ethical failures? Such
a climate might cultivate a lived solipsism, in which we never experi-
ence the other or their subjectivity; they remain merely objects for our
consumer scrutiny and as such violence of one sort or another is more
easily perpetrated. (SH, p. 267)

Along with an assimilative bias, modernism has maintained a de-
sire for stability rather than fluidity. Newtonian mechanics, our sense
of the world as a variety of combinations of simple building blocks
and the assumed know-ability of the world and its laws fostered nar-
ratives of stability and predictability. This has lead to corresponding
stories about the self, knowledge and values. We seek stable beliefs
about the world and our person and are enculturated into this
world-view as we learn rules, church doctrine, the laws of etiquette
and of physics. Our process of assimilation, of fitting new informa-
tion into existing patterns and categories helps to maintain our self -
other distinction and sense of stability. However, thanks to postmodern
floods of information, challenges to scientific and moral assumptions,
and the resulting dissolution of categories of understanding, our safe
haven of self and knowledge is rattled.^^ Do we dig our heels in deeper
and marginalize the other, or do we experience the new material?
Accommodation implies destabilizing our existing catagories of
uderstanding and moving our thinking, our consciousness toward
the other, be it person, thing or idea. From this we may reconfigure
our understanding and our self along with it. The self remains less
rigid, more fluid through a strategy of accommodation and like any
organic process, we find spirals of dynamic stability and instability.
In this way every accommodation becomes a potential revision of iden-
tity. In other words, when we no longer are able, or insist on, translat-
ing something into our schema then we are open to the possibility of
transformation.^"*

Nest Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIIl, 1995 141

As accommodation changes our personal boundaries some anxi-
ety may emerge. Since safety and psychological health or maturity
lave been associated with stability the process of accommodation
nay be perceived as undesirable, as opening us to a threats that need
:o be defended against. However, we may come to see accommoda-
ion as particularly desirable for our postmodern situation. Its effects,
^exibility openness, opportunities for new balance, understanding,
lave at times has been cast as weakness when they might be better
zonstrued as courageous empathy. For example, in therapy or any
ntimate relationship, when we move beyond mere diagnosis toward
understanding and appreciating the other from their perspective we
nove toward empathy and in so doing have practiced accommoda-
ion. We move from observation to participation.

The pressure toward assimilation and the stable self that goes with
t has been maintained in part by a confusion. We have mistaken sta-
sis for balance. Dynamic balance in our cognitive style involves flux
md interplay between assimilation and accommodation. Along with
t we can find comfort in the balance and fluidity of identity rather
:han needing to define and defend an unchanging sense of self and
:he world. This opens us to contact; experience becomes fuel for our
inderstanding rather than a threat to our identity. New information
zontinues to reframe our categories of understanding, maintaining a
dynamic process in which we continually reinvent our ethics. In this
tvay ethics is not an object to be revealed, possessed or created but a
process whose outcome is action. Rules and values may emerge but
such concretizations are not ethics but temporary objects or forms that,
ivhile having value to societies, are nearly an anathema to the
iynamicism of ethics.

Contact as implied here is not only relevant with respect to other
persons but it represents an epistemic style that works as well in the
sciences as in interpersonal relations or mystical revelation. Geneti-
:ist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock describes a less detached
empiricism: "a feeling for the organism", that requires "the openness
o let it come to you", and "patience to hear what the material has to
ay to you."^^ She makes the modernist object, subject. Einstein hints
it something similar when he suggests that "...only intuition, resting
m sympathetic understanding, can lead to these laws, the daily effort
:omes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the
leart." (AF, p. 201) The distinction of subject and object is unhinged

142 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

in this view. No longer can an the "science of objectivity" be exclu-
sively maintained; knowing is expanded through contact and partici-
pation.

The experience of inspiration provides a particularly salient ex-
ample of accommodation. The phenomenology of inspiration is cap-
tured by its etymological definition, to be filled or infused with breath
(of spirit, God, Muse, etc.) Our inspiration depends on contact with
an other, this may be through witnessing some act of courage or com-
passion, through reading about an experience or triggered by a rela-
tionship with an idea or some beauty as in nature or art. When we are
touched by such contact we may feel elevated. We are changed, at
least for that moment and sometimes for a lifetime, and may feel im-
pelled to act in accordance with this enlarged perspective. Our ac-
commodation to the new view is instantaneous and energizing and
informs the basis for relevant values and choices, athough it does not
provide an ethics or answer in itself . While inspiration cannot be willed
into existence it can be wooed or invited; the fundamental require-
ment is an openness or listening to experience as McClintock and
Einstein hint at above.

This kind of knowing through deep contact is often met with ec-
stasy, appreciation and reverence. Mystics have described the joy that
serves as a by-product or marker of this knowing and recently
transpersonal psychology has brought this to the social sciences. (This
knowing is not limited to those we call mystics.) Intense contact leads
to empathy and is often described as communion, implying sacred-
ness of experience. From this, ethical choices do not pop out, instead
the perspective on a question, be it a particular concern or about the
cosmos, is expanded. The issue comes into view in a new light. Ethi-
cal choices can then be explored with aid of this light (perspective).
We begin to see how helpful this ecstasy can be in gaining knowledge
that informs ethical action, but without the interpretive, analyzing
skills of intellect and the breadth of lived experience the ecstasy does
not provide sufficient information to form ethical choice.

There are at least two imitations that genuine accommodation can
be mistaken for. One is narcissism in which projection is mistaken for
contact. In this situation intimate awareness of a process or person is
presumed when we actually have only a self-generated, self-referential
knowing, and we assume the other thinks as we do or that we know
what the other thinks. In this experience others are seen as the exten-

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 143

sion of the self .^^ The second immitation is what has come to be called
a Borderline Personality in which there is not so much contact with as
invasion by and into others. For the Borderline personality safety or a
reduction of anxiety is achieved by "immersion" in the other or of the
other in us. While oversimplified, these two immitations highlight
the subtle difficulties with this process. Boundaries are required for
contact.^^ -^ Without boundaries there is amorphous interpenetration
that is difficult to distinguish and make sense of - an overwhelming
flood. Developmentally it would seem that both self differentiation
and relation are crucial for accommodation and deep contact. With-
out appropriate boundaries, confusion and susceptibility reign rather
than informed and open-minded discernment. The point of contact
provides a medium where choice is practiced.

From logic to the bodymind

Modernist narrative has maintained the body as object, as a ma-
chine to be controlled, fueled, repaired, possessed and so forth. The
body as a source of knowing has been dismissed and reduced through
the ascension of "technical reason" based on a Cartesian split.-^^ The
goal of Western scientific discourse has been to measure and control
nature, including the body. The goal of Western spirituality has been,
in large part, to transcend nature and the flesh. Postmodernism has
helped to expand the understanding of the body with respect to gen-
der, sexuality, and subjugation but for some postmodern conceptions
the body remains subtly the other or is elevated to the all.

As the other, we still see the body being acted upon through dis-
course in a Newtonian billiard ball sense of singular linear causality.
It is not partnered with the intellect but is the object of absorption of
its ideas about beauty, strength, gender, sex, and so on. "Our bodies
(are seen as) mere docile recipients of power laden discourse.-" "... the
body is at best a compromised concept"... "the body ... has no inher-
ent right to proclaim a truth." "The body is constructed in the articu-
lations of discursive and affective relations of power, as they are ex-
pressed in and through gender, sexuality, race and class". ^ Desexual-
ization or homogenization of bodily experience is an example of the
psychological distance maintained between thought and body. For
example, Foucault proposed that rape be classified as mere physical
assault since our ideas of sexuality are discursive constructions. What
O'Hara refers to as Strong Form constructivists ..."take the position

144 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Cojitact

that there is no reality either beyond or beneath our linguistic con-
structions".^^ Derrida pronounces that there is nothing outside the
text. From this perspective the body becomes merely an object of lin-
guistic manipulation. The text replaces molecules as the center and
source of meaning and organization. Logico-empirical knowing has
been replaced with logico-linguistic or at least linguistic. This offers a
partial alteration, but not an integrative development and, as such,
presents a significant liability as we come to recognize that "certain
forms of knowledge canonically exclude others". ^^^

On the other extreme are the postmodern positions which do rec-
ognize the body as a source of legitimate knowing, even going so far
as to suggest this is virtually the only source, (e.g. Cixous, Irigaray)
While a corrective to hyper-rationality, this pedulum shift elevates
the sensual and erotic as the preeminent source of value and mean-
ing. As such it runs the risk of being reductionistic, excluding other
viable sources.

Shifting to include the body, (without surrendering to it) along with
the intellect as legitimate sources of meaning and knowledge, offers a
broader range of tools through which to sense the landscape. We can
appreciate "the body" as formed by communication within, through
and beyond the physical entity, in this sense we do see it as a "discur-
sive formation" in which meaningful lived experience is central.^^^
"(This is) a body of meaningful experience, a body of significant in-
telligence, inherently informed about itself; ... (one that can be) pro-
foundly changed by sensitivity and embodied awareness".^^** This
middle way begins by entering into partnership and dialogue rather
than opposition or devotion to our human body and the larger body
of the natural world. In so doing our source of knowing, and with it
our perspective, grows wider. We move from body as machine, to
body as the shell of discourse or as ultimate authority, to body as
partnered or unified with mind. We become "embodied" - the mythic
centaur - as our identity shifts from having a body to being a body
and mind.^^""

Two paths developed in parallel in this country, one the "high road"
of language in the form of deconstructive postmodernism which found
home in the academy, the other is the "low road" of the body in the
form of body-centered psychotherapy and alternatives to conven-
tional allopathic medicine and theory which generally found itself in
the marginal offices of private, alternative therapies. Reich was one

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 145

pivotal figure in the reconsideration of the body and demonstrates
the attempt to synthesize Western psychology, Eastern concepts of
energy, sexuality, social theory and Western medical science - he was
essentially an early articulator of postmodern medicine.^^ (As a result
oi his practice Reich's last home was prison.) This reinvigoration of
the body as more than machine, as partnered with mind and of pos-
sessing its own forms of knowing and intelligence (e.g. Grof's "Inner
Radar", Chopra's "cellular communication", Kurtz's "Organicity",
Gendlin's "Felt Sense") has been expressed in hundreds of therapeu-
tic forms and continues to develop into emerging mind-body medi-
cine including current interests in psychoneuroimmunology,
Kolopathic medicine, even the empirical study of the effect of prayer
on bodily healing.^^

As postmodern deconstruction seeks to extend the intellect through
unpacking metanarrative and the social construction of "facts" and
"truths", body-centered knowing attempts to cultivate and expand
the sense of the body. Levin frames a valuable integration of these
ideas in his articulation of a postmodern medicine in which meaning
along with finely tuned self-awareness are critical to health and heal-
ing. (MH)

Given the limits of this paper we will briefly consider one dimen-
sion of body knowing. Just as our range of social perception is con-
structed by cultural conditioning so too is our sensory perception.
Enculturation solicits our membership in a shared construction of what
is real and valuable and what is not. The detached objectivism of
modernism prized seeing as the prefered mode of knowing; the sense
of sight was most highly valued as it was thought to be less contami-
nated or entangled with the "prison house" of the body. (SG, p. 150)
Postmodernism adds to sight, voices, intonations, multivocality. Nar-
rative replaces measurement as the currency of this knowing; inter-
views or ethnographies replace controlled experiments in postmodern
social science. But why stop with either sight or voice? What would
the world sound like if our focus and metaphors were musical rather
than visual and spatial or felt senses were respected as much as logi-
cal deductions and controlled observations? Synesthestic perception
may provide a path better suited to knowing in the multiplicity of the
postmodern world and encouraging of the fine-tuned awareness men-
ioned above.

146 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

Recently a new "disorder" was "rediscovered" (categorized) in
neuroscience - synesthesia.'*^ When listening to music a "sufferer"
will not only hear the music but might also see images - gold balls
dropping or sparkles of light, depending on the music. Others, while
tasting something, will sense shapes and colors beyond those obvi-
ous visual cues of the food itself. These are described as rich, vivid
experiences, ones which those afflicted could not imagine being with-
out. The neuroscientific interpretation explains these events as a neu-
rological throwback, an abnormal experience of the "old brain" cen-
ters. The contention is that evolution has helped differentiate sensa-
tion from murky confusion to discrete senses. This explanation is a
good example of assimilative - Aristotelian bias. This reduction, sepa-
ration and differentiation, or sensory individuation, parallels the val-
ues of the scientific process, our ideas about personality, boundary
style and personal agency. That is, modernist science reduces and sepa-
rates out variables - takes things apart to understand them; personal-
ity theory suggests healthy development involves a highly differenti-
ated, individuated autonomous self; in this country "good fences make
good neighbors", and rugged individualism and independence have
been among the dominant values. If we move to a synthesizing style
of science or knowing we may conceive of these ideas differently.

According to Cytowic, there is a functional disconnection between
the language and association regions of the cortex from parts of the
limbic brain during an experience of synesthesia. (SM) This is inter-
preted as a "cognitive fossil", an operational throwback to the ways
we may have perceived before (evolutionarily) the development of
sophisticated representational (language) abilities and the differen-
tiation of senses. But this is merely one interpretation and one that
remains within the master narrative of contemporary science. It is
plausible that synesthesia emerges as an evolutionary advantage rather
than a developmental artifact. (It may also have nothing to do with
evolution which Lyotard, for example, sees as merely another master
narrative.) This interpretation gains some support from the evidence
that synesthetes are generally highly intelligent and describe their
perception as entirely rich, full and life enhancing. We understand
perception as a complex interaction between the outside and the in-
side, that is, environmental stimuli and mind. Therefore, it can not be
concluded that synesthetes' perception is inaccurate as compared to
our clear representation of reality. It may be just as reasonable that it

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 147

represents a sophisticated constellation of personalized perception.
Validity need not be reduced to corroboration by shared experience.
In a postmodern frame which comes to appreciate diversity multi-
plicity difference, and variety synesthetic perception adds informa-
tion and richness - color, sounds, tastes, and so forth - that are appar-
ently less bound by linguistic compartmentalization.

The apparent functional disconnection of perception from language
function mentioned above may separate, to some extent, or tease apart
perception from interpretive representation; in so doing perhaps we
are able to "stay in" the experience longer before the translation to
representation or language is performed. It is presumed that some-
thing is always lost or changed in a translation. Many technologies of
consciousness attempt to achieve something like this, that is, experi-
ence less mediated by language through stopping the internal dia-
logue and shifting consciousness in an attempt to reach a more imme-
diate perception. We discover that vividness and multiplicity of senses,
not unlike the synesthete's, are described in consciousness altering
practices of some indigenous religious rituals, psychedelic drug ex-
perimentation, meditative traditions and transpersonal experiences
in which perception is cultivated over language and interpretation.

But how might the experience of synesthesia, of multisensory
knowing, correspond to the postmodern situation of floods of infor-
mation, options, sensory and cultural possibilities? If we evolved ei-
ther cognitively or through social constructions toward a differentia-
tion of senses in a modernist perspective what would postmodern
sense-ability look like? Again we recognize language or voice as a
dominant medium but might a multisensory mode be even more
inclusive, participatory?

Merleau-Ponty maintains that synesthetic perception is the rule
and that "we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts
the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to
see, hear, and generally speaking feel, in order to deduce... (what we
sense)" .^"^ As Blake wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed
himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavem."'^

Does our body serve as prison house or launching pad? It is not
presumed to offer superior or ultimate guidance in comparison to the
intellect, but as an equally valid and as an undernourished source of
knowing. The rejection and repression of the body has simply placed

148 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

US out of touch with its wisdom and perception. When it is embraced
we value it not only as partner but as us.

Fritz Perls' invocation to "lose your mind and come to your senses"
represents a potential pendulum shift in epistemic orientation rather
than an integrative move. While Perls' apparently intended this invi-
tation as necessary correction to the over-dependence on rational ab-
straction (e.g. talking about an experience instead of being in the ex-
perience) the risk is in elevating one form of knowing over another,
just as has been the situation with modernist technical reason. If we
are guided merely by impulse or surface feeling the results may be
regressive and lack discrimination. Our feelings, instincts and intui-
tions are sometimes wrong or incomplete; they may form from defi-
cits, cravings for early connections, and so on. If we simply replace
mind with senses, however sophisticated, we leave out the other forms
of knowing. St. Bonaventure, for example, suggests a tripartite
epistemic map that includes the senses, rational intellect and also con-
templation. (EE) Depending on one alone simply limits our under-
standing. We can see one way of knowing providing check and bal-
ance for another. Theory is tested through experience which then forms
new models for testing and so on in spiraling interplay. The concepts
lay out the level or domain by asking the questions, providing the
focus and frame for our attention while multisensory knowing in-
forms the answer, always being filtered back through our concepts in
a steady interplay. Without the conceptual consciousness, sensory in-
put is indiscriminate and may be confusing or difficult to channel
into informed choices. "A body uniformed by mind and spirit may be
given over to instinctual life or callous imitations, but a mind uni-
formed by the body losses its judgment and, in unforeseen and criti-
cal ways, blunders and retreats. "^^ While these distinctions of
conceptualization, sensation, and so forth may provide some simple
model, in higher order functions the distinctions between these styles
become less clear. Accommodative sensory experience seems to look
like contemplative knowing and visa versa; mindful awareness of our
thinking patterns may look like all three of St. Bonaventure's "eyes".
And in postmodern style we might intentionally cross these "eyes",
finding new ways to see, not being limited by a static style of know-
ing.

From external content to internal process:

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 149

mindfulness/ awareness

Modernism has been dominated by philosophical realism - what
we perceive of the material world is real and the task is to perceive (in
part though developing ways to look upon it) as much as we can. We
value that which we can see and touch, and as a logical extension of
assimilation and realism, we seek safety and satisfaction in possess-
ing or accumulating (either through literal ownership or mentally
through organizing / categorizing knowledge) as much of the world
as we can. The shift toward accommodation gives a better chance for
what James Joyce has described as epiphany, that is, to behold (in-
stead of holding on to) the other and with this, awe, ecstasy, apprecia-
tion, and inspiration are possible. Deconstructive postmodernism in-
vites us to look away from the concrete external back in the direction
of the perceiver to consider how the content of our thinking and do-
ing is shaped by social context. It offers an interruption of master nar-
ratives and "unchecked assumptions" that guide our responses and
our choice.'*^ But where deconstruction considers how content is
shaped by context, and Foucault and Lyotard among others have ar-
ticulated some means to consider the thinking process, deconstruction
itself is not deconstructed; it's context remains obscure. (PN) (PC)

Deconstruction (e.g. Derrida's use of it, among others) uses ratio-
nal abstraction to deconstruct rational abstraction - Piagetian formal
operational cognition. There seems to be an inherent limit to this
mechanism. We see examples of this through repeated scientific re-
ductionism or endless cascades of deconstruction without perspec-
tive to evaluate the relative merits of one position over another. The
ethical consequence of this may be radical relativism. Or we may find
lissociation from the pain of the world and with it a lack of willing-
less to move the status quo since any perspective is as good as any
Dther. Another possibility is simply ethical paralysis since there is no
position from which to take an ethical stand. For some, the anxiety of
his situation leads to regression into some ideological fundamental-
sm as an unchanging point of reference.

The way we have been working on a problem often helps to keep
t a problem, when we change our process - in this case our style of
:ognition or the ceiling of thinking - we may move the problem. Two
inalogies may give some feel for this. There is an old story of an in-
ligenous community that gathers together and talks about a prob-
em , when they have talked enough they then dance the problem.

150 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

then draw, then sing, and on until the way in which the problem is
sensed is changed by having stepped out of the way that the problem
had been held. Similarly, the "fact" of woman's inferior capacity for
moral reasoning, supported by discourse from the Bible, through St.
Augustine and Freud to Lawrence Kohlberg, evaporates when women
ask the questions and have access to publications. (DV, p. 6) When
technical reason, or any single source or cognitive style alone asks the
question and interprets the answer we do not step outside and evalu-
ate the context that is our mode of cognition.

A synthetic mode of knowing that integrates other modes has been
proposed by several sources (e.g. Aurobindo, Bruner, Arieti, Flavel)
and summarized by Wilber. (SE) Referred to as Vision Logic or Net-
work Logic, this mode of knowing is said to integrate the body and
formal operational cognition and in so doing goes beyond either and
provides a perspective on them. That is, it is transparent to itself and
thus capable of looking at the mind and it's processes. (Both the terms
vision and logic may be misleading in light of what has been said so
far. The use of "vision" may represent the grounding in a visualist
bias as opposed to multisensory perceiving. Logic may imply a nar-
row analytic, deductive capacity as opposed to the synthetic,
multiplicitous knowing more charactoristic of the claims of Vision
Logic),

The depth and breadth of perspective as well as the flexibility and
integration of knowing emerge with the development of bodymind
consciousness. Such development can be encouraged through what
Varela et al refer to as "awareness /mindfulness" practices that move
the focus from external content to internal process.^^

Awareness practice involves "... a mindful reflection that includes
in the reflection on a question, the asker of the question and the pro-
cess of asking itself." (TE, p. 30) In so doing we extend the view of
most of postmodern deconstruction and as we do "... we can begin to
sense and interrupt automatic patterns of conditioned thinking, sen-
sation and behavior" to an even greater depth.(TE, p. 122) Varela clari-
fies this practice as follows: "... (T)he practices involved in the devel-
opment of mindfulness / awareness are virtually never described as
the training of meditative virtuosity (and certainly not as the devel-
opment of a higher, more evolved spirituality) but rather, as the let-
ting go of habits of mindlessness, as an unlearning rather than a learn-
ing." (TE, p. 29)

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 151

Instead of finding ourselves more self-conscious and ego-centered
through awareness practices we find that we are more aware and less
narcissistic. We begin development with a fused, largely undifferenti-
ated consciousness and through subject - object dichotomizing - "This
is me this isn't me" - we differentiate. As we reach formal opera-
tional thought we are able to step outside and look back within at the
thinker. As we continue to cultivate this potentiality we can look even
deeper into the process of thinking, recognizing ourselves both as the
object and the subject - an integration or union of opposites as men-
tioned above. Washburn has described this as conscious or mindful
reunion with the Dynamic Ground."*^ We are both differentiated and
unified in this perspective, and conscious of both.

As to our ethical choices, the dilemma of groundlessness uncov-
ered in postmodernism is not replaced with new ideological ground
n this perspective but instead there is an expansion of our conscious-
less and cognition and a coming to terms with the groundlessness,
rhe shift does not disengage the mind from the phenomenal world; it
mables the mind to be fully present within the world. As Varela writes,
t is "... not to avoid action but to become fully present in one's ac-
ion". (TE, p. 122) This is not the self-consciousness often characteris-
ic of early formal operational thought (the bane of many adolescents)
)ut a more developed awareness that involves being present, mind
nd body, in the experience. In addition, Varella is careful not to re-
lace the receding ground of the environment with the ground of the
nind. That is, cognition is not reduced to being molded and shaped
y an independent environment or solely the internal generation of
[\ind, it is instead the result of interaction, or what Varella calls "en-
cted" - a constant interplay that does not posit an absolute ground
1 either environment or the self.

As awareness develops something else happens. The new degree
f openness to experience encompasses not only one's own immedi-
te sphere of perception but also enables one to appreciate others and
evelop compassionate insight into their predicament. An open heart,
wareness of suffering and deep compassion are regularly described
arising naturally out of the process of mindfulness.
Additionally, as we become mindful - that is, as we are able "... to
<perience what one's mind is doing as it does it, to be present with

Iie's mind." (TE, p. 23) - we can see the roots that a choice may stem

152 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

choices from those roots so they may be more fully conscious and
ours.

Buddhist meditative practice, or "mindscience" which is the most
well elaborated practice of mindfulness /awareness, implies that di-
rect knowing unmediated by conceptions is possible and can be culti-
vated through awareness strategies. But how is the immediacy or di-
rectness of such knowing to be assessed, let alone to claim that such
transrepresentational knowing is valid? We have only our own aware-
ness tools and experimentation to evaluate the degree or quality of
our awareness. If we apply the same principles that we have been
using to evaluate the limits of formal operational logic, then we must
hold the position formed by Vision-Logic and cultivated through
awareness strategies lightly. That is, deconstruction and mindful ex-
perimentation must be applied at every step and we can use the aware-
ness practices themselves as a radically deconstructive process. Aware-
ness practice is in principle incapable of producing any kind of narra-
tives. Narratives involve conceptualizing and construction, awareness
does not produce truths or stories in and of itself. Of course, people
who engage in awareness strategies also engage in conceptual con-
struction.

We often conclude that the fresh and newly realized level of per-
ception represents the final truth and as such becomes concretized as
ideology, only to discover a new truth down the road. Transpersonal
dimensions of consciousness have been proposed beyond this cogni-
tive level and as is the case with previous levels, this foundation may
enable the embodiment of other developments of consciousness. While
awareness practices help to reveal the process of our questioning,
narratives or conceptualizations formed from them become poten-
tially replacement master narrative if we assume them as the source
of Truth. The Dalai Lama reminds us that "... the ultimate authority
must always rest with the individual's reason (We will assume he
refers to reason in the broad sense conceived of in this section.) and
critical analysis. This is why we find various conceptions of reality in
Buddhist literature. Each is based on a different level of understand-
ing of the ultimate nature.""*^

From known to mystery

The last interrelated shift, and one that serves the others, involves
maintaining a dynamic openness to experience that is fostered by

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 153

moving the center of our intentions from the known to mystery.
Through modernism we came to expect that our world was eventu-
ally entirely measurable and potentially controllable. It was only a
question of when we would penetrate, through rational-empiricism,
into the not-yet-known. Our lived experience may become centered
on the knowledge we have accumulated. We protect and defend that
knowledge and build our house of self and values around it. It often
becomes our fortress. But both the history of science and the
postmodern perspective remind us that the known is inevitably in-
complete, that there remains mystery outside and within the known.
A house built on the known is built on shifting sands and therefore
temporary. If we shift our center of gravity to mystery we become a
transient guest, a traveler of sorts, looking for, and remaining open to
experiences, relationships, and ideas. This does not preclude respite
in the predictability of the known such as it is, but invites us to re-
main attentive to difference, always ready and willing to move be-
yond these boundaries toward loving more deeply, or looking in fresh
ways or in whatever emerges. This enables us to participate in our
own changes. If we remain centered on the known, any invasion of
mystery requires a structural rebuilding or even a change of location.
In short order we may get weary of this constant rebuilding and turn
away from mystery assuming we have all knowledge that we need.
Even the traveler may grow arrogant and turn away from mystery
when the focus is on accumulated knowledge. Dante's Ulysses shows
us this: "Ulysses' illusion of omnipotence founded on the success of
his previous journey's of exploration, closes his access to inspiration
and to further exploration of knowledge ..."^^ The existentialists re-
mind us of our transient nature through the recognition of our im-
pending death, a mystery. They suggest that when we can acknowl-
edge this we may begin to live more authentically, less fear-bound
and less confined by the fortress of the known and, we could say,
centered in the anticipation of mystery.

When we use the tools of modernism or postmodernism we are
active, penetrating and teasing apart the world, be it one of language
or of atoms. For modernism this search is to make the unknown known
and in so doing we accumulate or possess knowledge. Rather than
revealing and possessing knowledge, postmodernism acknowledges
:he unknowability of the world. In it's more optimistic forms this takes
:he form of celebration, at its most pessimistic is a kind of skeptical

154 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

relativistic fatalism. However, what this view does is open the door
for remaining aware of mystery, recognizing that the unknown never
fully recedes; we remain in relationship to knowledge rather than in
the illusion of possession of it. As with most relationships there is a
certain degree of receiving and taking. This is a case in which we do
not just possess knowledge or celebrate it (divine or otherwise) but
we are possessed by it."*^ We already have a language from the
premodern world that can invigorate the shift towards mystery and
our relationship with knowledge. For example, "enthusiasm" means
literally possession by some form of knowledge (a god, muse, idea);
"... the state of man in whom a god dwells."; "inspiration" implies
infusion (breathing in) of some idea into us; Ecstasy is understood as
entering into a relationship with or being unified with a deity, or we
could say, some idea."*^

Assuming a posture of willingness as opposed to exclusive will-
fulness, as May has said so well, involves a certain degree of surren-
der that opens the relationship to mystery."*^ And an openness to mys-
tery invites an expansion of awareness on the physical or sensory, the
mental and the contemplative.^" Openness may be thought of as prac-
ticed through listening. "When Michaelangelo did the Sistine Chapel
he painted both the major and minor prophets. They can be told apart
because, though there are cherubin at the ears of all, only the major
prophets are listening. "^^ The reason they are listening, we could as-
sume, is because they believe there is still much to hear - the mystery.
Imagine the freshness of a classroom with such an attitude of open-
ness and willingness. We get some glimpse of this difference by con-
sidering the pleasure, fascination and sustained flexibility of an in-
fant as it discovers its world and how soon that sponge-like quality
and joy becomes to discovering one right answer, or trying to please
the teacher, or otherwise restricting awareness. When we assume
mystery abounds we are open to the possibility of learning; if we as-
sume there is no mystery or only small portals or troughs of the
not-yet-known, the range and depth of our experience and hence the
dynamic quality of our knowledge which informs ethical choice, is
constricted. Moving from the goal of trying to possess the world
through "accumulating" the known to beholding the mystery (which
can certainly include celebration) may help keep our ethical choices
fresh and growing.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciejtces, XXXIII, 1995 155

As we gain the epistemic richness that may be provided through
these shifts, we may recognize interconnection or sacredness. This is
what is described in the expansion of consciousness or the mystic ex-
perience - love, compassion, connection, reverence, caring, etc. This
insight provides perspective without necessarily providing moral
answers. We can see how perspective informs actions without pro-
viding any specifics. The multiplicity and dynamicism of ethical re-
sponses as opposed to simply rules or doctrine make sense in this
perspective. Insight, intuition, vision, provides the process or back-
drop through which application to daily experience is made. The in-
sight does not provide ethical ground as in moral principles but light,
we might say. Ethical choice and principles emerge from little stories
(in the style of Lyotard) of interpretation of insight in a living (experi-
ential) context. The power of postmodern multiplicity and diversity
permit breadth of consideration, variety, and evaluation of the per-
spective (illumination) which help to avoid the traps of imperialistic
dogma and intolerance. This is the power of postmodern ethics. With
respect to ethical choices, illumined perspective without application
remains disconnected with concerns of daily living. When interpreted
in a modernist framework it may take the form of moral prescriptions
and absolutes. At the same time the postmodern breadth without the
complexity of perspective provided through contact and beheld as
ecstasy and mystery remains two dimensional and without adequate
means to inform morality. Without the expanded consciousness we
are left with biological pleasure, social agreement, or sheer intellect
as the source for ethics. Each are revealed as myopic. While we might
derive an ethical response from a biological necessity, for example
(e.g. food), the offering of expanded perspective (cognition and con-
sciousness) places these in a larger context. Together the breadth of
postmodern consideration and the "height" of expanding conscious-
ness provide handholds for ethical action. As such ethics is not a static
object to be revealed or even constructed but a lived experience.

References

^ K. J. Gergen and John Kaye, "Beyond Narrative in the Negotiation of Therapeutic
Meaning," inTherapy as Social Construction, eds. K. Gergen and S, McNamee, (Lon-
don and Newbury Park, California: Sage, 1992) p. 180. Henceforth cited as BN.

^ Robert Thurman, "Tibetian Psychology: Sophisticated Software for the Human
Brain", in MindScience: an East-West Dialogue., Daruel Goleman and Robert Thurman,
Eds., (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1991) p. 53. Henceforth referrred to as TP.

156 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

''Lawrence Kohlberg, Collected Papers on Moral Development and Moral Education, (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Center for Moral Education, 1976).

* Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) Henceforth referred to as DV.

^Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

''Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press. 1970).

' Willis Harman, "The Postmodern Heresy: Consciousness as Causal" in The
Reenchantrnent of Scie77ce: Postmodern proposals, D. R. Griffen, ed. (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1988) p. 122.

'^Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1984)
Henceforth referred to as PC.

Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Evolution of Consciousness, (Boston:
Shambhala, 1995) p. 188 Henceforth referred to SE.

^"M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, (New York: Pantheon, 1980) Henceforth referrredto
asPN.

" Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Scieijces: Insights, Inroads and
Intrusions, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 6.

'^Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. L. Fisher, (Boston: Bea-
con Press, 1945/1963).

'^Ronald D. Laing, The Devided Self, (Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1965).

'"Han F. deWit, Contemplative Psychology, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press,
1991).

'^Erwin Schrodinger, WJtat is Life? Mind and Matter, (London: Cambridge University
Press: 1945) p. 140

'*' as cited in Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985) p. 140.

'^H. Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena: Object Relations and the Self, (New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press, 1969), pp. 370-371.

"^ H. Kohut, The Resoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press,
1977), p. 458.

'''William Ralph Schroeder, Sartre and his Predecessors: The Self and the Other, (Boston:
Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1984) p. 267. Henceforth referrred to as SH.

^"Jean Baker Miller, "Connections, Disconnections, and Violations". Work in Progress,
No. 33 (Wellesley Ma.: The Stone Center, 1988.

-' Karen Homey, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self -Realization. (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1950).

^Kermeth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, (New
York: Basic Books, 1991).

^^Ken, Wilber Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (Boston: Shambhala, 1983/
1990). Henceforth referred to as EE.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 157

^* Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock,

(New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983) p. 198. Henceforth referred to as

AF.
^^H. Kohut, "Two Letters", in Advances in Self Psychology, ed. A. Goldberg, (New York

: International Universities Press, 1980) pp. 449-469
^^F. S. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1969), p. 19
^''E. Polster and M. Polster, Gestalt Therapy Integrated, (New York: Random House,

1974)
^^ Wendy Brown, "Feminist Hesitations, Postmodern Exposures". Differences: A Jour-
nal of Feminist Cultural Studies, (3.1, 1991)p. 65-66.
^'Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age,

(New York: Harper Collins, 1991) p. 124, Henceforth referred to as SG.
^Elspeth Probyn, "The Body Which is Not One: Speaking an Embodied Self," Hypatia,

vol.6,no.3, Fall(1991)p. 116.
^^ Maureen O'Hara, Is it Time for Clinical Psychology to Deconstruct Constructivism?, (La

JoUa, Ca.: Center for the study of the Person, 1995) p. 6
^^ Jerome Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, (New York: Antheum Press,

1965) p. 162.
^^M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Science, (Pantheon, 1971)
^David Michael Levin, "Meaning and the History of the Body; Toward a Postmodern

Medicine", Noetic Sciences Review, (Spring, 1995)p. 12. Henceforth referred to as MH.
^^Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, (Wheaton, II.: Quest, 1977).
^^Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Organism: Discovery of the Orgone, (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
^^ Larry Dossey, Healing words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, (New

York: Harper Collins, 1993).
^* Richard E. Cytowic, "Synesthesia and mapping of subjective sensory dimension."

Neurology, June, 1989, vol. 39 (6) pp. 849-850. Henceforth referred to as SM.
''Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, (New York:

Humanities Press, 1945/1962) p. 229.
' William Blake, "A Memorable Fancy", In Poems and Letters, J. Bronowski, Ed.

(Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1986) p.lOl.

John P. Conger, Jung and Reich: The Body as Shadow, (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books,

1988) p. 183.

Wendell Johnson, People in Quandaries, (New York: Harper and Row, 1946).
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sci-
ence and Human Experience, (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T Press, 1993) Henceforth
referred to as TE.

'Michael Washburn, The Ego and the Dynamic Ground, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988)
' The Dalai Lama, The Buddhist Concept of Mind in Mind Science : an East -West
Dialogue, eds. Daniel Goleman, Robert Thurman (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publica-
tions, 1991) p. 14.

158 Tobin Hart: Ethical Choice in a Postmodern World: Cognition, Consciousness and Contact

*^M. E. Williams, Inspiration in Milton and Keats, (Totowa: N.J.: Barnes and Noble

Books, 1982). p. 9-10.
''^M. P. Pandt, The Yoga of Knowledge, (Pomona, Ca.: Auromere, 1979) p. 225.
^Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) p. 326.
^^ Gerald May, Will and Spirit: A contemplative Psychology, (San Francisco: Harper S. F.

1987).
Tarthang Tulku, Gesture of Balance, (Berkeley, Ca. : Dharma Publishing, 1977) p. 51.
'^'J. C. Gowan as cited in W. Harman and H. Rheingold, Higher Creativity: Liberating

the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights. (Los Angeles: ]. P. Tarcher, 1984) p. 8.

Communication, Postmodernism, and
Postmodern Ethics in Communication

by Mark G.R. McManus

In spite of any misgivings over (or disregard for) such constructs
as deconstruction, postmodernism is rapidly informing practice as
well as theoretical concerns in the most mundane of social sciences.^
Communications scholars today continue a self- reflexive discussion
concerning the relationship of rhetoric and social, critical theory. This
discussion takes a variety of forms, with proponents taking opposing
sides on a variety of issues. The issues addressed primarily center
around the advisability of opening rhetorical theory to broader ques-
tions facing social theorists in general. The debate has become cen-
tered around the utility /disutility of "critical theory" (derived from
the Frankfurt School) and "postmodernism".

A number of social theorists continue to attract communication
scholars. Included are Anthony Giddens, Paul Ricoeur, Renato
Resaldo, Clifford Geertz, and particularly Michel Foucault and Jiirgen
Habermas. The discussion is not new: Whalen and Cheney suggest
that it began at least twenty years ago^; they suggest that the debate
has, however, taken on new life and intensity as both sociology and
communications studies seek to work themselves out of an "'identity
crisis'" (RE, p. 474).

As postmodernism enters the arcanity of more applied practice, it
is only natural that social and communication theorists work toward
a more mature iteration of postmodernism, one that includes practi-
cal, ethical considerations. It is no longer sufficient to prove that an
opponent is wrong or mistaken; nor can rhetoric be adequately re-
garded simply as a strategy to advance one's own arguments.

Starting from a point of definition, I am not certain that
postmodernism is yet here. I am more inclined to agree with Anthony
Giddens that Western society is engaged in the throes of late modern-
ism, with key characteristics that may well provide a close view as to
what postmodern society may entail.

Giddens helps provide a broader, non-rhetorical definition of what
current (post /modem) society is, and how it differs from other con-

160 Mark G. R. McManus: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

ceptions. In Consequences of Modernity he suggests three defining char-
acteristics of Western society:

A. distantiation of time and place

B. disembedding of social institutions, and

C. self-reflexivity.^

Ultimately, whether these characteristics represent vestiges of a mod-
ernist culture or harbingers of an emerging postmodern society is less
problematic than their value in providing an adequate critique of cur-
rent sociality. Their value lies in that they are characteristic of a con-
temporary. Western society that contains elements of both modern
and postmodern culture. Each of these features is addressed in some
way by most contemporary rhetoricians. Each rhetorician views these
features differently: they do not agree which are the most important
or which are problematic. Each places ethical constraints and respon-
sibilities on rhetoricians and communicators that are different, how-
ever, than those historically presumed under a traditionally conceived,
modern culture.

Distantiation of time and place, for example, is reflected in the no-
tions of progress, of the relationship between permanence and change,
of the use of language to create rather than to describe or reflect his-
tory. Disembedding of social institutions occurs in two ways: the erec-
tion, maintenance, and changing of symbol systems, a symbolic trans-
formation of physical reality (money being a paradigmatic instance);
the other is the importance of expert systems (the transference of so-
cial relationships into systems of coping with Nature), including tech-
nology, social expertise, politics, etc. Current examples include the
perceived transference of civil discourse into institutionalized mass
media; the determination of cultural issues by public opinion poll; or
the sets of laws, rules and physical features that are gathered under
the notion of transportation, or traffic (CM, p. 28). Self-reflexivity is, 1
believe, one of the most important features of modernity that con-
cerns contemporary rhetoric. It is addressed in the epistemic construc-
tion of reality all along the political and theoretical spectrum from
Weaver's "metaphysical dream'"* to Foucault's episteme/ discourse
constructs. It closely follows postmodernism' s insistence on theory/
-praxis as a lived life, with each changing the other.

The point I propose is that contemporary life, whether because of
a recognizable social transition process or because of simple
incoherencies, contains contradictory elements of sociality that pose
particular ethical questions to communication scholars, whether they

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 161

try to describe, predict, or change the course of society. These features
of current sociality (whether modem or postmodern) can be addressed
through focal points of the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke.

Contemporary Rhetoric

Kenneth Burke remains one of the most durable and enduring of
theorists for communication /rhetorical studies. Since his writing be-
came available in book form in the 1930s, his work has been studied
and used by rhetorical scholars, particularly those of a literary, politi-
cal, or sociological bent. Beginning in the 1950s, particularly after pub-
lication of A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950),
his work has been primarily mined for methodological approaches to
rhetorical studies. As in the dialogue among rhetorical scholars about
postmodernism, critical, postmodernist theorists themselves are di-
vided in their receptivity to Burke. He is compared unfavorably as an
"abstruse theorist"^ a literary theorist moved into the realm of cul-
tural theory by the more advanced work of Clifford Geertz"; and more
favorably as a theorist who long ago satisfactorily addressed key so-
cial factors raised by Durkheim and recently debilitated by such theo-
rists as Anthony Giddens^, and as a "critical structuralist" who opens
to us "a more detailed and heterogeneous level of history than we
lave been accustomed to knowing".^

I am not suggesting that Burke provides a common corpus that
allows communications scholars to more easily integrate
postmodernism into the study of rhetoric. First, I don't believe that
Burke's work has been integrated with any unanimity into rhetorical
theory. As I suggest above, much of the rhetorical reception of Burke
remains at the strictly methodological level.'* Secondly, Burke is hardly
central to the social theorists most studied by communications schol-
ars, Jiirgen Habermas or Michel Foucault. Much of the work done by
major social theorists is singularly insular.^ Although rhetorical theo-
rists and critics have begun serious work in postmodern theory",
Burke is familiar territory for many communications scholars. In re-
cent years, also, research has used Burkeian rhetorical theory as a
springboard to postmodern theory.^^ In electronic data communica-
tions, a bridge is a hardware /software mechanism that allows two
similar networks to converse with one another. This is not the role I
would assign to Burke's theory. A router, however, is a hardware/
software mechanism that allows dissimilar networks to communicate.

162 Mark G. R. McManns: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

This is the potential role I see for Burkeian theory: it provides a cen-
tral nexus for issues that communication scholars and postmodern
social theorists have in common.

Contemporary Rhetoric and Postmodernism

Several key themes in Burke's rhetorical theory address issues in
common with postmodern theorists. The contemporary dialogue
among communications scholars also addresses such themes. Al-
though each participant utilizes a particular vocabulary, Burke's dis-
cussion is particularly rhetorical, and based on language-in-use. He
may well, therefore, provide a satisfactory router role between rheto-
ric and postmodern theory. Any number of themes may be chosen:
the dialectic of structure /agency; discursive practices; cultural con-
straints in everyday life-practices versus historicity; praxis /theory
issues; dominance versus emancipatory interests. This paper will ex-
amine three of Burke's major constructs in view of the dialogue by
communications scholars over the role of postmodernism in the de-
velopment of a postmodern rhetoric.

Burke's rhetorical theory interpenetrates critical theory and mod-
ernist/postmodernist questions in several key areas. Three constructs
that remain central to a Burkeian rhetorical theory, and that have ana-
logs in modernist/ postmodernist theory are symbolic action, the iden-
tify/^identification^ dialectic, and the notion of language as equip-
ment for living (pragmatic emancipatory). In any discussion of Burke,
these constructs overlap and merge. They can be discussed as sepa-
rate entities, however, in their relationship to some of the terms nec-
essary to postmodern theory.

Symbolic Action

Use of language in a creative, generative mode, for Burke, consti-
tutes symbolic action. For Burke, there is no human "praxis" that does
not have from the beginning a symbolic dimension. . ." (Ricoeur, LIU,
p. 81). Language itself is constitutive of action. For Burke, language is
representative of human responses to physical situations. Burke makes
a clear distinction between human (symbolic) action and physicalist
motion. As he notes, "Whatever may be the character of existence in
the physical realm, this realm functions but as a scenic background
when considered from the standpoint of the human realm'\ Ricoeur

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 163

attempts to clarify this issue when he suggests that, for Burke, "sym-
bolic action is not an action which we take but one which we replace
by signs" (Ricoeur, LIU, p. 256). Yet, I think Ricoeur has still not quite
gotten Burke correctly here. A closer approximation can be gotten from
Ricoeur 's discussion of consciousness. Quoting Marx's The German
Ideology, he notes that

we find that man also possesses 'consciousness,' but,
even so, not inherent, not 'pure' consciousness. From
the start the 'spirit' is afflicted with the curse of
being 'burdened' with matter, which here makes its
appearance in the form of agitated layers of air,
sound, in short, of language. (LIU, p. 83)

Such a notion is closer to Burke, (although Ricoeur disagrees with it)
in that it makes explicit the fundamental anthropological facticity of
language in humans.^** Again, however, this feel for Burke's construct
is not entirely clear, and is certainly not complete. Although Burke is
amenable to the notion that the structure and use of language has
physiological manifestations and analogs, he is not actually sympa-
thetic to a behaviorist interpretation. When Burke asserts that human
discourse employs symbolic action he places particular burdens on
the differences between action and motion. He notes that

We have the drama and the scene of the drama The
description of the scene is the role of the physical sci-
ences; the description of the drama is the role of the
social sciences. The physical sciences are a calculus of
events; the social sciences are a calculus of acts. (PLF,
p. 114)

Additionally, "The error of the social sciences has usually resided in
the attempt to appropriate the scenic calculus [of physical events] for
a charting of the [social] act" (PLF, p. 114). The use of language, sym-
bolic action, "being, like biology, in an indeterminate realm between
vital assertions and lifeless properties, the realm ... is neither physi-
calist nor anti-physicalist, but physicalist-plus" (PLF, p. 116). Burke
relies on the concreteness of events. Despite any proposal explaining
or determining the quality of events (which can only be justified by
its adequacy, by its "collective revelation", the event itself is true. Burke
here does something very interesting by placing the reality of the event
partially outside the realm of analysis. That is, "the description of the

164 Mark G. R. McManus: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

scene is the role of the physical sciences. . .(PLF, p. 114). Its utility lies
in its provision of strands and textures for determination of quality.
This, I think is also the basis for Burke's distinction between act and
motion. Motion is the physicality of man's action. Motion becomes
part of the scene, and is not susceptible to analysis except as it con-
tributes to the quality of actions. Burke privileges language as the
activity that creates action out of motion (that is, motion + "talk
about").

What Burke means by this is that language is used to describe or
react to physical reality ("to encompass it"). Although the situation in
which language takes place is a realm of motion,

action is not reducible to terms of motion. For instance,
the 'essence' or 'meaning' of a sentence is not reduc-
ible to its sheer physical existence as sounds in the air
or marks on the page, although material motions of
some sort are necessary for the production, transmis-
sion and reception of the sentence.^"*

That is,

language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is nec-
essarily talk about things in terms of what they are not
And, even accuracy does not get around the fact that
such terms [labels for reality] are sheer emptiness, as
compared with the substance of things they name.^*'

Here, Burke agrees with critical and postmodern theorists in rejecting
the sanctity of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy that led to logical
positivism and behaviorism. He would agree with Habermas (who
attempts to redeem or revive the critical theory of the Frankfurt school)
when the latter posits that

the social scientist cannot 'use' this language 'found'
in the object domain as a neutral instrument. He can-
not 'enter into' this language without having recourse
to the pretheoretical knowledge of a member of a life
world . . . which he has intuitively mastered as a lay-
man and now brings unanalyzed into every process of
achieving understanding^^.

For Habermas, the resolution of this dilemma requires a renovation
of rationality that retransforms the 'public sphere' into an arena

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 165

wherein "communicative" action is based on the ability of actors to
"harmonize their plans of action on the basis of common situation
definitions" in an effort to reach "understanding" rather than per-
sonal success. ^^

For Burke, such renovation is not necessary. He assumes a suffi-
ciency of universality in human biological, psychological, and socio-
logical motives of language use. Such human commonality means
that it is adequate to realize that a transcendence {i.e.,
"physicality-plus") is explicit in the application of language to the
human world. ^'' Language use, symbolic action, the interplay between
positive, dialectical, and ultimate terms and the transcendence that
results from the juxtaposition of the human and physical realms is
the focus of analysis, and human motivation its object.-^^

Contrarily for Foucault (the prototypical postmodernist currently
studied by communication scholars), the modern shift to the "will to
knowledge about" from the classical "will to truth" represents an ac-
cumulation of historical and institutional baggage that cannot be sur-
mounted. This will to knowledge is so culturally constrained that it
imposes

upon the knowing subject - in some ways taking pre-
cedence over all experience - a certain position, a cer-
tain viewpoint, a certain function. . . a will to knowl-
edge which prescribe[s]. . . the technological level at
which knowledge [can] be employed in order to
be verifiable and useful. . . .^^

For Foucault, cultural domination so constrains individual attempts
to discover either truth or knowledge, that recourse can be found only
tn the "positivity" of discursive acts. An adequate, emancipatory cri-
tique can only be obtained by the analysis of the structural systemicity
3f language functions (AK, p. 125, 86-87).

For Burke, this is an unnecessary move, and indeed, a dangerous
Dne. Recall that the realm of the physical world cannot be neutrally
iescribed in language use. Language use, for Burke, is not truly ca-
pable of objectification. A transcendence is present precisely at the
3oint where human relations (language use) becomes tangent to the
'real" world. It is enough to realize that cultural domination affects
ill people. Any language use is to some extent a meta-symbolic activ-
ty, since it is exhortative, is activity that is primarily exercise of and

166 Mark G. R. McMamis: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

invitation to share the will to create. The form that cultural domina-
tion or intrusion takes, he views as a product of an individual's oppo-
sition in the dialectic of the identity /identification.

Identity / Identification

Burke is quite aware of the constraints that the social nature of
language places on human actors. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, he
observed

Terms are interrelated; once you select a few, you are
no longer free simply to apply them like labels to ex-
ternal situations, but must follow through all sorts of
internal battles, as the terms bring up obligations with
relations to one another. ^-

John Brenkman provides an example from Lacanian psychology
that illustrates the peculiar nature of the identify /identification dia-
lectic in symbolic action. A child's relationship with its parents is one
of total dependency. The "Other" (either parents specifically, or par-
ents as representative of community in general) satisfies all physical
and psychological requirements of the child. Additionally, in relation
to the child, the "other's" exclusive hold on discourse represents his/
her "omnipotence." The child's first bid for independence and au-
tonomy, therefore, is through becoming a "speaking being." This bid,
however, contains elements of both independence and constraint. Even
as the child establishes a new relationship to its parents, it is sprung
into the social nature of language and has its "first experience in par-
ticipation in the concrete discourse of the community").^'' To partici-
pate, the child must respond to the concrete sociality of language rules
of the community it is joining.

Burke's identity /identification dialectic is of just such a nature. As
he notes, "the individual's identity is formed by reference to his mem-
bership in a group" (PLF, p. 306); or "in forming ideas of our personal
identity, we spontaneously identify ourselves with family, nation,
political or cultural causes, church, and so on" (LAS A, p. 301). Indi-
viduality, therefore, arises as a personal distinction from human soci
ality. But Burke reminds us that

Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central
moltenness, where all is merged. They have been

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 167

thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they

;: have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions

I return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may

; be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may

i enter into new combinations, whereat it may again be

thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction. So

that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap

from one state to the other. Rather, we must take Aback

into the ground of its existence,the logical substance

that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is

consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this

time emerging with non-A instead.-'*

For Burke, the great molten center of human interaction is to be found
in the facticity of humans as symbolic actors, as users of language.
Creation of an identity is possible only through its acceptance or re-
jection of identification with.

Burke's construction of such a dialectic directly contravenes
Foucault's notion of identity. For Foucault, cultural domination is such
a factor of language use, that humans are unable to be self-reflexive
enough to create a meaningful identity. Although his later projects
tended to emphasize the "exercises of self upon self" rather than domi-
nation, he felt that people must gain a purchase on a position outside
cultural dominance before a meaningful identity was possible. A mean-
ingful "return of the subject" to the critique of society suggests that
the human problem is for the

individual soul to turn its gaze on itself in order to rec-
ognize itself in what it is and recognizing itself in what
it is, to recall the truths to which it is related and on
which it could have reflected. ^^

Dnly the liberated self can practice "care for the self," could become
m "absolutizing self" (FF, p. 5). This takes Foucault back to the project
18 outlined in "The Discourse on Language". He seeks there to reject
le domination of a sociated striving for "knowledge about" in favor
)f a "will to truth" he identifies with or locates in classical Greece,
^here, "true discourse" was

spoken by men of right, according to ritual. . . . The
highest truth lay in what discourse was. . .in what it

168 Mark G. R. McManus: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

did. ... It prophesied the future, not merely announc-
ing what was going to occur, but contributing to its
actual event, carrying men along with it and thus weav-
ing itself into the fabric of fate. (AK, p. 218)

This, for Foucault, is what is lost by the objectification imposed on the
actor by modernism. He remains skeptical of the ability of critics/
historians /social theorists to escape the linguistic and cultural bag-
gage with which they address analysis. His skepticism derives from a
shift he perceives from classical times in which truth lay in what dis-
course was to an emphasis on what discourse did, to a current em-
phasis on what discourse says (AK, p. 218, emphases added). True
discourse therefore became disconnected from the instantiation of
power and right, and became infused with institutionally determined
concepts of knowledge.

This shift is reflected in the erection of a conflicting "will to truth'
and a "will to knowledge". Will to truth is a concept about "being",
while will to knowledge is a concept directed toward "being about."
Foucault here introduces a very Burkeian notion, with the will to
knowledge being essentially an attitude toward an institutional situ-
ation {i.e., a situation determined by cultural rules). Foucault differs
from Burke, however, in that he feels that only by exploring the dis-
cursive practice / knowledge (s^i^ozr)/ science axis can subjectivity be
escaped (AK, p. 183). For Burke, the subjectivity (even institutional
aspects of it) are a given. Foucault believes that they must be over-
come.

Foucault's postmodernist solution toward a classical analysis of
truth is to strip the content of discursive practice down to its constitu-
ent functionality. He is adamant about the independence of statements,
the constituents of discursive actions. They are not like sentences or
propositions, that rely on representational relationships or structures.
Indeed,

one should not be surprised, then, if one has failed to
find structural criteria for the statement; this is because
it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a
domain of structures and possible unities, and which
reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space
(AK, p. 87).

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 169

The statement is, however, a function of a particular type: "it is a
function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis
of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether
or not they 'make sense'" (AK, p. 86, emphases added). Statements
are, then, analogical elements of "being" that allow resolution of the
"will to truth" rather than to the institutionally derived "will to knowl-
edge." Foucault's concern with stripping away the content of state-
ments derives, it seems, from his determination to circumscribe, as
completely as possible, subjectivity under the guise of rationality or
scientificity from the contextual event. Only the exterior, dispersive,
independence of statements provides the primary assurance that the
critic is not being fooled by himself and his relationship to his culture.
Foucault proposes a "true" scientificity of discursive practices. His
solution resides in the functional attributes of statements in the con-
stitution of discourse. The functional regularities and regulations that
"group" statements together contain and describe "objects" of analy-
sis, that reveal those accorded the right to use languages, and identify
sites from which discourse derives its source and its points of appli-
cation (AK, p. 40-43, 50-52). Specific groupings contain their own con-
ceptual structures and their own strategic possibilities. Analysis of
statements reveals the building blocks (the what must have been or
must be said) of cultural knowledge, without being impinged upon
by the exercise of power that is inherent in knowledge.

This stripping down of discourse, to elemental positivities, does
not entirely resolve Foucault's problems, it seems to me. An element
of tautology remains in his solution: it seems that statements and
discursive practices perform these functions, and these functions there-
fore provide definitions for "group figures". Yet, surely Foucault would
not suggest that the most stringent objectifications of data have as-
sured the removal of subjectivity from analysis (whether scientific or
otherwise). The only way provided out of this tautology lies in
Foucault's insistence that discursive practices are continuously active
(amenable to and capable of change), reflexive, and instantiating.

Foucault rejects the charge that his critique is structural, because
le wishes to retain the "introduction of chance as a category in the
production of events" albeit as an explicable occurrence, and to reject
the "mechanically causal links" as the explanation for their
Jistantiation (AK, p. 231). His interest in the new history of ideas de-
rives from its application to discontinuities and its analysis of rup-

170 Mark G. R. McManus: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

tures. His rejection of structuralism derives, also, from his rejection of
the event as "the domain of 'absolute contingency'", from his rejec-
tion of analysis as the project to completely "evacuate the event" .^^
The event must remain indeterminate, but determinable.

If statements remain functional, and discursive practices are de-
termined by functional rules that objective statements "fall into",
Foucault's archaeological projects remains intransigently structural.
"Archaeology - and this is one of its principal themes - may thus
constitute the tree of derivation of a discourse (AK, p. 147). Even by
its allegorical nature, archaeology retains just that structurality that
Foucault strives so hard to escape. This does not necessarily present
for me the difficulty that it presents to Foucault. It does, however,
place severe limits on his ability to recognize the determinacy of dis-
cursive practice. That he is at least partially structuralist is not so dam-
aging as his believing that he is not. I think that the reason for this lies
in his fundamental critique of power in sociality. Foucault strives
mightily to restrain valuation in his critique, yet relationships of power
are so inherent in social knowledge, that to reject the charge of relativ-
ity requires him to establish a methodology for deriving truth. To the
extent that his truth is capable of generalization, we may be left with
knowledge, in spite of his best efforts.

Foucault's postmodernist project is an attempt to regenerate a clas-
sical analysis of truth. Alisdair Maclntyre provides a fairly simple re-
ality check on Foucault's project. Maclntyre, in After Virtue-'^, comes
to nearly the same conclusions as Foucault. But, as a creator of theo-
retical underpinnings of neoconservative social theory and philoso-
phy, Maclntyre comes to his conclusion through a reactionary desire
to return to premodernism (to negate modernism), not through any
attempt to transcend the limits of modernism.^'' Here, indeed, is an
example of Burke's identity /identification dialectic subsuming both
theorists (A and not- A), as neither can subsume the other. A Burkeian
transformation of language (or, rather, symbolic action) almost always
assumes that sense of transformation that takes the form of "yes, and'
or "no, but, and."

Habermas, too, would find the identity /identification dialectic
problematic. For him, the institutionalization of the public sphere into
state and economic bureaucracies has transformed the arena of pub-
lic discourse into a place where public discourse is consumed, rather
than created (ST, p. 79-88, 181-195). Renovation of the public sphere

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 171

with the "public" rationality necessary for communicative action re-
mains the solution that can replace the structural constraints of lan-
guage use. And, for Habermas, "only those analytic theories of mean-
ing are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expres-
sion rather than from speakers' intentions (TCA, p. 275).

For Burke, such a critical theory has little meaning, because of the
integral nature of language-as-used as a determinant of human be-
havior. He certainly recognizes the changes that take place in people's
lives when language constitutes the terms of sociality. Burke would
suggest that the fact that Habermas can analyze the structural changes
of "public-icity" is a linguistic move in at least two ways. First,
Habermas can only make his analysis through language use. Secondly,
the changes themselves can only occur through language use, be-
cause they are expressions of human sociality. For Burke, this is al-
ways a given. Language is never without an adequate rationality, since
for him "language" is always "equipment for living" (PLF, p. 293).
Since language is that invitation toward a will to participate in cre-
ation/definition of the world, rationalities are always assumed to be
adequate, even if conflicting. Sometimes the conflict is insurmount-
able, but the Burkeian notion of rhetoric places the ethical burden on
humans to seek an adequate conciliation between an identification of
with an identification with.

Equipment for Living

Burke proposes that a "sociological criticism" is concerned with
the "various strategies which artists have developed with relation to
the naming of situations" (PLF, p. 301). "These strategies size up the
situations, name their structure and outstanding ingredients and name
them in a way that contains an attitude toward them" (PLF, p. 1). For
Burke, critical analysis of symbolic action can provide keys to the kinds
of choices that people make to live in-the-world, and to the linguistic
transformations people make to constitute their world. As a critic,
Burke refuses to seek a reconstructed, ideal rationality (like Habermas)
as the appropriate strategy to the human situation. The human world
is created by the unique symbolicity of humans as they live in it; and
people must use what is human about themselves to strategically en-
compass that world.

As an element of the acceptance /rejection of individual identifica-
tion with, Burke finally sees criticism as a method to improve coop-

172 Mark G. R. McManus: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

eration in human relations. When conflict occurs, we have the option
of responding to it materially or symbolically. Burke proposes that if
a symbolic solution of possible, it is better than a material solution,
because it is more humane (PLF, p. 312-313). Burke would not neces-
sarily disagree with Foucault when the latter argues that "speech is
no verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is
the very object of man's conflicts" (AK, p. 216). But for Burke, unlike
Foucault, humans by constitution, live in interaction with each other,
and with the institutions that they create together. A resolution of the
situations that men and women find themselves in may occur through
either cooperation or conflict, and humans can only cooperate through
linguistic actions that they share with one another. Burke dedicates A
Grammar of Motives "to the purification of war." To Burke this is the
highest order of human activity: should identification with others be
linguistically successful, material war might not prove necessary. Sym-
bolic action as enunciated by Burke truly emancipates because it pro-
vides adequate responses to the world.

Ethics and Rhetoric

There surely can be no surprise that communication (and rhetoric
in particular) is mightily concerned with ethics. From the time that
Isocrates made oratory a literary form and rhetoric the basis of classi-
cal education-^'', to charges that media companies pander to their au-
diences' basest interests, to the most recent politician's speech "on the
issues" dismissed as "mere rhetoric", people communicating in a
modernist mode have been charged with a readily discernable ab-
sence of ethics. Isocrates had to defend himself against the charges of
corrupting young men "by teaching them to speak and gain their own
advantage in the courts contrary to justice. . ." and that he was "able
to make the weaker cause appear the stronger. . . ."^ It may seem
surprising as we near the 21st century, but Isocrates' rebuttals can
point to concerns of ethical practices in postmodern communication.
Part of his defense was that speaking well was an ethical requirement
since, "it is not in the nature of man to attain a science by the posses-
sion of which we can know positively what we should do or what
we should say, in the next resort I hold that man to be wise who is
able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course.
. . (A, p. 335 emphases added). Questions about truth and knowledge

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 173

that concern postmodern theorists were being posited and defended
2500 years ago.

To look for ethical requirements of and guidelines for rhetorical
practice in contemporary society, it is useful to return to Giddens'
three characteristics of late modernism introduced above. A rhetori-
cian or communicator that even vaguely recognizes these features must
realize that they describe processes of sociality, rather than descrip-
tions of society. As processes, they continually open up the arena of
discourse to greater inclusiveness, as competing rationalities come
into conflict.

Increasing distantiation of time and place requires that the com-
municator or the rhetorician look at discourse that surrounds these
displacements. They point to, or reveal, content which analyzed,
should offer insight to social processes that impact cultures in which
they occur. How do we talk about and what happens when people
telecommute? What are the differences in expressed value for differ-
ent groups of societies? What social consequences occur in the eco-
nomic merger and expansion of industrial and financial institutions
into global, rather than local or national organizations? What values
conflict? What is happening, for example, when different discourses
conflict? The speeches of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, or the dis-
course around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
and the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) provide seams
of distantiation that illustrate dynamic cultural interests at work. Com-
Imunicators/ rhetoricians must examine those seams of time-space
distantiation to identify different pictures of social and cultural op-
erations likely to emerge. They also bear the responsibility to realize
that their own critiques continue the discourse in a meta-discursive
way that further define and change the context in which they occur.

The disembedding of social institutions by either symbolic tokens
or expert systems also provides postmodern communicators with ethi-
cal considerations. What are (to use Burke's phrases) the "god terms"
or "devil terms" currently applied to institutional constructs? How
io they change, and how are they challenged? What are family val-
ues? What is the American dream, or environmentalism? How are
positive or negative values ascribed to these symbolic tokens, and
/vhy are they worth arguing about? What expert systems are taken
or granted, or are under strain? What, for example, is the "criminal
ustice" system? What is it supposed to do and why? What is educa-

174 Mark G. R. McManus: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

tion, and what should be its result? The ways these tokens and sys-
tems are whipsawed by society offer both moments and structures of
discursive activity that are important and illuminating to communi-
cators and rhetorical critics alike.

Finally a postmodernist recogrution of self-reflexivity should force
both communicators and critics to examine the interpenetration of
discourse in the creation of both society and individuals.

The question becomes one of understanding the posi-
tioning of the individual in the given language pattern
and the relative change of altering that pattern, rather
than one of a search for an absolute, universal beyond
the given order, one that would somehow allow an al-
ready defined human creature to emerge as if from its
tutelage, or chains.^^

Self-reflexivity should force discourse into an arena where it is recog-
nizably part of the creation of individuals and their cultures.

Finally, ethical communications in contemporary society demands
more than that we not lie to each other or always assume the superi-
ority of our arguments. Our discourse and critique represent our con-
tributions to the expansive plasticity of society, rather than simply a
reflection of how society must or ought be.

References

' Two recent examples include Fox, Charles J. and Hugh T. Miller, Postmodern Public
Administration; Toward Discourse, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, cl995)
and Postmodern School Leadership, ed. Spencer J. Maxcy, (Westport CT: Praeger, 1994).

^ Whalen, Susan, and George Cheney, "Review Essay: Contemporary Social Theory
and Its Implications for Rhetorical and Communication Theory," Quarterly Journal
of Speech, Vol. 77 (1991), 461-479. Henceforth cited as RE.

^ Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990), p.16-29. Henceforth cited as CM.

* as in, e. g.. Weaver, Richard M., Language is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Na-
ture of Rhetoric, ed. Richard L. Johannesen, Rennard Strickland, Ralph T. Eubanks,
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uruversity Press, 1970), p. 212-213; or Ideas Have
Consequences, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 148-149.

^ Baird, James, "Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems," in Literary
Criticism and Psychology, Ed. Joseph P. Strelka. Yearbook of Comparative Criticism,
7, (University Park: Pennsylvania State Uruversity Press, 1976), p. 25.

/^est Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 175

^ Ricoeur, Paul, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 11, 82, 256. Henceforth cited as LIU.

'' Rosaldo, Renato, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, (Boston: Beacon,
1989), 104-105, 237.

' Lentricchia, Frank, Criticism and Social Change, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), p. 70, 75.

^ The first major methodological use of Burke's work with which I am familiar is
Holland, Virginia L., "Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Approach in Speech Criticism,"
Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 41 (1955), p. 352-358. In many instances, her sugges-
tions that Burke might be useful for the codification of rhetoric have remained the
fullest use of Burke by rhetorical scholars. Frequently, conceptual constructs devel-
oped by Burke have been used in particularly a mechanistic, methodological fash-
ion.

" This insularity is peculiarly common. The major continental philosophers provid-
ing the base for critical theory or postmodernism have taken little or no notice of
Burke. Even Stephen Toulmin, who has been appropriated by rhetorical scholars
makes no mention of Burke, although his recent work Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda
of Modernity, (New York: Free Press, 1990), deals specifically with questions Burke
dealt with in the 1940s and 1950s. Foucault and Habermas are apparently unaware
of Burke, and, indeed, rarely address each other. Appropriations of communica-
tions scholars is as insular. Whalen and Cheney recognize a major trend in
postmodern rhetorical theory as a "'return of the actor'" (RE, p. 469). They seem
unaware of a monograph of that title published by the French theorist Alain Touraine
in 1984, available in English in 1988 {Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial
Society, trans. Myma Godzich, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)).
Such myopia is not new. Although in the U.S., Daniel Bell is credited with the con-
cept of the "post-industrial society", Richard Sennett names Touraine as the origi-
nator of both the term and the concept ("Foreward", The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis
of Social Movements, by Alain Touraine, trans. Alan Duff (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), p. ix.

^ e. g., Slagle, R. Anthony, "Ln Defense of Queer Nation: From Identity Politics to a
Politics of Difference" , Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 59 (1995), p. 85-102.

'^e. g. Chesebro, James W., ed. Extensions of the Burkeian System, Studies in Rhetoric
and Communication, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), and Brock,
Bernard L., ed., Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Tran-

j sition. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication, (Tusacaloosa: University of Ala-
bama Press, 1995).

Burke, Kermeth, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3d ed.,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 115. Henceforth cited as PLF.
Indeed, even the physical nature of language noted here by Marx is most congenial
to Burke's earliest formulations of symbolic action. In The Philosophy of Literary Form,
Burke makes a motion (an action?) towards rank behaviorism in suggesting that
bodily motions become correlated with critical, human attitudes. He cites Paget's
theory of gesture speech in which "the origins of linguistic action" are correlated
"with bodily action and posture", p. 103.

176 Mark G. R. McManns: Communication, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Ethics

'^ Burke, Kenneth, On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield, The Heritage of
Sociology, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 54.

'^^ Burke, Kenneth, Language As Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 5. Henceforth cited as LASA. A
useful analog here to natural sciences might be among the distinctions that Pepper
draws of data, danda, and dubitanda (Pepper, Stephen C, World Hypotheses: A Study
in Evidence, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, cl942), p. 47-70; or the
distinctions among nondiscursive and extradiscursive practices (intervention) and
cerebration drawn by Kitching (Kitching, Gavin N., Marxism and Science: An Analy-
sis of an Obsession, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p.
13-16.

'^ Habermas, Jiirgen, The Theory of Communicative Action: v. 1: Reason and the Rational-
ization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon, 1984), p. 110. Hence-
forth cited as TCA.

"^ Habermas, Jiirgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989),
p. 285-287. Henceforth cited as ST.

''' Somewhere Burke notes that all living creatures are critics. What is implied here
includes the values and functions I have of transcendence, and specific notions of
"communication". We can assume, with Burke, that communication "means" a shar-
ing of intersubjective signification. This is true only in a minimalist sense, however.
In addition to this "adequate sharing", however, the communication scholar / rheto-
rician ought not underestimate the importance of the transforming meaning that
communication "consumers" bring to their participation (again that action + talk
about that makes discourse a social practice). While meaning is shared, it is never
entire, and never correct. Example: a network newscast about foreign affairs, which
carries a film clip of Russian politicians, speaking in Russian, shares differing mean-
ings, dependent on who hears it. A Serbian/ American in Chicago, an
African- American in Mississippi, a journalism class in California derive meaning
that bears differing relationship to intentions of any voice-over translator, the net-
work, or the speaker.

-" Burke, Kenneth, A Rhetoric of Motives, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969), p. 10, 183-189. Henceforth cited as RM.

-' Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and The Discourse on Language, trans.
A.M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 218. Henceforth cited as AK.

" Burke, Kenneth, and Malcolm Cowley, The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke
and Malcobn Coivley, 1915-1981, ed. Paul Jay, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), p. 237.

^"^ Brenkman, John, Culture and Domination, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p.
146-147.

-'' Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969) p. xix. Henceforth cited as CM.

^^ Foucault, Michel, Tinal Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, (Cam
bridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 2-5. Henceforth cited as FF.

^^ Foucault, Michel, Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, ed. C. Gor
don, (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 113-114.

West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XXXIII, 1995 177

^^ Maclntyre, Alisdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 114-153. '

^^ Maclntyre, Alisdair, WJtose Justice? Wltose Rationality?, (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1988).

^' Kennedy, George A., Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from
Ancient to Modern Times, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p.
31. Isocrates, 436-338 B.C., left at least two works, Antidosis, and Against the Soph-
ists, that reveal the classical view of language held by both Foucault and Maclntyre
had by his time been seriously challenged and severely eroded.

^ Isocrates, Antidosis, in vol. 3, Isocrates, in three vohunes, trans. George Norlin, (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1957-1968), 203, 193.

^' Poster, Mark, "The Mode of Information and Postmodernity" in Communication
Theory Today, ed. David Crowley and David Mitchell, (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1994), p. 190.

XT'-

+ZP 1637 997 34

STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

m

Tohin Hart Peter L. Nelson Kaisa Puhakka
Editors

RECEIVED

spiritual Knowing^an ir^g:af?j:!>!^fv
Alternative Epistemic Perspectives'

Tobin Hart
Peter L. Nelson

Kaisa Puhakka

Editors

State University of West Georgia

Studies in the Social Sciences

Volume XXXIV

January 1997

spiritual Knowing
Alternative Epistemic Perspectives

Tobin Hart
Peter L. Nelson
Kaisa Puhakka

Editors

Volume 34 of
the State University of West Georgia Studies in the Social Sciences

Copyright 1997

State University of West Georgia

CarroUton, GA30118

ISBN: 1-883199'07'7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may he reproduced in any form - except for a brief
quotation in a review or professional work - without permission.

Contents

Introduction 1

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing 5

Kaisa Puhakka

Spiritual Inquiry 25

Donald Rothberg

Inspiration 49

Tobin Hart

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction:

Through the Ontological Looking Glass 72

Peter L. Nelson

Revolution at Centerpoint:

Divesting the Mind, Dismantling the Self 98

Fred J. Hanna

Transpersonal Psychotherapy:

The Clinical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion 124

Gregjemsek

Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy:

A Holistic Perspective 142

Gary F. Kelly

Divination: Pathway to Intuition 160

Kenneth E. Fletcher

Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle 180

Joyce C. Gibb

I Know the Heather Song:

Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic 204

Jessica Syme

Contributors 221

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Richard Miller, Dean of the College of Arts and Sci-
ences at West Georgia, Glen Novak, Assistant Dean, and to Don Rice, Chair
of the Department of Psychology for their support of this project. Their con-
tinuing support for this series helps to maintain a clearing where fresh ideas in
the social sciences can find expression.

Cover Art: Gary Lichtenstein and SOMA International Galleries in San Fran-
cisco graciously provided the cover art. The painting is entitled From time to
time (oil on canvas, 56" x 90"). Sincere thanks. We find common resonance
in the art and the ideas expressed in this volume and look forward to continu-
ing collaboration.

Introduction

The preeminence oi a narrow form of rational empiricism as the highest
form of knowing has been a pervasive influence on Western thought causing a
skewing of modernist epistemic style. This has served to reinforce the view
that the normal waking state is the ground from which all "legitimate" know-
ing must emerge. Ultimately this leads to a myopic view of the world; one
that, at its best, may penetrate deeply but also very narrowly. It only serves to
confirm a priori ontological beliefs. The rational empirical knife can cut through
to the level of the atom and beyond, but it only discloses the material struc-
ture. Other, complementary ways of knowing are needed to gain a full picture
of what is before us and what is inside us. Rational empiricism can never re-
veal the experience of consciousness (although it may identify corresponding
neurological phenomena), it can not disclose the nature of being human, of
love, deep empathy, of God or emptiness.

The emergence of transpersonal psychology has fostered renewed interest
in altered states of consciousness and peak experiences, as well as a redrawing
of the developmental maps upward to include the sage, saint, artist, and hero.
At the center of these considerations is the question of how we know what we
know. Despite the long tradition of mystic knowing and of indigenous rituals
and various practices for shifting consciousness and awareness, alternative forms
of knowing are often dismissed as fantasy or pathology. They have also often
remained private or disowned for fear of ridicule precluding clear, open and
critical exploration of various ways of knowing. This occlusion has resulted in
a culture that is developmentally delayed in its capacity to know.

In this volume spiritual knowing is most frequently described as a more
direct encounter than the view through the lens of objectivism and conven-
tional science. It is an experience that is often invited by a shift in the normal
waking state or through an expansion in awareness. The subject-object dis-
tinction often becomes blurred or disappears entirely, and new worlds and
understandings emerge as our awareness grows. This occurrence may come
about through the practice of meditation, in a moment of inspiration, through
the cultivation of a witness consciousness, through a divinatory process, or in
radical deconstruction.

With this volume we bring together scholarly commentary on various forms
of alternative epistemics that we are referring to as spiritual knowing. It is
intended to articulate, with as much precision as possible, several different
epistemic means. Each author's direct knowing is the ground from which these

articles are written. The nuances of the epistemic are described from the in-
side and many are quite personal.

Our goal is to bring these ideas into the light of open-minded yet intellec-
tually discriminating dialogue. The hope is to invite continuing development
of ways of knowing so that we might better contact and recognize the depths
of our relationship with matter, mind, culture and spirit.

We begin this volume with the idea of Authentic Knowing, defined as
"knowing by and for oneself," which involves a direct contact between knower
and known in which the usual self experience and its intentional structure
changes and may dissolve altogether. In this first chapter Kaisa Puhakka ex-
plores the nature of authentic knowing as well as some cultural and psycho-
logical defenses against it. She then provides a phenomenological analysis of
the shift from intentionally structured consciousness to direct knowing as
awareness and offers a brief experiential journey through this shift. Finally,
she suggests that bliss, perfection and love are not the exclusive qualities of
mystical experiences but are present in any moment of knowing.

Donald Rothberg then considers ancient methods (those used by Plato
and Buddha, among others) of systematic spiritual inquiry or knowing and
explores their value to contemporary culture. He suggests that there are meth-
ods that seem to be similar to what we might call deep questioning, systematic
observation, and critical analysis that focus on spiritual questions. He then
explores the complexities of relating these mainly premodem approaches to
contemporary natural and human sciences and then asks whether new meth-
ods of inquiry are needed to explore and express spiritual knowing in a con-
temporary fashion.

Tobin Hart explores the experience of inspiration as a form of knowing,
one that has significance not only for the great artist or mystic but for any one
of us. The evidence of inspiration challenges the baseline of our normal wak-
ing state and with it the norms of how we know the world. Descriptions oi
contemporary mental health concerns are revealed as similar, if not the same,
as descriptions of the lack of inspiration. He argues that our epistemic style
may have a direct bearing on the quality of our overall psychological-spiritual
health.

In the transpersonal literature mystical experience is most often consid-
ered as the sine qua non of spiritual experience and is believed to lead to a
unique epistemic frame from which ultimate reality is known. Peter Nelson
examines his own mystical experience in order to raise a fundamental ques-
tion about the onticity implied by such knowing. To accomplish this task he
examines the mechanism through which spiritual knowing arises and then
reframes this process with the aid of William James' Radical Empiricism and
the critical process known as Deconstruction. He concludes that spiritual know-

ing and the ongoing process of deconstmcting our epistemic frames of refer-
ence are one and the same.

Fred Hanna describes the scope and limits of centeredness in the context
of his own experience of three decades of meditative practice. His descrip-
tions are of the interior landscape of his consciousness through the various
rhythms and stages of his growth. The focus is on the changes at the center of
consciousness or at the core level of self that is the result of his meditation. He
regards the center as a pivotal point in the progression of consciousness.

The traditional approach of the psychotherapy profession to altered states
of consciousness and spiritual awareness has been to diagnose their dysfunc-
tional dimension and to generate treatment plans intended to return clients
to conventional forms of waking consciousness. In his chapter on transpersonal
psychotherapy, Greg Jemsek proposes that certain altered states beginner's
mind and compassion serve to link client and therapist to a transpersonal
perspective significantly more useful in addressing client issues than the ego-
based perspectives normally employed by clinicians. The author proposes that
the non-dualistic nature of these two altered states increases the likelihood
that therapist and client will act with a spiritual authenticity rather than in
accordance with the norms and typical behaviors usually manifest in the pro-
fessional setting.

Gary Kelly then explores the many different levels of spiritual knowing
that may be manifested in psychotherapeutic process. He emphasizes the sig-
nificance of the shared experience of growth and development for both client
and therapist, and examines the common characteristics of spirituality and
psychotherapy. Using a series of case examples, a four-level model is presented
that can increase the likelihood of spiritual knowing as a psychotherapeutic
interaction unfolds. The model assumes a holistic perspective of human na-
ture and healing, and offers a sequential approach for balancing and stabiliz-
ing the body, strengthening the sense of personal identity; developing inner
control mechanisms for energy use; opening the heart; increasing the abilities
to detach from ego entanglements; and accessing intuitive wisdom.

Ken Fletcher suggests that intuition and divination operate in strikingly
similar ways. Both provide information about how present circumstances have
come to be and how they are likely to develop in the future. This chapter
argues that when properly practiced, divination can help the practitioner de-
liberately evoke personally meaningful intuitive knowledge a basis for spiri-
tual knowing. It also argues that the ability of divination to access intuitive
knowledge is easily tested. However, because it is in the nature of intuitive
knowledge that it must be experienced to be believed, the test depends upon
a sincere effort to practice a system of divination. How the interested reader

might carry out such an experiment is explained and illustrated with the tran-
script of an actual Tarot card reading.

Joyce Gibb explores the epistemic framework of oracular knowing, with
specific reference to the Runes as an oracle o{ choice for spiritual seekers in
our Western culture. A working model for Runecasting in the context of psy-
chotherapy is presented. Connections with the Jungian construct of
synchronicity are explored, and attention is given to the importance of con-
ducting oracular work within the expectation of a self-chosen future. Implica-
tions of retrodictive vs. predictive use of the oracle are outlined along with
validation of the oracular process as found in a number of postmodern natural
science disciplines. She suggests a reconciliation between the polarized posi-
tions of modern and postmodern thinkers regarding such concepts as Magical
Thinking and the phenomenon of spiritual knowing.

Jessica Syme ends the volume in mythic-poetic style as she introduces the
reader to a painted stage which sits behind the Scottish Gaelic play of life.
She brings together the perspective of medical anthropology and a deep ap-
preciation of the subtleties of ancient spiritual knowing in the Gaelic culture.
It is a play in which the audience, the reader, is invited to participate. She
presumes to hold a mirror up to some of that ancient wisdom hoping it will
reflect a little of what was lost back onto the tradition it was lost to, namely
Western medicine.

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

Kaisa Puhakka

A Taste of Knowing

Like many children, I often dreamed of God, and Heaven seemed near
perhaps just on the other side of the sunlit crowns of the tall pine trees that
towered over the playground. I longed to know God directly and without in-
termediaries. Faith did not satisfy me; I wanted to know authentically, by myself,
for myself. At age 1 1 while saying my evening prayers, such knowing opened
up to me or rather I opened up to it. In this knowing, all that could be said
in a prayer had already been said and heard, and the One to whom 1 would
have directed my prayer was already where my prayer originated. 1 stopped in
my tracks, was thrown off all tracks, into an openness to what was always,
already everywhere present. The sense of knowing that came with it was noth-
ing like what I had learned in Sunday school. I could have asked my elders for
explanations, so I could go on praying as before. But I did not do so, for this
knowing was somehow more enlivening than any explanation they could have
given me and more satisfying than the praying I had done in the past.

Later, 1 delved deeply into the spiritual and religious traditions both East-
em and Western, and found ways of knowing there. Though the ways as well
as objectives varied vastly among the traditions, the knowing itself was always
the same, a direct contact between knower and known that obliterates their
distinction altogether, if only for a split second. The discovery of this was
itself an act of knowing. Through meditative practice, I learned to enter into
altered states that were sometimes quite sublime and similar to those described
by mystics. Needless to say, these experiences were the major mileposts on my
spiritual journey.

Knowing and States of Consciousness

Eventually, I made a discovery that had an even greater impact on my life
and work than did the mystical experiences. 1 came to see that this direct
knowing was not the same as an altered state. Certain states of consciousness
facilitate knowing (just as others hinder it), but the coming together of knower
and known is not itself a state of consciousness. Some altered states are ex-
traordinary and have an intense emotional impact, yet little knowing occurs
in them. For example, certain states of yogic absorption described in Hindu
and Buddhist literature (Aranya, 1981; Rahula, 1974) are associated with heav-

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

enly, blissful vistas quite unlike anything found in this world. Yet afterwards
one may be left with just a vague longing for a paradise lost without any gain
in knowing or connectedness to the world in which one lives. Some altered
states, on the other hand, are associated with moments of knowing profound
enough to change the person's life.

From the descriptions of such states, provided by religous saints, mystics
and ordinary people, it is impossible to tell whether the experience did nor did
not have a transformative effect on the person. Consider, for example, the
experience of a 17 year old youth in which he, without any physical reason,
suddenly found himself in a most palpable and terrifying encounter with death,
only to realize within the inert silence of his body that he was Spirit tran-
scending the body, a deathless "I." The description continues in his own words
as follows: "All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as
living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought-process. T
was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all
the conscious activity connected with my body was centered on that 'I'."
(Osborne, 1971, p. 10)

As far as mystical experiences go, there is nothing extraordinary about this
description. What is extraordinary is that the knowing accessed in this expe-
rience stayed with the youth for the rest of his life., "Absorption in the Self
continued unbroken from that time on," he reports (Osborne, 1971, p. 10).
The youth was Ramana Maharshi, who, after that experience, became one of
the greatest spiritual teachers of this century .

Often enough, however, the experience fades away in a matter of hours or
days, and with it the insights and illuminations, however vivid and profound
at the time, fade as well. Alterations in states of consciousness are associated
with (not necessarily caused by) changes in physiological arousal patterns.
They may be minor variations within normal consciousness or major shifts
into and out of drastically altered states. What we remember, or know about,
can depend on the state of consciousness. Information learned while intoxi-
cated is often forgotten in a subsequent state of sobriety, only to be remem-
bered the next time when the person gets intoxicated. Some researchers (e.g.,
Fischer, 1980; Tart, 1975) theorize that everything about mental and psychic
functioning may be state-dependent, so that one moves

from one waking state to another waking state; from one dream
to the next; one amobarbital narcoanalysis session to the next;
from LSD to LSD; from epileptic aura to aura; from one creative,
artistic, religious, or psychotic inspiration or possession to an-
other creative, artistic, religious, or psychotic experience; from
trance to trance; and from reverie to reverie. (Fischer, 1980, p.
300)

Kaisa Puhakka

Everything that can be known or represented as a content of experience
may indeed be subject to the influence of states. Knowing, however, is not
state-dependent. This is because the act of knowing is not a state of con-
sciousness. It is not a structure but rather an activity that can provide con-
nectedness across states and effect transformations more substantial and last-
ing than fluctuations in states of consciousness (Aranya, 1981 ; Puhakka, 1995 ).
For most people, authentic knowing, by which 1 mean knowing by direct con-
tact, is fleeting and sporadic, if it happens at all. But for some, such knowing is
a way of being. Ram Dass' guru, Baba Neem Karolie, is a rare example of the
latter. When Ram Dass gave him some LSD, it apparently had no effect on
him. The amount of LSD Ram Dass reports witnessing his guru ingest was
thrice the usual dose. (Ram Dass, 1971). In this volume, Hanna describes
moving out of a mescaline-induced state of consciousness into awareness un-
affected by the drug. A less spectacular feat that many people are able to
perform is to pay mindful attention to their state, for example, while drinking
alcohol, thereby increasing the degree of continuity between the intoxicated
and sober states. An unexpected calamity or accident sometimes forces a per-
son to suddenly become very attentive and "sober up." Knowing is thus not a
state of consciousness but an activity of awareness that can integrate states of
consciousness.

Openness and Discernment

Recognizing the difference between knowing and states of consciousness
helped demystify the subject for me and opened up possibilities of knowing in
contexts other than those in which altered states are deliberately induced,
such as ingestion of drugs or certain kinds of formal meditative practice. Later
on, as a psychotherapist and supervisor, 1 witnessed and participated in the
coming together of knower and known in the precious moments of insight
that sometimes shifted the lives of clients and students. These moments var-
ied greatly in profundity and transformative capacity, but they all involved,
lowever fleetingly, a melting away of a barrier either within one of the person's
psyche or within the interpersonal ambiance between the two persons.

In psychotherapy and other interpersonal contexts, it became obvious that
knowing has much to do with empathy. Empathy is the capacity to under-
stand another person's experience (or one's own) with such intimacy as to be
able to touch the interiority of this person's psyche and, from the viewpoint of
that interiority, "feel with" him or her. Empathy thus understood is very differ-
ent from narcissistic identification in which the other's viewpoint is assimi-
lated into one's own and also different from projection in which one imposes
one's own viewpoint upon the other. There are conditions that facilitate em-
pathy, such as emotional responsiveness to the other and resonance with his

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

or her cultural and idiosyncratic meanings. What is essential to empathy, how-
ever, is a direct contact that is nonverbal and mutually recognized, even if not
always verbally acknowledged.

Thinking of knowing as empathy and contact helps highlight something
that is very important about it; namely, it does not seize or possess its object.
Like a bird in flight that leaves no trace, the touch of knowing does not grab
but leaves things as they are. Contact is openness, or an opening. This point
bears emphasizing, as the more common understanding of contact is that it
closes upon and seizes its object, as when a fist closes upon a coin to hold it.
Holding, however, arrests and controls. Whether done lovingly or harshly,
holding is not the same as making contact. Holding arrests by creating a bar-
rier, whereas contact occurs to the degree that there is openness or freedom
from barriers. For the less than fully enlightened beings that most of us are,
the openness is a matter of degree. We could envision regions^ of openness
that come into existence when contact occurs and disappear when contact is
not there. The regions vary in size depending on the depth of contact. Within
such a region, freedom from barriers of all kind, internal as well as external,
creates an unbounded opening; something that appears close to, if not identi-
cal with, Heidegger's (1962) notion of "clearing." Contact is a clearing for
awareness to discern what is there.

Discernment is essential to knowing, just as contact is. Let me clarify what
I mean by discernment and how discernment differs from discrimination. Dis-
crimination presupposes distinctions already operative in thinking and per-
ception, whereas discernment is intrinsic to awareness. We could say that
discernment is the " light" of awareness that "shows" or "reveals." For ex-
ample, in the context of a mystical experience, one could conceivably "dis-
cern" the Ground of Being that is intrinsic to All, but one could not "dis-
criminate" it since there is nothing with which it contrasts. Discernment is an
activity of awareness that may be present not just in extraordinary and mysti-
cal experiences but in perfectly "ordinary," everyday experiences as well.

The presence of discernment is evident whenever fresh insights occur,
when one notices what goes unnoticed by others in one's field of expertise,
perhaps in one's entire culture, or within one's own or another person's psyche.
William James's (1890/1983) description of the stream of consciousness exem-
plifies such freshness of insight, of seeing what others had missed. Other psy-
chologists of the time who took themselves to be empirical scientists (e.g.,
Wundt and Titchener) had described the data of the senses and their associa-
tions these were the basic "elements" from which complex experience were
built. James, was able to turn his attention to what had been assumed to be
empty space between the elements and saw the "fringes" and "transitory parts"
(p. 236) between the elements, saw that whatever one focused on, even the

Kaisa Puhakka

fringes themselves had further fringes. Thus he came to reject the atomistic
paradigm of his colleagues that viewed consciousness as an empty container of
discontinuous bits and pieces of sensation in favor of a holistic paradigm in
which consciousness is a continuous stream.

What enabled James to turn his attention to what others had not noticed?
Where others had settled for assumptions about elements and empty space,
James (1967), true to his radical empiricism, was willing to make contact afresh,
to hold himself out to an openness where novelty could be discerned. Con-
tact, which we now understand to be openness, and discernment, are insepa-
rable as the two sides of knowing.

"Knowing" and "Having Knowledge"

I have talked about "knowing" as an act or activity. Others who have ap-
preciated the active mode in knowing, most notably Brentano, Husserl and
later phenomenologists, have taken intentionality to be essential to this act.
Knowing (or "consciousness"), for these thinkers, is "of something. The trouble
with taking intentionality to be essential is that it shifts the focus to the in-
tended object or content, no matter how much one wishes to stay with the
intentional act itself. It appears to me that the moment of knowing is already
gone by the time one becomes aware of an object as object, as something that
presents itself to a subject and is capable of being described and reflected upon.
The "knowing" investigated in this chapter happens prior to its forming into
an intention, prior to there being anything of which one could " have knowl-
edge."

"Knowing" and "having knowledge" may be distinguished as follows.
"Knowing" is a moment of awareness in which contact occurs between the
knower and the known. This contact is nonconceptual, nonimaginal,
nondiscursive, and often extremely brief. "Having knowledge," on the other
hand consists of descriptive or interpretive claims to the effect that "such-
and-such is the case." The distinction between knowing and knowledge is not
merely conceptual or logical; it is empirical and temporal. That is, the mo-
ment of contact is an actual event, however brief in duration, that precedes
making knowledge claims. This moment may be accompanied by mental im-
ages, impressions or thoughts. But whether or not such mental contents are
present, these are not what is being contacted in knowing. Rather, what is
contacted are, to borrow Husserl's terms, "things themselves." The act of con-
tact breaks out of our solipsistic representational world of images and mean-
ings, and also out of the collective solipsism of socially determined meanings,
into genuine, empathic interconnectedness'.

One of the most valuable contributions of postmodern thought is to em-
phasize that "knowledge" is necessarily contextual. The knower is immersed

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

within the context that separates him or her from the content. The con-
text can never be completely turned into content, and so it remains the un-
knowable horizon that leaves knowledge necessarily incomplete and fragmen-
tary. A state of consciousness, including beliefs and feelings that one is aware
of as well as others buried in the subconscious, forms such a context." Con-
text" is simply an extension of "state of consciousness." Knowledge is always
"had" in some state of consciousness or other, and its content is bound by the
context formed by that state and its psychological, social, cultural etc. con-
tingencies. The boundaries between states form the limits of what is known at
any given time. Shifts from one state (and context) to another introduce
discontinuities and fragmentation of experience. These discontinuities are
subtle enough to pass unnoticed when one is immersed in the content of ex-
perience, but they become evident when one pays close attention to the mo-
ment to moment flow of experience through the shifting contexts

Knowing, on the other hand, provides connectedness and integration of
experience across contexts. Even though it occurs in a context, being devoid
of content, it is free of contextual influence. But because it has no content
knowing is extremely subtle and so tends to pass unnoticed. What is typically
noticed are the content of mental images and thoughts that accompany or
follow it. When the entire experience during the moment of contact is taken
to be "about" this content, a shift from knowing to having knowledge occurs.
A handshake provides a palpable illustration. The actual contact between
the hands may be missed under a deluge of images and thoughts propelled by
desires or fears and various personal agendas the participants may have con-
cerning their meeting. Yet something in the moment of contact between the
hands may inform these thoughts and images as well, even when the actual
contact was barely noticed. For discernment naturally and spontaneously
operates in the openness of contact, however fleeting it may be.

Dimensions of Contact and Discernment

The quality of contact and of discernment varies along three dimensions.
First, there are degrees o{ contactfulness or depth. These are associated with a
shift from discernment of the exteriors or surfaces of things to an awareness
that reaches increasingly to the interior of things. Second, the permeability of
the participants in the contact varies from "solid" or impermeable to increas-
ingly "porous" or permeable. The quality of discernment likewise changes from
"opaque" to increasingly "transparent" and "spacious." Third, there are vary-
ing degrees of aliveness, wakefulness or presence, associated with contact. Pres-
ence, depth and permeability in turn are associated with a subtle but increas-
ingly discernible sense of wellbeing or even bliss that seems intrinsic to aware-
ness itself.

10

Kaisa Puhakka

The three dimensions of contact and discernment are mutually depen-
dent. For example, the greater the depth of contactfulness, the more perme-
able and less solid are the things that come into contact. Also, the more
presence, aliveness, and wakefulness the greater the experienced contactfulness.
The handshake, though a relatively crude example of knowing, again serves
to illustrate the interplay of these features. Thus the depth or contactfulness
of a handshake can vary from a perfunctory act that barely touches the sur-
faces of flesh to an electrified comingling of the interiors of living bodies and
minds. The perfunctory shake tends to be experienced as a contact between
the surfaces of two solid objects, whereas a firm, inviting handshake that mu-
tually engages the participants tends to be experienced as a much more per-
meable contact, perhaps even as a momentary entry into a shared space. The
latter type of handshake is also likely to be accompanied by an awakening
that enlivens the participants' minds and bodies for minutes or perhaps hours
afterwards (and, of course, may also stir up mental images and fantasies not
to be mistaken for knowing).

Let me pause for a moment here to clarify the meanings of some words used
above. The words "permeable," "solid," "surface," and "interior" are meant to
be taken in as precise and nonmetaphorical sense as language allows. We are
accustomed to reserving these words for physical things. But they are just as
applicable to what we usually take to be mental phenomena (Tulku, 1977,
1987). Thus, there is a kind of "solidity" that mental images and thoughts
possess that is similar to the solidity of physical objects. Like physical objects,
mental images are in varying degrees permeable. When they are solid, they
tend to clash with other images and thoughts, and deflect attempts to make
contact. The more permeable they are, the more they reveal their interiors
and interconnections. Generally speaking, immersion in the content of men-
tal images and thoughts lends them solidity. For these contents only manifest
surface meanings while their interiors remain occluded, hidden within the
contextual (cultural, linguistic, intrapsychic, etc.) underpinnings that give
rise to them. On the other hand, a detached obervation of mental activity,
such as is cultivated in certain meditative practices (see e.g., Thera, 1988;
Young, 1993), reveals the contours of the objects as changing and more per-
meable, and as continuous with their interiors and contextual bases.

Appreciating the qualities of relative permeability in both physial and psy-
chical phenomena helps soften the dualism of body and psyche. It becomes
easy to see that a handshake is not just a physical analogy but an actual in-
stance of knowing. Body is capable of knowing, and so is psyche. The do-
mains of knowing may differ, but the knowing in both cases involve direct
:ontact. An empathic touch that involves no physical contact can be subtler
ind deeper and involve greater permeability of the participants. In some in-

11

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

Stances, their boundaries may altogether dissolve into a moment of radical
openness of a shared space of awareness.

Another dualism that begins to loosen is that of "subjective" vs. "objec-
tive." The coming together of the subject and object, or the knower and the
known, in the act of knowing obliterates their distinction in the moment of
contact. To be sure, the coming together may not be complete but rather a
matter of degree, depending on the depth of the contact or the permeability of
the participants in the contact. To the degree that contact occurs, it involves
an ontological shift it is not a matter of the subject "viewing" the object but
rather the subject is now "being" the object. But note: the subject is not being
the object "in" his or her subjective experience or viewpoint. By "ontological
shift" 1 mean a shift not just from one viewpoint to another by the "same"
subject but a shift in the constitution of the viewing subject. In other words, a
transformation of the subject takes place. As contact deepens and permeabil-
ity increases, the isolated "subject" is transformed into a connected
"intersubject." Knowing is not merely a subjective experience of assimilating
the object. In interpersonal contexts, the mutuality of the contact in em-
pathic knowing attests to the fact that the knowing transcends the boundaries
of subjectivity and is genuinely intersubjective. But even to call this way of
being "intersubjective" is a bit misleading for it is not something that happens
between distinct "subjects." Thich Nhat Hanh's (1995) term "interbeing" cap-
tures the ontological shift better. It refers to the mutual connectedness of all
things, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving. Knowing, then, is aware-
ness of interbeing even as one is interbeing.

The Taboo Against Knowing

Anyone who has tried to be aware is likely to have discovered that this is
quite tricky now awareness is there, now it is gone, and when it is gone, we
don't know that it's gone, until it's there again. The attempt to take hold of
awareness launches a strange hide-and-seek game thinking tries to capture
awareness, and awareness, being devoid of qualities or form through which it
could be identified, eludes capture. When thinking has its way, the unthink-
ability of awareness suffices as proof of the latter's nonexistence, and the game
ends right there. But awareness can sometimes tempt the curiosity of think-
ing, and another round of the game then ensues thinking now attempts to
hold on to awareness but, unable to grab hold of any form or quality that
would sustain it in this activity, thinking begins to disappear. It may, for a
moment, fizzle out of existence altogether. To see how this happens, just try to
think of awareness not thoughts, images, or memories o{ awareness, but
awareness itself! Much like a snake swallowing its own tail, thinking now
becomes an utterly self-defeating project. So in an act of self-preservation,

12

Kaisa Puhakka

thinking quickly recoils from awareness. The familiar preoccupations of think-
ing return, and the open horizons that for a moment had surrounded, per-
vaded and undermined its usually solid basis are soon closed off. But perhaps
not before it glimpsed what is most alarming of all the insubstantiality of
the self, the very thinker who undertook this project in the first place (Loy,
1992).

Thinking, understood as mental-cognitive activity in the broadest sense,
affirms the existence of the subjective self in an act of reflection. But more
than affirm, thinking and reflecting create and recreate the sense of self in
endless mental activity. The self has no existence apart from such activity,
and this activity in turn is traceable to the workings of language, culture and
social environment.The existence of the subjective self is thus precariously
dependent on the constructive activity of thinking. But the reverse also seems
to be the case the sense of self, or of subject, appears to be essential to
thinking. Without a center of subjectivity, thinking would seem impossible
at the very least, the lack of center raises the frightening specter of being
lost in a schizophrenic-like confusion and disorganization.

Not surprisingly, thinking is deeply disdainful of the prospect of awareness
operating free of its control. For in such a prospect thinking contemplates its
own demise. And in so far as our self-identity is vitally dependent on think-
ing, we contemplate the annihilation of our selves. So we, as thinking selves,
regard awareness with unease and suspicion, perhaps contempt and derision,
that belie a fear of madness worse than death a fear that the self already is
and always has been nonexistent (Loy, 1992), and that we are capable of know-
ing this, perhaps already know, if only we let ourselves. For every act of know-
ing, however fleeting and mundane, dissolves the self in the moment of con-
tact.

Knowing, then, is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the self
we think we are. Foucault (1980) has called attention to the danger authentic
knowing poses to the power elite in the dynamics of social oppression. The
danger we are exploring here intrudes into the intimacy of our psyche, threat-
ening not only the power role of the self as the owner of our being but expos-
ing its very existence as ephemeral and hollow to the core. Only when the
threat that knowing poses to the self's very existence is fully appreciated can
we understand why the moments of knowing are so rare and when they do
occur, why they tend to be instantly forgotten. There is a taboo against know-
ing buried deep within the human psyche that is more powerful, more pro-
found than the taboo against sex or even against death.' All good parents
want their children to grow into responsible adults, well informed and capable
of love and work, capable of taking responsibility for their lives, making deci-
sions for themselves. But do parents want their children to be capable of

13

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

knowing for themselves? Probably it does not even occur to them that they
could want such a thing, or that their children (or themselves) could have the
capacity for knowing. This is how a taboo works what is forbidden is not
even known to be forbidden (Laing, 1972).

Perversions of Knowing

Rather than knowing, many children grow up coping. Coping perverts
knowing by aborting the aspiration for contact inherent in a genuine desire to
know. Coping refers to the ways in which people seek to reduce anxiety and
satisfy their needs. Astute observers of human nature (e.g.. Homey, 1950; Laing,
1965, 1972; Miller, 1981) have noted the mixed blessing that our mechanisms
of coping bring to our lives the gifts of security and satisfaction are bought
at the price of one's own authentic experience and truth. This being so, cop-
ing can never deliver full satisfaction, and the anxiety never goes away com-
pletely. In its subtler manifestations, coping refers to our very personality and
"styles" of knowing and being. Usually we think of "personality style" as some-
thing that makes a person who he or she is and accounts for the unique flavor
and patterns of creativity as well as of stagnation in his or her life. A personal-
ity style is, indeed, all of these. It provides form and containment to creative
expression. The more flexible the style, the more accommodating of creativ-
ity it is. However, the agenda of minimizing anxiety or warding off threat that
is inherent in a "style" aborts knowing even as the person reaches out in the
attempt to know. The project of knowing then remains incomplete, unfin-
ished, to be continued in a repetition of the same pattern that titillates yet
frustrates the need to know. In this way, a style is a self-feeding pattern that,
with self-identification and growing attachment, tends to solidify into "who I
am" or "personality."

All styles are designed to abort contact. Some do it by pulling back from
openness, others from discernment. Most people manifest a capacity for either
openness or discernment, but rarely for both. Some seem very open, always
willing to be surprised, awed, astonished by what is happening around them.
Yet these same people often are impressionistic and forgetful and tend not to
pay attention to detail or be concerned about clarity. On the other hand,
others seem to have a remarkable capacity for discernment; they have excel-
lent concentration and their attention catches the subtlest of detail with great
clarity. Yet these people often do not seem very open and don't like to be
surprised by the unexpected. I have sketched here the familiar "hysterical"
and "obsessive-compulsive" styles described by Shapiro (1965). In their more
flexible manifestations, these styles represent normal, healthy functioning.
These two styles do not exhaust all possibilities, but they are common enough
that most people will recognize features of one or the other or both in their

14

Kaisa Puhakka

own habitual ways of thinking and behaving. Let us take a closer look at how
these styles pervert authentic knowing.

People who manifest the hysterical style are drawn to things in wonder
and excitement. Yet, they do not "see" what is around them very clearly, they
are forgetful and prone to excessive fantasy. They can be lively and engaging,
yet at the same time, emotionally shallow. "The hysterical person does not
feel like a very substantial being with a real and factual history," observes
Shapiro (1965, p. 120). People who manifest the obsessive-compulsive style,
on the other hand, tend to be realistic in a down to earth and rather unimagi-
native manner. They can be remarkably effective working with rules and or-
ganizational schemes. With a narrow focus of concentration, they are ready to
grasp the object that is already intended before it is perceived. "These people
not only concentrate; they seem always to be concentrating" (Shapiro, 1965,
p. 27).

Both styles are defenses against contact even as they masquerade as ways
of knowing. The obsessive-compulsive "already knows" and thus closes off
openness to contact before it occurs. This provides a sense of security and
control. But it also prevents discernment from operating freely in the clearing
of awareness. Instead, discernment is co-opted into the service of rigid thought
constructions. This is how discernment becomes perverted in the obsessive-
compulsive style. The hysterical style copes with contact by retreating into
sentimental wonder and fantasy. Imagination and fantasy take the place of
discerning awareness, but, being everpresent, fantasy muddies the clarity of
the hysteric's openness; and herein lies the perversion manifested in this style.
When the levels of anxiety or deprivation are intolerable, these and other
styles usually (in the "normal" or "well-adjusted" case) work. The hysteric is
rescued from the nastiness and dangers of the world by fantasy and often in
real life by another person more willing to deal with the world. The obsessive-
compulsive is protected against the surprises of an unpredictable, chaotic world
by well-organized strategies of thinking and action. Yet at a subtle level, the
lysteric will remain anxious, scared of a world never squarely met, hungry for
he satisfactions that excitement and wonder promise but never quite deliver.
Similarly, anxiety remains the constant companion for the obsessive-compul-
ive, propelling him or her to devise more and more strategies to hold at bay
he source of anxiety that never allows itself to be fully controlled by such
trategies.

Thus at levels that we are used to tolerating and perhaps no longer notice,
oping styles perpetuate the very anxiety and lack of satisfaction they are de-
igned to alleviate. In this way there is always more "work" for them to do, and
he staying power of our coping styles is ensured so long as we cooperate by
emaining unaware of what is happening.

15

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

Knowing Is Natural

But few people exist in a constant, unmitigated state of unawareness. In-
deed, only in extreme cases (the so-called "personality disorders") is the person's
being so fully and exhaustively controlled by automatic coping mechanisms
that there is almost no free awareness. For most people, moments of awaken-
ing and connecting occur spontaneously now and then, playfully rattling cop-
ing mechanisms and loosening up personality styles. Knowing is natural, and
those who have tasted it like it, in spite of the dread it may arouse. They reach
for it even while retreating behind their coping and yearn for it even when it
has been virtually snuffed out of existence by a taboo.

How to access the knowing that is our birthright? An obvious and tempt-
ing answer is, by geting rid of the gate-keeper that prevents access. The gate-
keeper is, of course, the self that our coping mechanisms are designed to
protect. Through the ages, spiritually engaged people have found the narrowly
focused, egoic self a burden on their quest. Nowadays, increasing numbers
find the self and its sufferings a burden in daily life. So for various reasons,
both psychological and spiritual, many people are drawn to spiritual practices
that encourage them to "let go" of the self, sometimes with disastrous conse-
quences (Engler, 1986). Even in the best of cases, the intent to let go of the self
can lead to endless and unproductive self-torment, for obviously there is nothing
to let go, and no one to do the letting go (Epstein, 1988; Beck, 1993). The
project of letting go of the self is conceived and pursued by the very mind that
creates and maintains the self by its thinking activity. So the project is doomec
to fail until it is let go. And how does one do this? The answer is, one
doesn't. For once again, there is no one to do and nothing to be done. This is
another way of saying that knowing is natural it cannot be manufactured,
much less forced. But perhaps it can be cultivated.

Shifting to Awareness

There are numerous well-tried methods and practices that facilitate the
shift from thinking to awareness. Stilling the mind and bringing the incessant
thinking process to rest is a preliminary practice for making the shift, and
methods for such a practice have been developed in contemplative traditions
both Eastern and Western. There is a growing recognition that psychotherapy,
geared toward insight into and release of subconscious emotionally charged
sources of psychological turbulence, confusion and tension can be valuable
and in some cases indispensable as an adjunct to a contemplative practice
(e.g., Epstein, 1995; Grof, 1985, Grof & Grof, 1990; Vaughan, 1986;). The meth-
ods of Buddhism (Goldstein, 1976, Khantipalo, 1987, Sayadaw, 1984; Young,
1994) and also of the Yoga-Sutras (Aranyaka, 1982; Coster, 1972; Taimni, 1981)
are particularly well suited for cultivating contact and discernment. In these

16

Kaisa Puhakka

traditions the importance of removing psychological obstacles to awareness
that are often deeply buried within the subconscious is well recognized (see
Hanna, 1994, also in this volume; Puhakka, 1995). With the help of all these
methods one can develop one's capacity and tolerance for prolonged moments
of awareness and also increase their frequency. However, no method or proce-
dure is guaranteed to take one from thinking to awareness; the shift happens
spontaneously when it does. And on occasion, it happens to people who have
not taken up any formal awareness practice.

Few people, however, are accustomed to dwelling in bare, naked awareness
for any length of time without much practice. As soon as one awakens to bare
awareness, there is a tendency to quickly wrap oneself in thinking again and
tightly clutch the familiar fabric of mental noises and pictures for comfort and
a sense of identity. Thus, contact with awareness tends to be limited, sporadic,
and full of gaps. Thinking fills the gaps and creates a sense of continuity and
purpose that accompanies everyday consciousness. Intentionality is at the basis
of this sense even if the objects change, the directedness towards an object
is almost always there. This characteristic of consciousness was known to
Husserl as well as to the Buddha (Hanh, 1996). In Buddhist literature one
finds descriptions of subtle jhanic states that occur in advanced concentrative
meditation practice. In such states the activity of the senses that produces
objects for consciousness ceases, and with this, consciousness itself ceases
(Rahula, 1974). Intentional consciousness, then, is clearly not the same as
awareness. Unlike consciousness, awareness has no direction, no center of
subjectivity, and no intentionality or purpose. It has no form and no qualities
through which it could be defined, and it is presupposed by any epistemologi-
cal category that would attempt to define it.

So how does one discourse about awareness, let alone describe the shift
from thinking to awareness? Just as the question was raised a moment ago for
one who would make the shift from thinking to awareness, it must now be
raised for the writer presuming to describe it. No doubt such a project is doomed
to a fate similar to that of thinking when it tries to capture awareness. Never-
theless, I will attempt to trace the disappearing contours of the shift as far as
they are still discernible.

Several writers have recognized that the shift from thinking to awareness
involves a subtle but radical change in the structure of eonsciousness. Heidegger
(1966) hints at this change when he talks about a kind of meditative thinking
that is simply waiting without waiting for anything. Transpersonal psycholo-
3;ists (Walsh & Vaughan, 1993; Wilber, 1990) talk about a move from a men-
ial-reflective to contemplative modes of knowing and being. The contempla-
:ive modes of knowing have been associated with an expanded sense of self

17

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

that seems to imply a change in the structure of subjectivity. Let us examine
this change more closely .

With the shift from thinking (intentional consciousness) to awareness,
the sense of self as the center of subjectivity and owner of experiences gives
way to a subjectivity that spreads throughout awareness, as in three-dimen-
sional space. In this space wherever there is objectivity, or "something to see,"
there is simultaneously and coextensively the "seeing" as well. Subject and
object coincide fully and their disctinction collapses altogether. But note, this
is not reductionism into either a subjective or an objective "Oneness." It is
not that subject collapses into object, or object into subject. Only their dis-
tinction disappears, and with it their confinement to separate domains.

To intentional consciousness, things (whether mental images or physical
objects), appear "in front", as it were, so that only one side is directly seen.
Subject and object remain polarized. To awareness in which subjectivity is
distributed throughout, everything that appears is seen from all directions^ at
once; there is no "backside" of things hidden from view. Phenomenologists
such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty also maintain that the "backside" is not
hidden from view but is given directly in perception. However, for these
phenomenologists it is given "as backside," which means that the perception
to which it is given is still perspectival, still involves a subject viewing from a
particular location and direction. When subjectivity spreads out in three di-
mensions, it becomes capable of simultaneously accommodating all possible
perspectives within the region of its spread. There is then no "front" as op-
posed to "back" side at all; this kind of seeing is truly aperspectival. It could
also be characterized as "three-dimensional," in contrast to the "two-dimen-
sional" seeing of intentional consciousness.

Experiential Inquiry into Awareness

The meanings of words like "two-dimensional," "three-dimensional," and
"distributed subjectivity" may seem stretched beyond intelligibility here. At
the very least, they run the risk of remaining abstract and elusive unless they
can be grounded in experiential observation. But how is such an observation
to be carried out? Awareness, beng as much subject as it is object, cannot
observe itself simply as an object. It somehow must also observe itself as sub-
ject. When thought through logically, subject observing subject seems an im-
possibility. However, when carried out experientially, such a self-reflexive act
of observation effects profound changes in its own structure in the very pro-
cess of the act. Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) have described the posi-
tive feedback and open-endedness that is inescapable in any inquiry that takes
the inquirer (mind, consciousness, or awareness) as its object. An inquiry into
awareness feeds back into itself to alter the most fundamental structures of the

18

Kaisa Puhakka

observing consciousnes, eventually to reveal awareness as it is, divested of all
structures.

How does one carry out such an inquiry? As with any fresh inquiry into
what is hitherto unknown and undefined, we must not begin by asking "what
is it?" but rather, we must begin with the resolution to put ourselves into an
encounter with awareness that is prior to any question, or answer, as to its
"whatness." As Merleau-Ponty (1968) noted, such an encounter is "indubi-
table since without it we would ask no question." (p. 159) So we must begin
by situating ourselves in an encounter with awareness. And "where" does this
encounter take place? Of course, it takes place wherever we happen to be at
the present moment that is, right "here." Let us then begin the inquiry. Is
this "here" an extensionless point or an extended space? Most of us would be
inclined to consider the "here" to be an area vaguely extending around our-
selves in all three dimensions. But how far does the "here" extend out before it
becomes "there"? We might extend our arms to draw an imaginary line in
front and say, "Here! This is how far it extends." The lamp on my desk falls on
this side, the flower vase on the bookshelf on that side. Yet this imaginary line
is arbitrary; the "here" could be extended indefinitely to include the flower
vase and beyond. How, then, does the "there" become "here"? And how does
the "here" become "there"? The answer, (again confirmable by direct experi-
ential inquiry) is that when continuity of awareness is broken, then objects
appear across a gap "over there" and are presented to the subject "in here."
Our experiential inquiry into the location of awareness reveals only "here,"
extending out indefinitely in unbroken continuity, spreading and embracing
the lamp, the flowervase, and other things in all directions until we stop
the process of inquiry, perhaps because of being distracted, feeling exhausted,
or perhaps simply because we are not used to being so fully present for pro-
longed periods of time. Suddenly, I am "back here" in a smaller, denser, more
familiar space. Glancing "over there," I see the lamp, and "over there," the
flowervase. There is now a gap between myself and those objects.

Resuming our inquiry, we focus attention once again on the location of
awareness "here." But this time, let us ask, how far does the "here" of our
present situation extend "inward" toward the subject I take to be my self? The
answer, ascertained by actual experimentation, is that the "here" extends all
the way in, all the way through, so long as I let myself be truly present. There
is then nothing left of myself outside of what's here, to have a perspective on
it. This is the amazing, perhaps a bit disorienting, revelation that comes with
carrying out the inquiry there is no subjective center located somewhere
in" here, and no distance that would hint at the subject or the self as being at
one end of the distance and the world at the other. There is just continuous

19

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

awareness pervading all, softening and making transparent the distinctions
between inner and outer, here and there, self and no self.

Proceeding with the inquiry further, we let awareness freely expand in all
directions, unhindered by any distinction between "here" and "there,", "in-
ner" and "outer." This last phase of the inquiry is extremely subtle and easily
eludes attempts to sustain it long enough to note what happens. But if we are
able to do it, we may find that the lamp, the flowervase and other things are
embraced by awareness not only from all sides simultaneously, but pervaded
from within as well. Things that are bathed in such boundless awareness be-
come vibrant and in a way ephemeral. Yet the materiality and form of the
lamp or flowervase do not disappear. Rather, they become transparent, reveal-
ing themselves as patterns of energy and a dynamic interplay of activities and
mutual dependencies that constitute their manifestation at this moment as
this particular lamp and that flowervase. These patterns of energy and dy-
namic interplays may include qualities of the artistry, craft or manufacturing
process, or of the chemical composition of the materials. Thus everything
remains just as it is, only now seen with astonishing richness and perspicuity.

Perfection, Bliss and Love

The foregoing investigation of awareness, carried out experientially by
awareness, is likely to yield its conclusions gently and inoffensively, perhaps
even with a subtle taste of bliss. The moment of boundlessness in which there
is no distinct self may be experienced as relaxing and revitalizing, indeed as
liberating. There is none of the horror and dread with which reflective think-
ing contemplates the absence of the self.

When distributed throughout the "space" of awareness in which objects
appear, subjectivity contacts not only the exterior surfaces of the objects but
pervades their interiors as well. They become transparent, luminous and, be-
cause they are seen so fully and completely, perfect in being just the way they
are. Ephemeral visions of luminosity and perfection are described in the mys-
tical literature of various spiritual traditions. These visions are not about a
reality beyond the one in which we live or about a Heaven that is not found
here on earth. As our experiential inquiry into awareness may have intimated,
they are about the ten thousand things of this very earth, of the coming to-
gether of Heaven and earth when thinking gives way to simple, naked aware-
ness. As the Third Zen Patriarch put it, "If the mind makes no discrimina-
tions, the ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence. "(Sengstan,
1976).

Meister Eckhart, the 13th century Christian mystic said it thus:

For the person who has learned letting go and letting be/

20

Kaisa Puhakka

no creature can any longer hinder./ Rather/ each creature points
you toward

God/ and toward new birth/ and toward seeing the world as God
sees it:/ transparently. (Fox, 1983, p. 55)

And here is my favorite from the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition:

Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is,
having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection,
one may well burst into laughter. (Long Chen Pa)

Everything is up for laughter? Indeed, it is. The transparency with which
everything reveals itself to awareness lights up both mind and heart. The mys-
tics of ancient India knew that bliss (ananda) is an essential quality of aware-
ness in which object (sat) and subject (chit) come together .

The coming together of object and subject is an act of love that involves
an ontological shift from isolated being to expanded interbeing. Though the
intimate connection between knowing and love has on occasion been noted
(e.g., by Laing, 1970) the effortless, relaxed, blissful quality of this act is virtu-
ally unrecognized by Western philosophers and psychologists [William James
(1948) is a rare exception]. Yet everyday experience manifest this subtle bliss
from time to time, for example, in the unselfconscious smile that spontane-
ously spreads on a person's face in a moment of awakening and contact, per-
haps while watching a bird in flight, lifting a fallen child, or just sitting. In
such a moment the self's boundaries melt away, and just for an instant, the
person is in Heaven with all things of this earth.

Conclusion

Authentic knowing is not a privilege of the elect but is within the reach of
every human being. It is not something extraordinary that requires special
setting or circumstances. Rather, it is natural and could be active any time,
anywhere, once the barriers to it are removed. This is a point I have empha-
sized throughout the chapter. The other point is that authentic knowing nev-
ertheless occurs very rarely. The precious moments of such knowing are for-
gotten with a thoroughness reminiscent of altered states. Our coping mecha-
nisms isolate these moments and build fences around them and indeed turn
them into veritable altered states. Fear is responsible for this, and I have ex-
plored the vicissitudes of fear also in this chapter.

Every person short of enlightenment stands poised between love and fear,
3eing pulled at each moment toward one or the other depending on his or her
inique dynamics and life predicament. However, no one freely and naturally
ispires to the isolation and compressed subjectivity that are associated with
ear. On the other hand, who would not savor the taste of freedom and fulfill-

21

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

ment of a moment of knowing when subjectivity spreads out boundlessly and
connects seamlessly in a perfect act of love? My own experience suggests that
there is a tilt in the delicate balance between love and fear, and that once one
gives in to this tilt, the various methods of psychotherapy and meditative
practices available today can greatly accelerate the removal of obstacles to
authentic knowing, interbeing and love.

References

Aranya, Swami Haraharananda (1981). Yoga Philosophy of Patanjali. Albany, N.Y.:
SUNY Press.

Beck, C. (1993.) Nothing special : Living Zen. Harper San Francisco.

Coster, G. (1972). Yoga and Western psychology. New York, N.Y.: Harper Colophon.

Epstein, M. (1995). Thoughts without a thinker. New York, N.Y.: Basic Books.

Epstein. M. (1988). The deconstruction of the self: Ego and "egolessness" in
Buddhist insight meditation. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20, 61-69.

Fischer, R. (1980). State-bound knowledge: "1 can't remember what 1 said last
night, but it must have been good." In R. Woods (Ed.), Understanding mysticism. Garden
City, N.Y. (pp. 286-305). Doubleday Image Books.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected intervieivs and other ivritings, 1972'
1977 . C. Gordon (Ed.), New York: Pantheon.

Fox, M. (1983). Meditations u^ith Meister Ec/c/iart. Santa Fe, NM.: Bear &. Company.

Goldstein, J. (1976). The experience of insight: A natural unfolding. Santa Cruz, CA.:
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Grof, S. (1985). Beyond the brain. Albany: SUNY Press.

Grof, S. and Grof, C. (1990). The stormy search for the self. Los Angeles: Tarcher.

Hanna, F. (1994). The Confines of the mind: Patanjali and the psychology of
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Hanh, Thich Nhat (1995). The heart of understanding: Commentaries on the

Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley, CA.: Parallax Press.

Hanh, Thich Nhat (1996). Breathe.' You are alive. Berkeley, CA.: Parallax Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York, N.Y. : Harper &. Row.

Heidegger, M.(1966). Discourse on thinking. New York, N.Y.: Harper &. Row.

Homey, K. (1950). Neurosis and human grovuth: The struggle tovuard self-realization.
New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton.

Husserl, E. (1970). The Paris lectures. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

James, W. (1983). The principles of psychology . Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University
Press. Originally published in 1890.

James, W. (1967). Essays in radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe. R. Barton
Perry (Ed.), Glouchester, Mass.: Peter Smith.

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James, W. (1948). Essays in pragmatism. New York, N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing Co.

Khantipalo, B. (1987). Calm and insight: A Buddhist manual for meditators. London:
Curzon Press.

Laing, R. (1972). The politics of the family. New York, N.Y. : Vintage Books.
Laing, R. (1970). The divided self. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
Long Chen Pa. The ruLtural freedom of mind, (source of publication unknown).

Loy, D. (1992). Avoiding the void: The lack of self in psychotherapy and Buddhism.
ourrml of Transpersonal Psychology , 24,2,151-178.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern
Jniversity Press.

Miller, A. (1981). The drama of the gifted child. New York, N.Y: Basic Books.

Osborne, A. (1971). The teachings ofRamana Maharshi. New York, N.Y: Samuel
Veiser.

Puhakka, K. (1995). Religious Experience: Hinduism. In R. Hood (Ed.), Handbook
)f religious experience (pp. 122-143) . Birmingham, Ala.: Religious Education Press. Pp.
.22443.

Rahula, Walpola (1974). What the Buddha taught. New York, N.Y.: Grove Press.

Ram Dass ( 1971 ). Be here now. New York, N.Y.: Crown Publishing.

Sengstan, (1976). Verses on the faith mind (R. B. Clarke, Trans.). Sharon Springs:
^en Center.

Sayadaw, M. (1984). Practical insight meditation. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist
Publication Society.

Shapiro, D. (1965). Neurotic styles. New York, N.Y.: Basic Books.
Taimni, I. (1981). The science of yoga. Wheaton, 111.: Quest Books.
Tart, C. (1975). States of consciousness. New York, N.Y.: E.P. Dutton.
Thera, N. (1988). The heart of Buddhist meditation. York Beach, ME.: Samuel Weiser.
Tulku, Tarthang (1977). Time, space and knowledge. Bekeley, CA.: Dharma Publish-
ng.

Tulku, Tarthang (1987). Love of knowledge. Berkeley, CA.: Dharma Publishing.

Varela, E, Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The embodied mind: Cognitive science
md human experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Vaughan, F. (1986) The I'nu^ard arc. Boston: Shambhala.

Walsh, R. &. Vaughan, F. (1993) Paths beyond ego. Putnam: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Washburn, M. (1995) The ego and the dynamic ground. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.

Wilber, K. (1990) Eye to eye: The quest for the new paradigm. Boston: Shambhala.

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'Ill

23

An Invitation to Authentic Knowing

Notes
' Heidegger's (1966) notion of "region" or "regioning" as a nonrepresentational,
nondual "expanse" that is at the same time an "abiding" (p. 65-67) appears very close
to the meaning of "region" used here.

- For Husserl also, the way out of solipsism is through "transcendental intersubjectivity
and what he calls "transcendental empathy" (1970, p. 34).

^Michael Washburn's (1996) notion of "primal repression," which is completed around
age five, elucidates the intra-psychic underpinnings of the anthropological notion of
"taboo." According to Washburn, primal repression is necessary for the protection of
the ego and the development of rationality. Such a repression, he argues, closes direct
access to the source of our libidinal energies as well as spiritual aspirations.

24

Spiritual Inquiry

Donald Rothberg

I have pursued my apprenticeship for sixty-four years. During these
years, many, many times I have gone to the mountains alone.
Yes, I have endured much suffering during my Ufe. Yet to learn to
see, to learn to hear, you must do this go into the wilderness

[ alone. For it is not I who can teach you the ways of the gods.

Such things are learned only in solitude.

I Matsuwa, Huichol shaman Mexico (Halifax, 1979, p. 250)

Yes, Kalamas, it is proper that you have doubt, that you have
perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful.
Now, look you Kalamas, do not be led by reports, or tradition, or
hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere
logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by the
delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, nor
by the idea: "this is our teacher." But, O Kalamas, when you know
for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong,
and bad, then give them up . . . And when you know for your-
selves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept
them and follow them.
Gautama Buddha (Rahula, 1974, pp. 2-3)

It is as if it were not possible to turn the eye from darkness to
light without turning the whole body; so one must turn one's
whole soul from the world of becoming until it can endure to
contemplate reality, and the brightest of realities, which we say is
the Good.... Education then is the art of doing this very thing,
this turning around, the knowledge of how the soul can most
easily and most effectively be turned around.
Plato, Republic, Bk. 7, 518c (Grube, 1974, p. 171)

When I think of the faces of that squad of armed, green-uni-
formed guards my God, those faces! I looked at them, each in
turn, from behind the safety of a window, and I have never been
so frightened of anything in my life as I was of those faces. I sank
to my knees with the words that preside over human life: And

This article originally appeared in ReVision, Vol. 17. No. 2 J 995

I I

Spiritual Inquiry

God made man after His likeness. That passage spent a difficult

morning with me.

Etty Hillesum Netherlands 1943 (1985, p. 258)

What would contemporary culture look like if the insights and methods of
spiritual approaches to knowledge and inquiry, such as those of Matsuwa, the
Buddha, Plato, and Etty Hillesum, among others, were taken seriously? How
might educational institutions and practices, in which the ways of knowing
and inquiring of a culture are developed and passed on, be transformed? How
would contemporary understandings of science be changed if such ways of
knowing and inquiry were recognized as legitimate and integrated?

My intention in this essay is to lay some of the groundwork for responding
to these questions by exploring the idea that there are forms of systematic
"spiritual inquiry." I want, in the first part of this essay, to establish a provi-
sional plausibility for this idea on the basis both of a review of contemporary
literature concerning the idea of a "spiritual science," and the examination of
practices and texts drawn from many cultures and historical periods. These
practices and texts seem to give evidence of ways of inquiry leading to resolu-
tions of spiritual questions. There seem to be methods involving something
like what we contemporary Westerners would call systematic observation, deep
questioning, and/or critical analysis, qualities that are at the heart of what we
generally mean by the terms "science" and "inquiry."

In the second part of the essay, however, I want to step back and question
a premature assimilation of these approaches through the contemporary West-
ern categories of "science" and "inquiry." I want to consider critically some of
the complexities and difficulties of relating these mostly premodern, and of-
ten non- Western approaches to the two main forms of contemporary Western
inquiry, namely the natural and human sciences. How should we explore the
idea of spiritual inquiry? Can we do this simply within the context of contem-
porary scholarly institutions and practices? Are new modes of inquiry neces-
sary to explore and express spiritual inquiry in a contemporary way?

Before proceeding further, however, it is helpful to give some initial clarifi-
cation of the terms "spirituality" (and "spiritual"), "religion" (and "religious"),
and "inquiry." A deeper discussion of these terms, particularly of the concept
of "inquiry," can only occur through following the questions in the second
part of the essay. Furthermore, it is important to say at this point that I use
these terms with some reservations. They are rooted in Western traditions,
have been used in very different ways historically and in contemporary dis-
course, and do not translate easily (or sometimes at all) into non-Western or
premodern traditions.

26

Donald Rothberg

I take spiritviality to involve the lived transformation of self and community
toward fuller alignment with or expression of what is understood, within a
given cultural context, to be "sacred." This transformation may be supported
by doctrines, practices, and social organization. However, 1 do not mean to
suggest with the term that there is a separate spiritual realm, even if belief in
such a realm is found in some spiritual teachings. I use the term religion as a
broader term signifying the organized forms of doctrine, ritual, myth, experi-
ence, practice, spirituality, ethics, and social structure that together consti-
tute a world in relation to what is known as sacred (Rothberg, 1993, pp. 105-
106; Smart, 1976, pp. 6-12).

It is important to note, following these definitions, that there can be both
nonreligious (i.e. nonorganized) spirituality and nonspiritual religiosity. Fur-
thermore, neither spirituality nor religion as such is inherently good or bad.
Spirituality and religion can make possible love and wisdom as well as great
brutality. Religions, of course, have long been criticized for the many horrors '

for which they have been in large part responsible. Nazism, to give a less- ,

obvious example, can be interpreted as involving spiritual dimensions, as a . j

number ofcommentators have pointed out (e.g., Berman, 1989, pp. 253-293). : |

By inquiry, I understand most generally (and minimally) a response to an
existential and/or intellectual question through the search for insight, knowl-
edge, or understanding.^ The question may be a deeply practical one concern-
ing how to solve a problem or resolve an existential dilemma. The question
may be very abstract, seemingly purely theoretical. It may be motivated mainly
by inquisitiveness, curiosity, wonder, or a sense of mystery. The inquiry may be '

highly personal and idiosyncratic, or it may be organized within a given cul-
ture and carried out through particular practices. , }

To use the concept of inquiry rather than that of "knowledge" as a focus is
to stress the activity and process that lead to knowledge, rather than the com- ,

pleted and abstracted result. Furthermore, inquiry is a much less ideologically |

loaded term than science, much less wedded to particular Western interpreta-
tions of knowledge (especially positivist and empiricist interpretations of knowl-
edge as exclusively empirical). In these senses, the concept of inquiry seems
more neutral and potentially useful for the kind of cross-cultural exploration
required in investigating spiritual approaches.

I. The Idea of Spiritual Inquiry

It is not surprising that many contemporary Westerners exploring spiritu-
ality, especially in an experiential way, should be attracted to interpreting a
number of spiritual practices and traditions in part through the categories of
science and inquiry. These categories are of course the hallmark, in contem-
porary culture, of what is cognitively significant, and it is the cognitive that in

27

Spiritual Inquiry

modem times usually provides the way to "truth" and "reality." But even though
such categories have been central to the (Western) Enlightenment critiques
of religion (as superstitious, dogmatic, irrational, etc.), they have also seemed
initially very applicable to many spiritual approaches, particularly those deemed
mystical and contemplative.

Indeed, many recent writers have attempted to make sense of something
like a "spiritual science." Some, focusing on contemplative disciplines, have
spoken variously of a "science of self- investigation" (Needleman, 1976, p. 159),
an "inner empiricism" (Weber, 1986, p. 7), the "inner sciences" (Thurman,
1991, pp. 53-73), "state-specific sciences" (Tart, 1972), and "mysticism as a
science" (Deikman, 1982). Some have attempted to reconstruct traditional
Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic metaphysical systems, interpreting them
in their mature forms as examples of the most fundamental "sacred science"
(e.g., Nasr, 1981, 1993), and also applying the term "sacred science" to tradi-
tional interpretations of disciplines such as cosmology, linguistics, mathemat-
ics, astronomy, medicine, and architecture (e.g., Bamford, 1994; Nasr, 1993,
pp. 95-118). Some have begun to write about "native" or "indigenous" sci-
ence (Colorado, 1988; Deloria, 1993). A number of authors have employed
something like the term "spiritual science" as a synonym for a systematic ap-
proach to spiritual training (e.g., Steiner, 1947), in ways similar to the ways
that cognates of "science" have been used historically in many mystical texts.

Others have attempted to connect spiritual approaches more explicitly with
the contemporary natural and human sciences. Several authors have, in light
of "postempiricist" philosophy of science, pointed out the strong parallels be-
tween natural scientific and religious ways of knowing (Barbour, 1974; Rolston,
1987). Others have shown the similarities between empirical and more ex-
plicitly mystical ways of knowing (e.g.. Smith, 1976, pp. 96-117). More con-
troversial has been the attempt to explore apparent commonalities between
the findings of contemporary science, particularly physics and various mysti-
cal traditions, and to interpret the practice of natural science as a possible
spiritual path (Capra, 1975; Weber, 1986; Wilber, 1985).

A number of authors have examined the connections between contempla-
tion, particularly Buddhist forms, and the cognitive sciences. De Wit (1991)
has given the outlines of a pioneering crosscultural "contemplative psychol-
ogy." Hayward (1987, pp. 189-201) has argued that the practice of Buddhist
mindfulness meditation "can be regarded as a form of scientific method" (p.
193), in that it is essentially naturalistic, universalistic, and intersubjectively
testable. Rosch (1992, pp. 84-106) has distinguished the rejected project of
introspection in modern psychology from the method of mindfulness medita-
tion. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) have claimed that mindfulness
meditation is preferable to the current methods in the human sciences, such

28

Donald Rothberg

as phenomenology, for the systematic examination of human experience, in
large part because it combines both theoretical and practical dimensions.
Thurman (1991, pp. 51-73) has maintained that Tibetan Buddhist "inner sci-
ence" shares the core qualities of Western science; it is theoretically flexible
and nondogmatic, open to empirical experience, critical, rational, systematic,
and analytical. Yet it is also highly practical, oriented to the achievement of
the deepest possible human happiness.

Wilber ( 1983, pp. 1-81 ), following and expanding on the work of Habermas
(1971), has given perhaps the most comprehensive (although preliminary and
simplified) philosophical treatment of the idea of spiritual science. He has
outlined a very general model of three distinct and paradigmatic types of sci-
ences: 1 ) the "empirical-analytic" sciences of the world known through the
senses; 2) the "mental-phenomenological" sciences of the human symbolic
world of meanings; and, finally, 3) the "transcendental" or "transpersonal"
sciences. These latter sciences, in turn, comprise what Wilber calls the
"mandalic sciences," involving use of the mental-phenomenological mode in
order to understand spiritual experiences and realities, and the
"noumenological" or "gnostic" sciences, with methodologies designed to fa-
cilitate direct spiritual insight. These three types of sciences share a basic struc-
ture. Every science is injunctive (to know, one must carry out this or that
inquiry), leads to concrete apprehensions of reality, and has its results com-
munally confirmed.

I use the concept of spiritual inquiry in a way generally continuous with
the above literature, referring to a number of spiritual approaches, outlined
below, which seem to have many of the qualities of inquiry found in the natu-
ral and human sciences. On this basis, it seems plausible to hypothesize that
there are general qualities of inquiry and science shared by both the contem-
porary sciences and forms of spiritual inquiry. That is, these spiritual approaches
seem in many ways relatively open and nondogmatic, rooted in rigorous ob-
servation, methodical, systematic, critical, and/or intersubjective. Yet these
inquiries also seem to go considerably beyond the contemporary sciences, in
that they have to do with ways of knowing, access to domains of reality, and
transformative practices not currently understood as scientific. They suggest
the possibility of a significantly expanded understanding of inquiry and knowl-
edge.

Methods of Spiritual Inquiry

1 want, then, to offer a very preliminary typology of five interrelated ways
or "ideal types" of spiritual inquiry: 1) systematic contemplation, 2) radical
questioning, 3) metaphysical thinking, 4) the critical "deconstruction" of
metaphysical and other views, and 5) the cultivation of visions and dreams. 1

29

Spiritual Inquiry

will give several examples of each type, generally presented from the perspec-
tives of the approaches cited.

1 . Systematic Contemplation, The form of spiritual inquiry that is prob-
ably best known today involves training to develop a relatively open and re-
ceptive contemplative or meditative awareness. The inquirer cultivates the
ability to be "present" with the phenomena of human experience in their
breadth and depth, often in a primarily nondiscursive way, and commonly
uses exercises and conceptual models to help initially access particular dimen-
sions of experience. This contemplative process purportedly gives insight into
the surface patterns and deeper nature of these phenomena and potentially
opens up awareness to the most fundamental spiritual insight, however this is
understood.

Forms of contemplative inquiry can be located as particular approaches or
schools particularly within Asian and Western metaphysical and religious tra-
ditions. I want to discuss two examples of living traditions, Buddhist mindful-
ness meditation and Christian contemplation, while recognizing the large range
of similar examples that might be drawn from Hindu, neo-Confucian, Taoist,
Greek, Jewish, and Islamic sources, among others.

The basic method of mindfulness meditation has been developed in a vari-
ety of forms in Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions (e.g., King, 1980;
Komfield, 1977; Nhat Hanh, 1976; Nyanaponika, 1965). A number of con-
temporary practitioners have applied this method oi inquiry to, for example,
death and dying (Levine, 1982); stress, pain, and illness (Kabat-Zinn, 1990);
social transfommation (Macy 1983, Nhat Hanh, 1987); and intimate rela-
tionships (Welwood, 1990).

The mindfulness meditator generally begins in a communal context, guided
by a teacher, and with a basic grounding in ethical behavior and understand-
ing of Buddhist teachings. One typical sequence in the Theravada tradition is
first to train the meditator's attentional abilities by cultivating the ability to
concentrate on one object, often initially on the sensations of breathing,
through practice of a formal exercise. The meditator then is urged, in both
formal meditation and everyday activity (as, for instance, a monk or nun), to
be aware o{ any content o( consciousness, as much as possible from the atti-
tude oi a present-centered, nonjudgmental, "bare attention." The stance is
that of a radical openness to whatever content presents itself, pleasant or un-
pleasant, wanted or unwanted; thoughts about Buddhist teachings and expe-
riences of qualities such as compassion, equanimity, and even mindfulness
itself have, strictly speaking, no privileged status.

From this basic contemplative stance, the Buddhist meditator is initially
aware of a wide range of ordinary experiences bodily sensations and sensory

30

Donald Rothberg

lata, and mental and emotional states and may discern habitual patterns of
hese experiences. If the meditator continues to "progress," there are further
general developmental shifts, both in the way of knowing and in the contents
)f consciousness. The meditator experiences in an immediate way insights
nto the nature of ordinary experience and phenomena as anicca, dukkha, anattd:
IS impermanent, unsatisfactory, and selfless. As concentration increases, tem-
poral and gross cognitive constructions decrease significantly. The gap de-
;reases between knower and known, between consciousness and its content,
rhe lived experience may be more and more that of a continually changing
lux, without an active and independent knower. The "experience" of nibbana
Sanskrit: nirvana) provides the final, liberating insight into the nature of all
phenomena.

Christian contemplation, according to the work of Thomas Merton (1959;
[978; Shannon, 1981), perhaps the most prominent Western Christian con-
:emplative of this century, can be classified, following the teachings of the
;arly Greek fathers, into three types: active contemplation, natural contem-
plation, and mystical theology, sometimes called "infused" contemplation.
\ctive contemplation, the mode of contemplation most accessible to
lonmonastics, is an inquiry through which the contemplative aims to dis-
:over and be aligned with the will of God in everyday life. For Merton (1959),
t means being in touch with several dimensions of life: with the essential
pouter) events and movements of one's epoch; with one's own (inner) life and
leeper intentions, activated particularly through liturgy, reading, and medita-
:ion on important themes; and with reality as a whole, contemplated with a
sense of awe. Such contemplation is practiced with some effort, and with the
lid of conceptual models, discriminating judgments, and acts of faith. The
ntention of active contemplation is, as in infused or "passive" contempla-
ion, union with God in love; indeed active contemplation may at times be-
;ome infused.

Natural contemplation {theoria physike) is the "intuition of divine things
n and through the reflections of God in nature and in the symbols of revela-
ion" (Merton, 1959, p. 66). It presumes considerable ascetic training, so that
le contemplative is no longer attached to objects and nature, but can instead
iscern their essential natures, and their symbolic relation to God.

The third form of contemplation, mystical theology (theologia), is defined
s "pure contemplation" and understood by Merton to culminate in the direct
experimental" knowledge of God, without thoughts, concepts, or images. Such
ontemplation is central to the long line of Christian apophatic mystics, such
s Pseudo-Dionysus, Eckhart, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, St. John
f the Cross, and Teresa of Avila. Merton, following this tradition, identifies
ch infused contemplation as a kind of "dark knowing" that is also an un-

31

Spiritual Inquiry

knowing. It demands, therefore, considerable openness. Merton (1959, p. Ill)
writes: "The great obstacle to contemplation is rigidity and prejudice. He who
thinks he knows what it is beforehand prevents himself from finding out the
true nature of contemplation."

The path of infused contemplation proceeds through a number of stages of
"purification" through which love develops most fruitfully, believes Merton,
in the monastic climate of silence and solitude. One crucial initial stage is the
experience of aridity and darkness, and sometimes intense conflict, in which
prayer, meditation, liturgy, and contemplation lose much of their meaning;
this period is interpreted as the clearer surfacing of selfishness and sin. At
some point, there comes initial illumination, a sense of contact with God.
This may be followed by the continued attempt to purify one's love through
all of one's experiences, cultivating the kind of apatheia or "holy indifference"
recommended, for example, by St. John of the Cross:

Even as the bee extracts from all plants the honey that is in them
. . . even so the soul with great facility extracts the sweetness of
love that is in all things that pass through it. It loves God in each
of them, whether pleasant or unpleasant. (Merton, 1978, pp. 64-
65)^

As infused contemplation continues, the purified inmost self may be touchec
by God in a "dark knowing" free of all concepts (even the concept of God, as
Eckhart once suggested). In such intuitive knowledge and purity of love for
God, the split between subject and God is healed.

2. Radical Questioning. Whereas contemplative inquiries of the kinds
described above are carried out in large part nondiscursively, especially in their
more advanced stages, other modes of spiritual inquiry proceed primarily
through language and concepts, even if language and concepts are eventually
left behind. For example, the art of asking fundamental and often unusual and
unexpected questions as a path of ethical and spiritual learning leading to the
deepest spiritual insights has been developed widely in both Western and Asian
traditions.

For Socrates and Plato, questions, particularly in the setting of dialogue,
are the main means by which to arrive at the knowledge of fundamental reali-
ties and to prepare for intuition of ultimate reality. As McGinn (1991, p. 29)
suggests, there is no separation between such questioning and spirituality, for,
contrary to most contemporary philosophical scholarship on Plato, philoso-
phy is always spiritual practice for Plato and most ancient philosophers. Ini-
tially, questions might reveal our perhaps unexpected ignorance, thereby lib-
erating our wonder and curiosity if we are not too prideful. It was apparently at
this open and agnostic state that Socrates both began and frequently arrived,

32

Donald Rothberg

a State that was in Socrates' case sometimes connected with visions and other
spiritual experiences.

For Plato, however, questioning could go further. As we follow the way of
questions, especially as guided by a mentor like Socrates and in the context of
ongoing moral purification, we move away from the overlays of ignorance
toward the knowledge which is always already present in the depths of the
soul and only needs to be uncovered. In this sense, we do not arrive at new
answers with our questions, but rather at the universal innate and archetypal
knowledge of self and cosmos. At first, such knowledge is of patterned and
ordered realities, the Forms or eide of the "intelligible region," and is a knowl-
edge articulable in language. Following such intellectual preparation and
knowledge may come the sudden and "unspeakable" (arrheton) insight {noe-
sis) into the Form of Forms, into what Plato variously calls the Good, the
Beautiful, or the One.

Western ways of asking radical questions have especially been preserved
since Plato and Socrates in the philosophical traditions, even as the confi-
dence that such questions would yield sacred knowledge has often wavered
and been lost, especially in modern times. The energy of radical questioning
has instead often been used to criticize religious and philosophical claims to
knowledge of the sacred. There have, nonetheless, been a number of modem
exemplars, such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, of deep philosophical ques-
tioning as a kind of spiritual inquiry.

Examination of Asian traditions also reveals a number of modes of deep
questioning. For example, the Buddha's address to the Kalama people (cited
at the beginning of this essay), in which he urged them to question deeply
their usual beliefs based on authority, tradition, or popularity and instead seek
confirmation in their own experiences, stands parallel with Socrates' exalta-
tion of the examined life. In later Buddhist traditions, the factor of "inquiry"
[vicara (Pali)] was highlighted as one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment
and sometimes developed in a concentrated way as a spiritual method. Stephen
Batchelor (1990) writes of the tradition of radical questioning in the Chinese,
Korean, and Japanese Zen traditions. Those practicing such questioning are
guided in developing a "great doubt," a doubt to be cultivated in and out of
the meditation hall through focusing continually on words like "What is it?"
or "What is this?" or "Why is it?" or simply "What?" The seventeenth century
apanese Zen master Takasui advised his students:

You must doubt deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the
subject of hearing could be. Pay no attention to the various illu-
sory thoughts and ideas that may occur to you. Only doubt more
and more deeply, gathering together in yourself all the strength

33

Spiritual Inquiry

that is in you, without aiming at anything or expecting anything
in advance, without intending to be enUghtened and without
even intending not to be enlightened; become hke a child within
your own breast (Batchelor, 1990, p. 15).

The twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharsi developed a well-
known method of questioning, with roots especially in the Hindu traditions
o{inana yoga and Advaita ("nondual") Vedanta, that he called "Self-inquiry"
[also vichara (here in Sanskrit)]. Ramana Maharsi advised the seeker continu-
ally to ask the question, "Who am 1?" examining the supposed sources of the
self, until the more conditioned aspects of self disappear and the deeper "Self
is known:

Trace, then, the ultimate cause of "1" or personality... From where
does this "1" arise? Seek for it within; it then vanishes. This is the
pursuit of wisdom. When the mind unceasingly investigates its
own nature ... [t]his is the direct path for all. (Godman, 1985, p.

50)

3. Metaphysical Thinking. In the various traditions of spiritual inquiry
examined, we can note a certain tension between those who claim that con-
templation or questioning can reach determinate "answers," articulable in lan-
guage, and those who claim that no methods can produce and no language
can adequately express the core spiritual understanding; for the latter, in an
important sense, there are no answers (Fenner, 1994). This tension between
spiritual inquiry as a path of knowing and spiritual inquiry as unknowing also
appears when we consider (in this and the next section) two further methods
of spiritual inquiry: metaphysical thinking, and the "deconstruction" or sus-
pension of metaphysical thinking.

In the world's religions and in Western philosophy, there have been at-
tempts to further spiritual understanding through intellectual analysis, syn-
thesis, and speculation concerning the nature of human experience, the na-
ture of the mind and knowing, the structure of reality, and spiritual develop-
ment; I speak of such inquiry generally as "metaphysical thinking." Thinking
of this sort is typically the attempt to understand and systematize earlier spiri-
tual insights, in the interest of guiding future spiritual development. Platonic
contemplation, questioning, and intuition of Forms, for example, led to rich
traditions of further speculation and spiritual experience. Jewish, Christian,
and Islamic philosophers and theologians have taken the founding religious
revelations of their traditions as starting points and articulated, in Christian
terms, "faith seeking understanding" {fides quaerens intellectum) .

Metaphysical exploration is often a starting point for further contempla-
tive inquiry, as the seeker receives and studies a kind of "road map" of the

34

Donald Rothberg

spiritual path. For Ibn al-'Arabi (Chittick, 1989), metaphysical reflection and
reason typically help make possible the deeper insights of "gnosis" (kashf) and
"the heart" (qalb). In Jewish mysticism, study of the Torah and of the struc-
tures of the higher worlds, as outlined in the Kabbalah, may not only facilitate
further contemplative practice, but may sometimes in itself lead to mystical
ecstasy. For Aquinas, inquiry through the "natural" intellect brings the indi-
vidual to many truths, although "supernatural" truths are revealed through
other modes of knowledge. Study of the Abhidhamma "psychology," and of
other epistemological and metaphysical models, often precedes Buddhist con-
templative practice.

Metaphysical thinking may also be used coupled with contemplation or
radical questioning, as a guide to illuminate everyday experience and deepen
understanding. A Hindu jnana yogi might reflect on his or her assumptions
about the nature of the self, considering the thesis found in the Upanishads,
that the deepest aspect of the self, the dtman, is being or ultimate reality itself.
A Buddhist might use the teaching of "dependent origination" (paticca
samuppada) to help structure mindfulness meditation, examining how that
teaching can be observed as operative in moment-to-moment experience. A
Jew might reflect on a given passage of the Bible in relation to some aspect of
daily life, as, in an extreme example, Etty Hillesum, in the passage given at
the beginning of the essay, brought scriptural understanding to bear on her
experience in the Nazi camps.

4. The Critical "Deconstruction" of }Aetaphysical and Other Views.

We can also speak of methodical inquiries in which the focus is on an
undoing of established metaphysical and other belief systems, in the interests
of making possible the deepest spiritual insights. In these (in Christian termi-
nology) apophatic inquiries of a via negadva, there is an openness to question-
ing or suspending even those core principles or teachings of the very tradition
of the inquirer. The inquirer leaves behind the familiar and safe territory in
order to know in a different way. In Christian theology and practice, methods
of systematically suspending core beliefs have been developed in the tradition
of "negative theology" that dates from the work of Pseudo-Dionysus, and have
been linked with the claim of infused contemplation that concepts are absent
in the most profound knowing.

In Asian traditions, it is the Buddhist Madhyamika method of
"deconstructing" core concepts (Buddhist concepts included) that is perhaps
paradigmatic as a path of spiritual inquiry in this mode. In that approach
(Fenner, 1991, 1994; Sprung, 1979; Thurman, 1984), the inquirer examines
thoroughly, in a formal way, every logically possible alternative on a given
issue or topic, ultimately finding that none of the alternatives meets the an-

35

Spiritual Inquiry

ticipated requirement of noncontradiction (i.e. that a statement and its con-
tradiction cannot both be true). All possible metaphysical views (drsti), in-
cluding the most central Buddhist tenets about causality, nirvana the spiritual
path, etc. are, when probed, self-contradictory; they imply their opposites. All
intellectual attempts to claim some kind of absolute truth, complete adequacy
or determinacy of thought to reality, or full intelligibility, are doomed to fail-
ure because of the intrinsically dualistic structure of such claims. Guided by
this understanding, such a deconstructive inquiry, when coupled with con-
templative practices, it is claimed, leads the inquirer to "nonconceptual" and
freeing spiritual insights into "emptiness" (sunyata), i.e. the nature of reality
as known without metaphysical views. It is furthermore the claim (e.g., of the
main Madhyamika thinker, Nagarjuna) that, far from such inquiry's leading
to nihilism, only such an understanding and practice makes possible ethical
and spiritual life.

This form of spiritual inquiry is particularly interesting and important in
that there are significant parallels with modem (and some postmodern) cri-
tiques of metaphysics. Inquiring at a time when practical spiritual contexts
had largely been separated from intellectual inquiry, for a variety of reasons,
modem Western secular critics of classical metaphysics often found only mere
dogma, a lack of contact with experience and evidence, and, from a purely
intellectual perspective, numerous problems and internal contradictions. For
some of these critics, beginning with Nietzsche and leading on to contempo-
rary deconstructionist postmodern interpreters, the prospect is of a kind of
nihilism; the old metaphysical, ethical, and political grand narratives and sys-
tems do not hold, even on their own terms. Thus it is important to note that,
with these forms of spiritual inquiry, a deeply reflexive view of language and
conceptual systems can be articulated in an ethical and spiritual setting, i.e.
not at the cost of nihilism.

5. The Cultivation of Visions and Dreams. In many traditions, particu-
larly indigenous traditions, the resolution of spiritual questions or problems
may occur through practices culminating in visions or dreams bringing spiri-
tual knowledge. Few contemporary westerners have spoken of these practices
as sciences or forms of inquiry. Perhaps this is because the cultivation of vi-
sionary capabilities does not seem central to contemporary methods of the
natural and human sciences, even though the use of the creative imagination
has played an important role in many scientific discoveries and in phenom-
enology, and the exploration of dreams has been since Freud the "royal road"
to self-knowledge in psychotherapy.

A number of different practices may induce the desired vision or dream.
The seeker in ancient Greece and Egypt frequently went to a sacred place to

36

Donald Rothberg

sleep, or slept in contact with sacred objects, in order to "incubate" dreams
that might answer a given question or problem. Diviners (e.g., in many Afri-
can cultures) engage in ritual practices leading to visions or dreams, after they
have first been "called" by the ancestral spirits to become diviners. There may
often be an extended time of solitude in the wilderness, as in the North Ameri-
can "vision quest," described by Hultkrantz (1993, pp. 255-372) as "the most
characteristic feature of North American (indigenous) religions outside the
Pueblo area" (p. 278). Other means used include fasting and other ascetic
practices, community rituals, and the use of psychedelics. Typically, these prac-
tices make possible a dream or vision in which there are revelations from
spirits, either from one's own guardian spirit or from other spirits. Information
revealed in trance permits shamans, for example, to heal.

An Eskimo shaman of the twentieth century, Igjugarjuk, described, in con-
versation with the anthropologist Rasmussen, the nature of his initiation into
the life of a shaman, the life of "seeking for knowledge" (Halifax, 1979). Placed
in solitude far from his village with little food and water, under severe ascetic
conditions, Igjugarjuk was enjoined to think only of the helping spirit he wished
to contact:

[This] took place in the middle of the coldest winter, and I, who
never got anything to warm me, and must not move, was very
cold, and it was so tiring having to sit without daring to lie down,
that sometimes it was as if I died a little. Only toward the end of
the thirty days did a helping spirit come to me ...whilst I had
collapsed, exhausted, and was sleeping. But still I saw her lifelike,
hovering over me, and from that day I could not close my eyes or
dream without seeing her. (Halifax, 1979, p. 67)

In this shamanic initiation, there is a close relationship of seeking for spiri-
:ual knowledge with crisis and ordeal.^ The individual (or collective) crisis,
ivhether that of a severe illness or great cultural danger, or that of the more
:onstructed crisis of ascetic wilderness solitude, seems, under certain condi-
ions, to facilitate the opening to wisdom through inquiry.''

Igjugarjuk described his usual procedure as a shaman for seeking for knowl-
edge, for inquiring into a given issue or problem:

[T]he people of my village were called together and I told them
what I had been asked to do. Then I left tent or snow house and
went out into solitude, away from the dwellings of man, but those
who remained behind had to sing continuously. ... If anything
difficult had to be found out, my solitude had to extend over
three days and two nights, or three nights and two days. In all
that time I had to wander about without rest and only sit down

37

I !)

Spiritual Inquiry

once in a while on a stone or a snow drift. When I had been out
long and had become tired, I could almost doze and dream what
I had come out to find and about which I had been thinking all
the time. (Halifax, 1979, p. 68)

II. Understanding Spiritual Inquiry
in the Contemporary Context

But how well do the concepts of science and inquiry help us to explore and
interpret these spiritual approaches and traditions? On the one hand, there
seem to be some very significant potential advantages to using these concepts.
For example, they provide a way of responding to the (Western) Enlighten-
ment critiques of religion without, as it were, having to choose sides between
science and religion (and spirituality). We might interpret spiritual inquiry,
for example, as a mode of inquiry in large part complementary to rather than
in conflict with contemporary modes of inquiry, perhaps understood as in
Wilber's account of three types of sciences. Speaking of spiritual inquiry also
seems to help develop a discriminating response to the Enlightenment cri-
tiques. It might be argued that these critiques can be cogently applied to the
dogmatism, superstition, and authoritarianism of some religious and spiritual
approaches, but that these critiques are not so adequate when applied to many
of the forms of spiritual inquiry discussed above (Rothberg, 1986a, 1986b).
Third, given that spiritual inquiry involves ways of knowing, dimensions of
mind and body, and domains of reality other than those that are thematized in
the contemporary sciences, the possibility arises of radically transformed un-
derstandings of these areas, if the findings of all modes of science or inquiry
were integrated. This is presently occurring in several areas, such as
transpersonal psychology and medicine.

But there are also a number of problems and dangers in integrating mate-
rial from diverse cultures and epochs, which may be less obvious than the
potential advantages. Some of the recent-work and discussions in and con-
cerning hermeneutics (e.g., Gadamer, 1975), anthropology (e.g., Clifford and
Marcus, 1986), cultural studies (e.g.. Said, 1 979; Williams and Chrisman, 1994),
philosophy (e.g., Wilson, 1970), and cross-cultural and interreligious dialogue
(e.g., Kremer, 1992a, 1992b; Walker, 1987) help us to identify some of these
issues.

The major danger is a tendency to project, often unconsciously, contem-
porary Western views and models of the natural and/or human sciences as if
these understandings are universal. We may very easily tend toward a kind of
cultural imperialism, toward what Said (1979) has called "Orientalism," in
which we assimilate the "other" (the premodern, the non -Western, appar-
ently nonrational ways of knowing, etc.) to our categories and projects, albeit

38

Donald Rothberg

sually in far more subtle ways than in the past. (Of course, to worry about
rejection and cultural imperialism is often another typically Western preoc-
upation, and we may also uncritically assume the ideas related to these con-
ems as universal as well.)

For example, in thinking about spiritual science or inquiry, we might, with
lany good intentions, attempt to show that the spiritual approaches discussed
leet certain criteria of science or inquiry. Indeed, many of those cited in the
2view of current literature about spiritual science have more or less followed
tiis tack. Claims resulting from many of the modes of spiritual inquiry (par-
icularly contemplative modes) may be said to be based on experience (rather
tian mere dogma), on "evidence" and "data," and thus be generally "verifi-
ble." Through the use of systematic methods, many of the claims of spiritual
iquiry can be replicated by others and generalized. The claims seem in a
Lumber of cases to be intersubjectively confirmed, by a teacher or within a
ommunity. Furthermore, there are often "critical" standards, internal to the
lethods of spiritual inquiry, that help to discriminate insight from
seudoinsight or confusion. Those modern critics who argue that the religious
ontexts of spiritual inquiry prevent a truly open and nondogmatic inquiry
light be countered by pointing to the ways in which the contemporary sci-
nces are understood to work through "paradigms," on the basis of generally
nquestioned views of science, logic, and metaphysics (Barber, 1974; Rolston,
987).

I want to identify two main problems with this strategy of thinking about
piritual science that reflect elements of projection. First of all, we may, con-
ciously or unconsciously, give a privileged position to contemporary, estab-
Lshed Western concepts of science and inquiry. To interpret spiritual approaches
hrough categories like "data," "evidence," "verification," "method," "confir-
[lation," and "intersubjectivity" may be to enthrone these categories as some-
Low the hallmarks of knowledge as such, even if the categories are expanded
n meaning from their current Western usage. But might not a profound en-
ounter with practices of spiritual inquiry lead to considering carefully the
neaning of other comparable categories (e.g, dhydna, vichara, theoria, gnosis, or
ontemplatio) and perhaps to developing understandings of inquiry in which
uch spiritual categories are primary or central when we speak of knowledge?
fo assume that the categories of current Western epistemology are adequate
or interpreting spiritual approaches is to prejudge the results of such an en-
counter, which might well lead to significant changes in these categories. At
)est, to understand some of the examples of spiritual inquiry as meeting many
)r most of the general criteria of science or inquiry might establish a certain
)lausibility, among those who value the contemporary Western sciences, that

39

Spiritual Inquiry

spiritual inquiry should be taken seriously and might be integrated among the
sciences.

A second problem is that to use the contemporary Western categories of
science and inquiry is usually to give very selective interpretations of spiritual
approaches, noticing some aspects and ignoring others. For example, if we are
making use of an empiricist Western model of natural science, we may well
leave out consideration of the larger context, of the ways that many if not
most contemplative methods, Asian and Western, are typically grounded in
communities and in ethical practices (e.g., in Patanjali's yoga, the Buddhist
model of a threefold training, or the writings of Christian monastics such as
Benedict and Bernard of Clairvaux). We may tend thereby uncritically to
duplicate the empiricist split of science and ethics and its asocial and ahistorical
perspective and consider these spiritual approaches as exclusively "psycho-
logical" or "inner." We may focus on extracting techniques to help with stress,
pain, or illness, but overlook the more profound goals of spiritual inquiry.-

It may be less obvious that to carry out an "encounter" between represen-
tatives of different modes of inquiry through "dialogues" and "discourses" more
rooted in the human sciences often involves many of the same difficulties of
projection, exclusion, privileging, and limited horizons. For many, dialogue,
in the context of scholarly and public forums, seems a neutral ground for the
sharing and investigation of differences, whether differences related to values,
views, gender, ethnicity, cultures, or religions.

I would like to illustrate some of these dangers of projection by examining
in some depth the work of Habermas, who has developed one of the most
comprehensive theories of how such dialogue might proceed in the human
sciences. He has given an account of the underlying structures of "communi-
cative rationality" (communication aiming at understanding) and of the spe-
cial role of what he calls "discourse" (Habermas, 1979, pp. 1-68; 1984a; 1984b,
pp. 127-183). For Habermas, discourse is an activity separate from but grounded
in everyday action, in which there is consideration only of arguments con-
cerning problematic claims to validity (to theoretical truth or normative "tight-
ness"), conducted in a setting ideally free from various forms of domination
and oppression. The participants are ideally psychologically mature, so that
their motivation can be entirely to search for what is true or right and not act
in ways that are consciously or unconsciously strategic, deceptive, or self-de-
ceptive.

But what would a dialogue (and resulting discourse) look like, to give an
example, between a scholar sympathetic to spiritual inquiry and a scholar of
the human sciences, one who proceeds according to Habermas 's model? Let us
imagine that there is a dialogue based on the reading of part 1 of this essay.
Whatever benefits there might be, the second scholar will likely at some point

40

Donald Rothberg

say something like the following: "Yes, I've been edified some. But I have one
main problem about calling what you present 'inquiry.' These spiritual in-
sights all seem ineluctably 'private,' without there being public reasons to be-
lieve in the claims. How could we evaluate these claims? Why should 1 think
that the shaman has contacted a spirit rather than just had an interesting
dream? Why should I think that the meditator's experiences of light are any-
thing more than a physiological response of the brain when under great stress?
What are the publicly accessible reasons for thinking that Ramana Maharshi
was in touch with his Self, or that Eckhart was united with God? Why should
I think that 'spiritual inquiry' brings 'knowledge' rather than edifying private
but nondiscursive experiences?"

A response to these questions can take several approaches. The emphasis
on the giving of reasons in public discourse as the sole guarantor of validity
might be questioned in a variety of related ways: as tending to exclude direct
attention to the role of body, emotions, and personal experience in knowl-
edge (e.g., Jaggar and Bordo, 1989; Scheman, 1992, pp. 61-71; Solomon, 1992,
pp. 19-47); as uncritically assuming the distinction between "public" and "pri-
vate" in ways that tend to obscure the dimensions of gender, class, race, and
power embodied in the history and theory related to this distinction (Benhabib
and Cornell, 1987); as ethnocentric, as presuming the universality of Western
models (Winch, 1970, pp. 78-1 11); or as neglecting the horizons of tradition
and narrative and the ways in which dialogue may take the shape of a "fusion
of horizons" (Gadamer, 1975, p. 5)^

I want to suggest a further reason. The second scholar is right to point to
the ways, at this time, in Western culture, that no public reasons could con-
clusively establish the validity of many of the most basic claims associated
with spiritual inquiry, even if some of the claims associated with spiritual in-
quiry might be adequately assessed on empirical or interpretive grounds
(Rothberg, 1990). As I hope to show in what follows, what is "questionable" is
to project discourse as the universal horizon of knowledge.

But even before we consider this question, an immediate objection may
arise. If we are questioning discourse in this way, aren't we doing so by engag-
ing in discourse ourselves? Habermas (1990, p. 86ff.) points out, in a kind of
"transcendental" argument, that there is a "performative paradox" in question-
ing discourse as the main way to reach validity. In doing this, thinks Habermas,
one is presumably invoking reasons and thus assuming exactly what is ques-
tioned, namely that problematic claims should be settled by discussion and
giving reasons. However, the problem with Habermas's argument is that he
again implicitly presumes discourse as the universal horizon, because if there
are other ways of questioning and inquiry not part of communicative rational-
ity, such as those found in forms of spiritual inquiry, then this argument doesn't

41

Spiritual Inquiry

work. Rather, these other ways of inquiry may suggest further horizons beyond
the structures of communicative rationality.

In fact, there can be no ordinary arguments and reasons as to why one
should accept discourse as an ultimate arbiter. Rather, Habermas, for example,
gives two unusual kinds of arguments. First, he gives "quasi-transcendental"
reconstructions (a la Kant) of the structures of communicative rationality (and
discourse) as simply given in human experience (and not simply a particular
cultural artifact). But even if acceptable, this in itself isn't adequate to estab-
lish the universality of these structures, unless there are no broader or comple-
mentary structures. Habermas needs therefore a further argument, and gives a
"developmental-logical" one in which he claims that communicative ratio-
nality is identified as the most advanced structure of human onto- and phylo-
genetic development. However, in the light of his problematic reading of how
religious and metaphysical traditions represent "lower" levels of development
(Rothberg 1986b), this argument also doesn't work. If forms of spiritual in-
quiry are not essentially immature forms of rational inquiry, then an alterna-
tive perspective may be more plausible. From the points of view of many theo-
rists of spiritual inquiry, both traditional and contemporary, rational
competences are among several basic competences, and not the endpoints of
development; spiritual "competences" are similarly "given" as part of human
potential and may in fact provide a more comprehensive horizon of knowl-
edge than communicative rationality. Thus, to assume that rational discus-
sion (as defined by Habermas) provides the basic horizon for all inquiry again
prejudges the structure of an authentic encounter with spiritual inquiry.

But how might we explore the relations between the contemporary sci-
ences and spiritual inquiry, aware of the dangers of projection and exclusion?
Kremer (1992a, 1992b), in recent issues of this journal, speaks of the limits of
the model of discourse and the need for a complementary model of what he
calls "concourse." For Kremer, recognition of the limits of discourse, the ways
in which discourse presumes a banished and unexplored "other" (e.g., body,
emotions, the feminine, wilderness, and the spiritual), may prompt a kind of
"dark night of the soul" for what he calls the contemporary "masculinized
scholar." The scholar travels above and below, like a shaman, to encounter and
reclaim the other, and carries back a story of the integration of what has been
excluded. Concourse for Kremer is the expression of such a story as a model of
multidimensional inquiry, in which all of these formerly excluded dimensions
are potentially present. In a given inquiry, there might be rational discourse,
along with ritual, silence, stories, spiritual practices, theater, or dancing.

I believe that Kremer's idea of concourse represents, at least in the kind oi
brief outline given, a more adequate model for the meeting of different modes
of inquiry than the model of discourse. Indeed, some of those exploring inter-

42

Donald Rothberg

religious dialogue (e.g., Walker, 1987, pp. 11-18) have found it necessary to
develop expanded models of dialogue that go beyond more strictly academic
discourse, including not only such discourse but also spiritual retreats, rituals,
and contemplative practice.

Of course, to recognize the need for such an expanded sense of inquiry is
only, as it were, to open a door. There still remain versions of all the old ques-
tions about the criteria for evaluating the validity or appropriateness of claims
and practices. There also emerge newer questions about the distinctions be-
tween what we might call premodern and postmodern interpretations of spiri-
tual inquiry (and of spirituality in general).

However, there are presently a number of significant constraints and limits
to developing such multidimensional forms of inquiry, both in contemporary
Western spiritual settings and in academic institutions. In contemporary spiri-
tual settings, there frequently remain hierarchical social structures and au-
thoritarian relationships often at odds with the contemporary democratic spirit
(if not reality) of inquiry, and a cautiousness about integrating contemporary
modes of inquiry. Spirituality is often interpreted individualistically an pri-
vately rather than more communally and publicly (Rothberg, 1993), making
collective inquiry more difficult. There often remains a residual anti-intellec-
tualism, in large part a reaction to the limited intellectual life presented in
most schools and universities.

Within academic settings, there also are many constraints on multidimen-
sional inquiry, especially within institutions organized around something like
the idea of "rational" discourse and current models of scholarship. Despite the
former influence of Dewey's pragmatism on educational models, there is little
Dpenness to the "experiential" and practical dimensions of learning in "higher"
education. Typically, there is a separation of thought and reflection from in-
depth examination and deepening of one's own experience, as well as from
the practical ethical and political dimensions of individual and collective in-
quiry. One usually investigates, as a student and scholar, what is other and
separate and does this individually rather than more collaboratively (although
;his is less true of the natural sciences). Ironically but also predictably, many
3f the criticisms of conventional notions of objectivity and the separation of
:heory and practice (such as have been inspired by Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault,
:ritical theorists, and many feminists, among others) often can only find a
.sometimes comfortable) place in the academy's discussions as purely theoreti-
cal criticisms!^

This suggests that to take the idea of multidimensional inquiry seriously
and playfully) in a particularly contemporary way demands critical transfor-
nations of the present ideas of spirituality, scholarship, and educational insti-
ution. Only such shifts will let the intentions of spiritual inquiry infuse and

43

Spiritual Inquiry

be influenced by other forms of inquiry. In this sense, the exploration and
understanding of spiritual inquiry is only at a beginning.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dennis Friedler, Bonnie Morrissey, Ken Otter,
Joseph Prabhu, and Tony Stigliano for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this
essay.

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Notes

1. Inquiry is an important category particularly in the American pragmatist tradition.
Dewey (1938, p. 104ff.), for example, thought of inquiry as a response to an actual indeter-
ninate, doubtful, or perplexing situation, a response that leads, if successful, to a determi-
late. resolved situation.

Of course, most contemporary writers about such honorific terms as "inquiry," "sci-
:nce," and "rationality," including Dewey, would not be satisfied with the rather minimal
ccount of inquiry 1 have given. They would typically want to include discussion of criteria
hat are characteristic of the contemporary natural and/or human sciences, for example,
hat inquiry is replicable, verifiable, systematic, critical, self- reflective, based on evidence
nd reasoning, etc. However, my strategy is to give a minimal initial definition, so that
3me of the issues that arise in looking at the relations between different forms of inquiry
.e., in the second part of the essay) are not prejudged, so that contemporary criteria of
iquiry are, as much as possible, not given a privileged place.

2. 1 have removed italics and capitalizations that appear in Merton's quotation.

3. I thank Mat Schwarzman for this insight.

4. Under other conditions, of course, crisis, danger, and suffering can lead to fanaticism
nd brutality.

47

Spiritual Inquiry

5. I am leaving out discussion of the frontal assault on this model by some postmodern
critics. Nonetheless, to a large extent, many postmodernists still assume an exclusively
textual and intellectual model of knowledge, even if claims to "the truth" are given up; the
model of discourse changes but discourse still remains the basic framework of understand-
ing.

6. There are nonetheless many persons exploring and implementing more dynamic and
dialectical versions of the theory-practice relationship from these perspectives, as well as,
significantly, from the perspectives of a "critical pedagogy" (e.g., Freire, 1970), and experi-
ential and collaborative learning (e.g., Boud, Cohen, and Walker, 1993).

48

Inspiration

Tohin Hart

I suspect that you and I have had moments that we would call inspiring.
We might recall the power in listening to Martin Luther King's "I have a
dream" speech, the invigoration that a particular piece of music engenders, a
spreading of love and compassion as we witness the purity of a young child's
heart, or being uplifted by a selfless act of courage or a heroic accomplish-
ment. These are moments that fill us and move us, providing a kind of psycho-
logical or spiritual sustenance. And we are in good company, Hebrew proph-
ets, medieval poets, ancient Greek philosophers, and contemporary artists all
describe something similar that is referred to as inspiration. While often asso-
ciated with the great artist or mystic, inspiration is a term that is regularly used
to refer to highly significant moments in the lives of many of us and, as such,
warrants a closer examination.

This chapter considers inspiration as a specific epistemic event, a process
3f knowing. It is one that is distinctly different from the kind of knowing
haracteristic of the typical normal waking state which is dominated by con-
tant internal dialogue in the form of thinking about the past and anticipation
3f the future. In the normal waking state awareness is subservient to analysis,
le possibility of participation in the scene often thwarted by the expectation
or observation, and deep contact prohibited by chronic categorizing of the
Dther. Our style of knowing is skewed by the acceptance of subject - object
lichotomy and of the objectivism that rationalizes this in place. These norms
ire described as more or less rational, linguistic and empirical (in a narrow
ense of the word emphasizing measurement rather than experience). We are
ncreasingly noticing the destruction that emerges out of such a distant "I - it"
tyle of knowing. When we treat the other as some "thing" that is discon-
nected from us, it is much easier to propagate violence upon it, whether the
)ther is the natural world, a fellow human or even some disowned part of
mrselves. At the same time that this may define our cultural norms with re-
pect to knowing, we see evidence and longing for alternatives. The long tra-
lition of mystic knowing, with its significant resurgence in transpersonal psy-
hology, meditation and everything from urban shaman to angels, may be a
ign of cultural recognition of the need for epistemic correction.

This chapter uncovers inspiration as one possible way of shifting the cen-
er of our knowing. After a brief orientation to the use of the term, the expe-
ience of inspiration is described, in part, through voices drawn from in-depth

Inspiration

interviews with seventy participants; this is followed by an exploration of the
cultivation of inspiration in an attempt to form a doorway into this experi-
ence.

The understanding of inspiration as a specific non-rational process of know-
ing is common across cultures and time. The word itself, stemming from the
Latin "inspirare", implies being breathed into, filled or inflamed. In ancient
inspired creativity the Muse are described as whispering, breathing or singing
into the recipient, providing the source for music, poetry, and so forth. Re-
lated to inspirare and perhaps its Greek origin (Heschel, 1962) is "enthusi-
asm" which implies being possessed (by a god) or having a god in oneself. The
myth of Dionysus provides a model of inspiration via ecstasy, that is, a contact
with or possession by some transcendent knowledge through losing oneself
through passionate abandon. Of this path Nietzsche wrote: "The mystical tri-
umphant cry of Dionysus breaks the spell of individuation, opening the way to
the Mothers of all Being, to the innermost heart of things" (as cited in Vogt,
1987, p. 34). Nietzsche saw Dionysus as an opportunity for wholeness and
unity precisely because he "prescribes" an alternative form of knowing, one
that "tears down the barriers that have been erected by excessive rationality
and individuation" (p.34). Williams (1982) suggests that inspiration exists as
a specific mental process; "...(it) describes the poet in the process of learning
... a means of gaining knowledge ...of achieving wisdom" (p.l).

In accounts of contemporary creativity we seem either to be waiting for
inspiration to get us started or for that moment of discovery that will consti-
tute a breakthrough or illumination in the way we have been thinking about
a problem. Creativity and inspiration are often thought to be dependent on
"encounter" an intimate relationship with some aspect of the world. "The
deeper aspects of awareness are activated to the extent that the person is com-
mitted to the encounter" (May, 1976, p. 46). For RoUo May the second facili-
tating characteristic is receptivity "...holding (oneself) alive to hear what
being may speak. ...(This) reqtiires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in
order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge" (May,
1976, p. 91).

We also use the word inspiration to address issues relating to religion and
meaning. We may speak of a revelation or a an inspiring prayer that provides
hope and perspective. Religionist Abraham Heschel (1962) has written of the
concept of inspiration in relation to revelation and prophecy. Underbill (1960)
describes inspiration as "the opening of the sluices, so that those waters of
truth in which all life is bathed may rise to the level of consciousness" (p. 63).
Laski (1968) considers inspiration as a "special immediate action or influence
of the Spirit of God (or of some divinity or supernatural being) upon the mind
or soul" or "A breathing in or infusion of some idea, purpose, etc. into the

50

Tobin Hart

mind" (pp. 280-281). Assagioli (1965, 1973) suggests that inspiration occurs
when the ego or personality contacts a higher or transpersonal self.
Transpersonal experiences are regularly described as including transformative
non-rational learning (e.g., Bucke, 1901; James, 1902; Laski, 1968; Maslow,
1971, 1983; May, 1982; Underbill, 1960; Wilber, 1995).

What is common among all of these explanations is the understanding of
inspiration as a specific and non-rational process of knowing, one that appears
available to all of us.

Phenomenology and Meaning

While it is ephemeral, and often fleeting, making it difficult to articulate
directly, of the scores of people I have interviewed about their experience of
inspiration, all were able to recognize and describe moments of inspiration
and the meaning it holds in their life [see Hart (in press) for a methodological
description of this study]. Four general phenomenological characteristics help
to identify and define inspiration: "connection", "energy", "opened", "clar-
ity". While one or more of these aspects may be most prominent in a person's
description, every experience contained each of these four dimensions.

Contact and Connection

A kind of direct contact and connection occurs in the moment of inspira-
tion. This is accompanied or perhaps accomplished by the perceived alter-
ation of one's personal or self boundaries and with it there is a shift in a sense
3f self-separateness. While the degree of expansion or alteration of boundaries
i^aried, connection and contact were described as distinct from a "normal"
subject-object dicotomization.

Wilber (1996) describes such contact in witnessing great art: "(It) grabs
^ou, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a
ijuiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of the self con-
Taction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may
;ome flashes of higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. " (p.
?0). Note the epistemic shift that is at the center of this description and the
lontent (truths, revelations, connections) of an inspirational moment that is
:he result. "James", a thirty year old musician whom 1 interviewed described
:he sense of contact and connection as "coming home" while witnessing a
sunset from a cliff on Prince Edward island. "There was a feeling of being at
lome with the world and myself; a connectedness..." Contact is not reserved
o great beauty. Nobel laureate (in genetics) Barbara McClintock described
noments of contact with corn plants when she talked about "a feeling for the
)rganism", that requires an "openness to let it come to you" (in Keller, 1983,
). 198). The object of contact can be anything generally thought of as an
other" for example, some aspect of one's own shadow, in Jungian terms,

51

Inspiration

another person. The distance inherent in the observation and analysis of nor-
mal waking consciousness is replaced with the intimacy of contact and the
alteration of self-other distinction. One woman I spoke with described the
following sense of completeness: "I wasn't just a mind thinking thoughts or
just a body working hard, 1 was a totality. My person had expanded to include
the friend I was with and the birds and the sunset and even the dock." The
most expansive experiences spoke of a connection with everything an ex-
perience and awareness of the unity of all existence. These are the numinous
experiences often described in mysticism and captured by the following de-
scription from a woman 1 interviewed.

1 remember my first realization of everything being connected. 1
was fifteen or sixteen, sitting in silence in my special spot outside
and sort of tuning in to nature, the little birds and insects here
and there. Then suddenly 1 had this realization of everything being
connected. Both in the sense of just part of the same but then,
what was most amazing to me, was there was also a sense of ev-
erything being equal the majestic mountain, the blade of grass,
and me...

The alteration of the relationship between subject and object is a compo-
nent of transpersonal experience, but the phenomenon is not reserved for
higher stages of development, (Although its particular degree or qualities may
help to mark these stages, for example, the description immediately above
would fall within Wilber's (1995) "psychic" stage of transpersonal develop-
ment.) but is a characteristic of inspiration at any stage.

For example, other moments also described as inspiration included em-
bracing some aspect of oneself that in turn affected the sense of identity: "I
learned that I could trust and accept myself." "1 came to recognize my es-
sence". One woman described overcoming her own shyness to have a success-
ful experience working in a shoe store. She did not have a transpersonal expe-
rience but claimed new self-efficacy and personal power as she experienced
deep contact and awareness with some previously alienated part of herself.
Another woman describes a moment of inspiration while vacuuming. "It was
a shift from my usual feeling of vacuuming which was just something to get
through a necessary burden to be done as quickly as possible. But then it
just shifted, I appreciated the convenience of the vacuum, was in wonder about
its technology, I was fully enjoying what it and 1 were doing. 1 was really there
in the room and with this tool; I went from drudgery to real enjoyment. It
seems trivial that this was an inspiration but that is what it feels like." I
should note that this same woman also described profoundly mystical or
transpersonal experiences as examples of her inspiration. At the root of these

52

Tobin Hart

noments was a shift in the way she knew the world her epistemic style
noving her from a thinking observer, to a connected, aware participant.

Where conventional thinking and perception is often maintained by a
)elief in objectivism and manifest in the perceived separation between ob-
ects, inspiration breaks through those distinctions. Rather than remaining
ipart from or in distant observation of an "other", our boundaries are altered
is we experience a connection that may be expressed as empathy, understand-
ng, love, and compassion. One woman reported: "A veil was lifted, 1 saw it all
o clearly, I remembered what was most important, I knew what was right to
lo because it was as if it all fell together perfectly from this view." We move
irom categorizing to contact and in so doing practice accommodation (see
-lart, 1995).

Love or acceptance, trust and appreciation were often the outcome of in-
piration and appear to be tied to this degree of connectedness. It was experi-
enced physically as a filling or warming of the chest and emotionally as an
leepening or spreading of love. As one person describes: "I saw how much my
oving is what is most meaningful and that it hurts when I feel hardened to-
vard my husband or curt, disconnected from my children."

opened

Inspiration is experienced as an opening, as an availability and receptivity
vhich occurred quite unexpectedly and spontaneously for some. 1 remember a
Irive I took along one of the Great Lakes last summer. 1 had just left my wife
md children for a few days alone; I was enjoying the freedom of a fast summer
Irive without anyone to tell me to turn the radio down or put the window up.
suddenly took notice of the huge cumulus clouds set against a brilliant blue
ky; in that moment I was transported and transfigured full and free like
he clouds, vibrant like the sky; joy, power and peace all at once... chest burst-
ng... no words, just being and knowing. I felt like my awareness opened into a
lirectness and immediacy, without linguistic preconception or the need for
mmediate intrepretation. This way of being is easily overwelmed by the
hythms of a busy, responsible, adult day. In this case a break from typical
esponsibilites and the trigger of a beautiful sky seemed to set the stage for this
mexpected opening.

For some inspiration was a familiar experience that could be prepared for.
'i.rtists, authors or meditators may prepare themselves mentally, creating an
iviting environment and focus attention in a particular direction. Whether
nexpected or invited, the phrases below emerged consistently from those I
iterviewed: "available", "letting go", "flowed through", "a channel", "not in
vf control", "Everything in my body just opened up." As part of being opened
lere was sometimes expressed a sense of "awe", even wonder and often thank-
ilness or relief.

53

Inspiration

As a consequence of being open or opened there was a simultaneous de-
scription of being "filled", or of serving as a channel or a vessel through which
something flowed. As one man reported: "When my writing is inspired it's
like automatic writing; it's almost like taking dictation." The filling "substance"
was most often described as energy, light, or warmth. Several participants also
indicated being filled with a sense of God or spirit as well as with illuminating
ideas. The root meaning of the word inspire, to be filled or infused, expresses
this dimension precisely. When the connection is intense enough the con-
tainer or the self seems to disappear and being filled is experienced as fullness
or expansiveness without a sense of being a separate container.

This raises the question of the source of inspiration; to what or whom are
we opening? the unconscious, divinity or something else. It has been interest-
ing to watch the proliferation of writings and interest in channeling during
the '80s and Angels in the '90s. While these areas are fertile ground for char-
latans on the one hand and wishful thinkers on the other, two aspects of these
phenomena speak to the consideration of inspiration. First, the concept of
knowing or gaining information from some disembodied source and through
some non-rational means represents the precise opposite of the embodied,
empirical rationality that has been the modernist's highest knowing. As such,
the widespread popularity of the idea of non-rational knowing and of know-
ing as a contact with some "other" may hint at the need for a culture-wide
epistemic correction. While the ancient Greeks poets invoked the mythic
Muse and Socrates wrote of a divine voice, "daimonion," that names a tran-
scendent power, the idea of a guardian spirit or of divine intercession has gradu-
ally become internalized. "Following Greek sources, Roman religion posits
that every man has a genius, a familiar spirit; eighteenth century aesthetics
maintains that a great poet has genius; and today an extraordinarily creative
person is a genius" (Frieden, 1985, p. 15). "The classical conception of a guard-
ian spirit is gradually supplanted by modem ideas of an individual extraordi-
nary mind." (p. 8) We have become epistemically self-sufficient in a style
that is centered in rationality. Self-reliance, hyper- individualism, and the like
appear as social values emerging from these beliefs; narcissism, disconnected-
ness and arrogance grow as social epidemics from these assumptions. How-
ever, it appears that we are past the apex of hyper-individualism; hints of this
shift come through relational theorists like Gilligan (1982), the rise of the
importance of social context in the understanding of human behavior, eco-
logical awareness that recognizes our interconnection with nature, and more
recently, transpersonal psychology that seeks consciousness of the unity of all
life. While the idea of a divinity providing guidance and direction is an an-
cient one, its reemergence in popular culture helps to adjust contemporary
myths about the boundaries of the self, correcting the overly individualistic,

54

Tobin Hart

entirely self-sufficient rational knower that is the hero of modernist mythol-
ogy-

I should caution that the inside - outside dichotomy elaborated here is a
False one, that is, a relative one. It may be valuable in that it suggests the need
X3r opening and making contact beyond our narrowly defined self. However,
kvhile the source of an inspiration is often reported to be "from the outside",
kvhen our base of consciousness is altered we may experience this differently. If
3ur openness and connection are deep enough, our inside (i.e. consciousness,
Dody, etc.) is no longer distinct from the outside. That is, the source is not
perceived as being "outside" or apart from the experiencer. Said another way,
kvhen our consciousness expands and experiences deep interconnection we do
lot experience the other (in this case the source of our inspiration) as sepa-
rate from us, the experience arises without a distinct origin.

What is common is that the inspiration arises as a result of an opening in
Dur knowing that is distinctly different from normal waking consciousness,
kvhether the source is named God, the subconscience, or remains unidentifi-
able mystery. There is a sense that it is opening to an awareness, a state of
-cnowing and being that is there all along we may think of it as a veil being
iifted or a crack in our state that allows a shaft of illumination in.

Clarity

As indivivuals found themselves connected and opened; sensory clarity
and clarity of understanding emerged. Participants in these interviews reported
tiaving a heightened sensory awareness: "I felt every cell of my skin", "My
tiearing, my sight became so clear." "Everything felt so alive". Some degree of
a transient synesthetic (see Cytowic, 1995) or multi- or merged sensory expe-
rience was frequently named. For example, one might describe the texture or
the spacial qualities of a piece of music: "It was as if I could see the different
shapes, movement and the color and density of the music." NX^ile neuro-
science reports synesthetic perception as extremely rare, the evidence of this
iensory merging as frequent in the state of inspiration challenges these as-
umptions. It also suggests that rather than an evolutionary artifact, synes-
hetic perception may provide an evolutionary and perceptual advantage or at
east a marker of alternative or expanded knowing. Merleau-Ponty (1962/1945)
naintained that synesthetic perception is the rule and that "we are unaware
)f it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experi-
:nce, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking feel,
n order to deduce... (what we sense)" (p. 229). Synesthetic perception is not,
n and of itself , inspiration. It is an experience that results from an expansion
)f perceptual norms that can accompany or spring out of inspiration. As Blake
1986) wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would ap-

55

Inspiration

pear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all
things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." (p. 101) Inspiration provides an
opening from the cavern.

There was an expansion of awareness and understanding, although this is
different than intellectual clarity. Analytic meaning lagged behind, if it came
at all. Rather than a decision or answer to a question emerging directly, the
shift was regularly reported as gaining an expanded perspective. "It didn't
come analytically, although it made perfect sense, but as a flash of clarity."
Others said: "There is a grasping of unexpected connections or seeing a kind
of hidden layer of order of reality". "Sometimes I see little things, sometimes
things 1 should have seen all along, sometimes I understand the big picture."
In intepreting their experTence, some suggested that the insight comes out of
a shift from analytic thinking to an intuitive mode. Intuition and inspiration
both represent a non-rational, as opposed to an analytic or sensory knowing;
however, in and of itself intuition is not equivalent to inspiration. For ex-
ample, we may have a flash of intellectual clarity in solving a problem and be
relieved or excited about it without an alteration of boundaries and connec-
tion. Instead our experience may be quite intellectually contained. Intuition
may involve the completion of some gestalt, the coming together of ideas, a
"sense" of something but intuition does not consistently enliven us neither is
there a shift in self-other boundaries which is a component in inspiration.

Traditionally, the scientific community has assumed hierarchy and domi-
nance in the functional and neurologic relationship between emotion and
cognition. That is, emotion and cognition are conceived of as separate phe-
nomena in which intellect dominates emotion. However, recent evidence and
argument suggests that this interplay may be quite different. Neurological evi-
dence suggests that the flow of information may actually be dominated by
emotion. (Cytowic, 1995) Further Ommaya (in press) suggests that a non-
linear, non-hierarchical model of brain functioning may be more reasonable
and allows for the possibility of more complex relationship between emotion
and cognition. Consistent with this likely complexity and interdependence,
the phenomenological evidence from the experience of inspiration shows a
simultaneity and qualitative equivalence in emotion and cognition. That is,
there is no suggestion that an intellectual insight leads to the emotion or visa
versa rather that they are part of the same experience. This might be called
emotional-cognition, full-body knowing, or something similar. It may be most
accurate to describe this knowing as the byproduct (or intermediary step) of
the expansion of awareness and transcendence of self - other boundaries that
is at the heart of inspiration.

It is important to note that this expanded style characterized by synes-
thetic sensory perception and emotional-cognitive understanding exists be-

56

Tobin Hart

tween the moment of contact and awareness in inspiration and its translation
into representational form (language, art, etc.). It serves as a benchmark on
the exploration of inspiration, but it would be a distraction if we saw it as
some perceptual and cognitive end state. We could simply cultivate synes-
thetic perception or expanded understanding and never (or rarely) experi-
ence the fuller contact and openness that is inspiration.

''Energy"

A dramatic shift in emotional, physical and "energetic" states were evi-
dent in every description of inspiration. The emotional change was not merely
"feeling better" but was an immediate and powerful shift commonly described
by those I interviewed as: "joy", "elation", "excitement", "enthusiasm", "ful-
fillment", "being at peace". "It was the first time I cried out of joy; I was sur-
prised as I thought that people only cried when they were sad." Both excite-
ment or an enlivening and peacefulness occurred within the same moment.
We normally don't conceive of peacefulness and excitement as components
of the same experience but these descriptions suggest otherwise and further
appeal for revision of our assumed segmentation of emotional experience. In-
stead of emotional opposites, the sense of being filled consisted of both an
overflowing with joy, love, vitality and a deep satisfaction that many named
as peace or calm.

Walsh's (1995) comparative phenomenological mapping of several states
of consciousness (Shamanism, Vipassana meditation, schizophrenia) rate the
direction o{ arousal and calm for each state. In each type of experience there
is an inverse relation between the two. However, in the experience of inspira-
tion, an increase in both arousal and in a sense of peacefulness (calm) is re-
ported as occurring simultaneously. The arousal is not agitation as with the
schizophrenic. It is as if a larger space opens up to contain or receive the
energy, and while it is full, even overflowing, the expanded container or con-
duit allows for more energy, but it does not emerge as frenzy, and along with it
:here exists peacefulness and satisfaction. Following inspiration there is occa-
sionally a more agitated experience as we attempt to find a channel for the
nsight. It is as if when we shift to our conventional perceptual-cognitive style
3ur container shrinks and may be overwhelmed we may have trouble con-
laining or channeling the vision we had.

Physically there was an experience, described by interviewees, of: "renewal",
'freshness", "being charged", "energized", "cleansed" and "purified", "uplifted",
ilegardless of the previous state of health or mind, the inspiration provided a
"iveting and immediate lift.

Many described, what will be referred to as, the etheric energy field being
Iramatically altered (and perhaps this is at the root of the physical and emo-

57

Inspiration

tional change). This may be noted most easily by an associated sensory change.
For example, tingling , particularly in the upper body and head, was common
to nearly all the experiences as was a fullness in the chest. In a yogic sense, the
crown chakra often seemed to be "popped" open. Other phrases that capture
some of the variety of this energetic shift include: "full of light", "...made up of
humming particles", "powerful", "An inner push", "jelliness", "I felt juices flow-
ing", "Like a flowering, like streams, It's like bubbling, an up-rising or swelling
that travels up... it is something that comes centrally but then comes out."

This emotional, physical and etheric energy was occasionally translated
into immediate action, at other times it was used as an impetus or an affirma-
tion to direct one's energies in a particular direction, for others the impact did
not incite action but a shift in their sense of Being .

It may be useful to distinguish two ways that inspiration manifests into
form and into being. The scientist searching for the solution to a question, the
artist creating a composition, the student looking for just the right topic for
her paper all represent the focus on a problem waiting to be solved in these
and similar realms inspiration manifests in form and often out of seeking form.
It is described as a "light bulb" of an idea popping in, or a fleeting image of
"what feet to put on the pot" or even having the idea of "...putting cumin in
the meatloaf '.

Often inspiration does not manifest into form (e.g., solution, art, inven-
tion) but it does consistently affect what we might call Being, without con-
cern for any tangible product.

Inspiration affecting Being is not reserved for the dramatic mystic revela-
tion or the awakening of deep compassion, for example, that Buddhist psy-
chology acknowledges but may also be seen in the "small moments" and cap-
tured by the little stories (Lyotard, 1984) effecting our day-to-day experience.
"My sixteen month old learned how to kiss me the other day, she did this so
tenderly that I was inspired; it reminded me of the loving tenderness, of the
pure love that I want to express to others." These are moments that involve
neither a solution to a problem nor a momentous spiritual awakening. They
were described by nearly everyone interviewed as providing a potent, dra-
matic, uplifting emotional-perceptual shift. The result was a sense of hope,
meaning, value and clarity in life. They lifted individuals out of numbing de-
pression or simply a numbing, mechanical routine, energized and animated
their actions, expanded their perceptions and filled them with vitality and
love. Often they occurred spontaneously but, at times, they were induced by
specific activity (e.g., listening to particular music, taking a walk). These small
moments are not necessarily as momentous as the dramatic spiritual epiphany,
the unitive experience that has been the ground (and sky) o{ transpersonal
study but they are perhaps the smaller shifts or reminders of that connection.

58

Tobin Hart

rhey seem to bring Being or consciousness into alignment with what we rec-
ognize as most important regardless of the stage or level of development. They
are often described as Plato's anamenesis the soul's remembrance of truth.
A.S two interviewees reported: "It was a remembrance of what I know most
deeply"; "It was a recognition of truth." There is a certitude in this expansion
3f awareness, and a kind of spiritual sustenance through remembrance.

Mental Illness and Inspiration

The opposite of something may give us clues as to its meaning and signifi-
:ance. Descriptions of the opposite of inspiration were very similar to one an-
other and included such words as: flat, boring, lifeless, ordinary, plodding, stag-
nant, stuck and empty. When we examine this antithesis we begin to get a
sense of the relevance and importance of inspiration to daily living: empty or
"illed, lifeless or vital, hopeless or hopeful, stagnant or moved, uninspired or
inspired. If we consider questions of psychological health and of meaning, in-
spiration seems monumentally important, not necessarily to achieve "normal
psychological and social adjustment" but to live with vitality and meaning.

If we consider inspiration as one end of a continuum, toward the other
ind is a constellation of experiences that were described as having depression
IS their emotional center. When asked about the opposite or the lack of inspi-
ation participants said: "The opposite of inspiration is depression." "A hope-
essness and meaninglessness creep in. Life seems like a great burden." "1 feel
ick, numb, just going through the motions." "The opposite is dead, dull, low,
(ray, numb, isolated."

Their answers describe the phenomenological opposite of being connected,
nergized, open and clear as described above. A heightened sense of self-sepa-
ateness and with it alienation and isolation emerged: "I close off from the
rarld"; "I feel isolated, alone and (I) don't want to deal with other people."; "I
xperience a lack of connection, I'm isolated." Being energized and peaceful is
eplaced with descriptions of numbness, flatness and/or agitation and anxiety.
There is worry which breeds anxiety." "I just muscle through life." Where
nspiration bred openness to experience its opposite was captured in being
hut down or closed off. "There is a lack of expansion, a tightness"; "... It feels
rushing." Clarity is replaced by worry and doubt: "(I feel) self-doubt" "...a
ecrease in physical activity" "...a lack of trust and faith."

The epistemic style involves constant thinking rather than open aware-
ess. Worry or just chronic mind chatter, often obsessive and circular, charac-
2rize this state. Quotes from two woman I interviewed capture some of this
avor: "The opposite of inspiration is (getting) lost in analytical thought, like
hen I try to force a decision". "Worry and inspiration can't exist at the same
me. If there is worry or fear or confusion there may be a pulling back from

59

Inspiration

life. Inspiration provides the energy to go forward." Regrets, self doubts and
focusing on memories of the past or worries about the future are typical of the
absence or opposite of inspiration. With inspiration, the horizon of one's con-
cerns clears, focus expands but is rooted in the awareness of the present mo-
ment. With its opposite, focus seems to darken and contract; it is often char-
acterized as dull or plodding resignation, "forcing" of an outcome or a deci-
sion, agitation, or a droning hardness.

When considered in the context of contemporary mental health concerns
these difficulties: depression, anxiety, alienation, confusion, obsession seem
to describe most of the current complaints. What would psychological treat-
ment look like if we saw these clients' difficulties as centered, in part, in a lack
of inspiration? As inspiration emerges as a way of knowing and being, to what
extent does our style of knowing effect our psychological well-being? What
role does the constricted epistemic style in our contemporary culture have on
our mental and spiritual health?

Some Comparisions

It would be imprudent to simply homogenize the body of material on inspi-
ration, or any other "non-ordinary experience" to some overly reduced core.
Clearly the diversity of descriptions is as rich and significant as is the com-
monalty in the experience. At the same time, there is enough in common in
the material to name some shared ground. And since inspiration is a subtle
phenomenon, one that is difficult to approach directly, any conclusions must
be tentative and part of an ongoing dialogue rather than a definitive state-
ment. The most I have hoped to do is to make contact with it, rather than
capture it. Very briefly comparing inspiration to allied phenomena may give
some clearer sense of what it is and is not.

The term inspiration is sometimes used to describe motivation. Motiva-
tion is sometimes the pragmatic, active, operational consequence of inspira-
tion, but the energetic spark and the flow or "filling up" of inspiration is de-
scribed as a more ephemeral and powerful event; an experience of knowing
and being. Where motivation involves applying our will toward accomplish-
ing a goal, the inspiration is a moment of galvanizing energy and insight that
may then be consciously distilled into work on some task. Where inspiration
provides the illuminating vision and surge of energy, motivation may emerge
naturally or willfully as a next pragmatic step in order to get a "job" done.
Where motivation is an act of intent that may be catalyzed by inspiration, the
inspiration itself is perceived as emerging from a willingness or allowing that
is described below. Motivation also may be needed for maintaining the focus
that leads toward inspiration. This is often described as the perseverance to
stay with the frustration or difficulty. As one scientist I spoke with describes:

60

Tobin Hart

(In problem solving) you reach points of frustration. It wasn't going to hap-
)en in the first ten minutes. It really took a long time to gel. It required prepa-
ation and frustration."

Inspiration as a way of knowing is not a cognitive developmental level
uch as Piaget's formal operational thought or even a post-formal operation
uch as Wilber's (1995) descriptions of vision-logic or the fifth-order con-
ciousness of Flier's (1995) constructive-developmentalism in which mysti-
ism is not other than reason but a developmental perspective on reason,
lather than a cognitive-developmental stage, inspiration represents a differ-
nt style or form, characterized by the epistemology and the phenomenology
nentioned above.

Neither is inspiration confined to a particular stage or order o{ the broader
levelopment of consciousness. That is, it may occur as a component of a
ranspersonal experience, but can also occur at any developmental level. For
xample, an inspiration may emerge as a strong transcendent connection with
lature or an experience of non-duality or an event that fosters a holistic sense
>f self-efficacy and self-esteem. Each of these may reflect different develop-
mental stages [in these examples Wilber's ( 1995) Psychic, Nondual, and Ego/
!^entauric levels respectivelyl. These maps may help to locate a stage or order
)f development in which inspiration manifests, but inspiration is not con-
ined to a particular stage or limited to expression beyond a certain level.
X^hile ontological ground is often shifted in a transpersonal experience, in
nspiration, only a particular shift in epistemic style, not stage is required.

The difference between the manifestations of inspiration in higher levels
ind those preceding it may be analogized (however crudely) to electricity,
ike the electrical current that gets stepped down from the generating plant
o the light socket, the farther we are from the "source," the lower is the inten-
ity of the current and yet the fundamental qualities of the electricity, like
nspiration remain the same. Or, using an analogy emphasizing the receiver
ather than the "source", the inspiration is varied depending on the quality of
>ur receptive devices and the extent to which we are attuned to the frequency.

Flier (1995) reminds us that mysticism is a way of knowing, not something
o be known. But we often are absorbed by the content of such knowing,
ocusing on some tangible product (e.g., idea, insight, etc.) rather than the
rocess itself. However, it is not the content translated into some proverbial
tone tablet or intellectual insight that is the value in these states, it is the
tnmediacy and vitality of our direct and frequent knowing. The value of the
ext or tablet or practice is in its ability to move us or remind us into this state
f knowing. As we uncover and are reminded of the sacred in everyday life,
he cultivation of inspiration may help to deepen our awareness of the mysti-
al in daily living.

61

Inspiration

What is the relationship between inspiration and peak experiences? "Mo-
ments of highest happiness and fulfillment" was an acceptable definition of
peak experiences for Maslow (1962, p. 69). Obviously this very broad defini-
tion captures a wide range of experiences. Maslow compiled a list of nineteen
phenomenological characteristics, later refined into clusters, which formed a
prototypical or perfect peak experience. However, he reported that no one
reported all of these characteristics. Some later work (e.g., Panzarella, 1980)
has attempted to bring more specificity to the phenomenological make up of
peak experience while transpersonal psychology has attempted to understand
the "higher end" experiences. This research also attempts to look inside sub-
jective experiences, but rather than considering the very broadly defined "peak"
experiences as a whole, inspiration considers a more specific process of know-
ing that may be part of many peak, plateau or other experiences. Maslow rec-
ognized that peak experiences did not always have a noetic or cognitive ele-
ment and in some later work, suggested that peak experiences are transforma-
tive only when they contain a cognitive component (in Krippner, 1972, p.
115). In this he hints at the importance of the process of knowing that I have
tried to uncover here.

Whether in creative expression, mystic revelation, peak experience or the
knowing of an everyday encounter, it is the particular style of knowing that
may be uncovered as the process of inspiration. And as has been discussed
above, the event is not simply cognitive but one that has a particular phe-
nomenological and cognitive-emotional matrix, and is typically characterized
by some degree of transient synesthetic perception. Many, but not all, peak
experiences may have behind or within them the epistemic motor of inspira-
tion.

Like inspiration, the shamanic journey involves an altered state or an
epistemic shift as a means of obtaining knowledge. It has enjoyed a renewed
interest through the work of Eliade (1963), Goodman (1988, 1990), Harner
(1980), Larson (1976), Perry (1974), Walsh (1990), and others. Shamanic
experience typically includes an alleged vacating of the body and the soul
traveling to other spirit domains. By contrast, in inspiration the Muse, divin-
ity, an idea, etc. visits us. We remained embodied, a radio receiver that may
tune in one direction or another, or may spontaneously receive a welcome
signal, while the shaman is more like a probe traveling to other domains.
Using Walsh's (1995) phenomenological mapping we can further, if briefly,
differentiate inspiration from shamanic journeying. The ability of the experi-
enced shaman to leave and enter shamanic states at will is not as typical for
the inspired individual, although there can be some proficiency developed in
welcoming inspiration, but not in willing it. I have found that the use of brief
shamanic-like ritual, drumming, chanting, etc. can open one's availability to

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Tobin Hart

ispiration as well as to shamanic journeying. Perhaps some experiences of
le shamanic workshop participant are actually experiences of inspiration,
"hey should be easily differentiated from one another as the following brief
omparison identifies. Walsh suggests the shaman maintains partial control of
le content. The only sense of control of content with inspiration is occa-
onally in the initial direction of focus (e.g., toward a particular issue, ques-
on, or form) but there is no sense of shaping the material itself. Awareness of
le environment decreases in shamanic journeying but is heightened in inspi-
ition. Unlike shamanism, during inspiration arousal and calm increase as
mentioned above, only "positive" feelings are reported and there is no ecstasis
r out of the body experience, we remain embodied, however the sense of self
; expanded, sometimes tremendously.

We see the shamanic journey and inspiration representing two similar yet
istinct modes of acquiring knowledge through non-rational means. While
oth may prove valuable, inspiration may have some distinct advantages. First,
lere is no cultural barrier in inspiration which has sometimes been a com-
laint of the use of shamanic experience out of its cultural context. While it
lay be possible to invoke a core shamanic experience that does not require
lared culture legacy, there remains some reasonable doubt about this. Inspi-
jtion also appears available to a wider range of individuals. Even in cultures
'here shamanism is part of the mainstream, it is usually undertaken by an
iite group who may have special skills, lineage or status. Inspiration appears
^alitarian in that it takes some form in nearly everyone.

Cultivating Inspiration

While it does not seem possible to will inspiration into existence, it does
:em likely that we can set up favorable conditions to woo it. Three general
ipects impact the emergence of inspiration: setting, set and mystery.

etting

Inspiration emerged in a wide range of contexts and activities or settings,
eluding in situations involving: helping others, acts of creativity, moving
iyond some personal challenge or limitation, love, meditation, etc.. While
lecific events were not said to cause inspiration, there were some common
riggers" that were associated with the experience including: nature, love,
ffering and/or colirage, ideas, music, exercise, beauty or quality. But the value

this information is quite limited in two ways. Many of these same triggers
>uld be found if we asked about peak, mystical, happy or similar experiences
ee Laski, 1968; Nelson, 1990), and virtually anything could be found to be a

gger. If we are in a particularly open, available state we find ourselves able

make contact and be inspired in nearly any setting. However, most of the

63

Inspiration

time we are so immersed in our normal waking state that it takes a strong
magnet, such as great art, music, etc., to attract our attention.

One woman reports: "When I listen to Puccini I get inspired; it happens
almost every time if I pay attention." Does everyone get inspired by Puccini?
Probably not. Our individual meaning structures and experience make cer-
tain events, acts, sights more salient to one person than another. While the
longing and love and beauty in much of Puccini's work, for example, may be
particularly inspiring to one person, it may, given the right internal condi-
tions, inspire a great many. It appears that some events, ideas, music seem to
resonate through most of us if we are paying attention, are present or are open
to the experience; that is, our mind-set effects our availability to our setting.

Certain people are inspired in certain directions. For example, a woman
who overcame abuse and describes herself as strong and self reliant finds the
highest level of inspiration in events and music that reflect and express power.
A self described artist finds beauty and creativity as most moving; the medita-
tor describes states of particular mystic awareness as the most salient moments.
None of these is exclusive; that is, the initial apparent preference or availabil-
ity doesn't preclude inspiration from other ways but it may suggest a front door
into their experience.

Inspiration emerged frequently out of frustration or difficulty. Paradoxi-
cally, while a loving, secure, or beautiful setting may at times be conducive to
inspiration, moments of difficulty, vulnerability, frustration or struggle were
often the ground from which inspiration sprang. It may nudge a shift in our
state of knowing.

We also find inspiration as consuming and contagious, cultivated by our
mere association with something or someone. In Ion Plato writes that the
Muse is "... a divine power, which moves you like ...a magnet ...the Muse
inspires man herself, and then by means of these inspired persons the inspira-
tion spreads to others, and holds them in a connected chain." (lines 533, D-
E). Whenever inspiration was described in a context where there were others
around there was frequently a propagation of the experience. Whether hear-
ing a Martin Luther King speech, or during a papal visit (see Biela and Tobacyk,
1987) or even at a Nazi Nuremberg rally, inspirations seems to have a conta-
gion like quality. Although the mere wild or Dionysian-like frenzy of a group
is not the same as inspiration. We can have enthususiam, or passionate aban-
don without the expanded sense of knowing that is charateristic of inspira-
tion. The great work of art or musical composition or speech has that same
power to move us as the presence of another person. 1 suggest that a work ol
art, food, music, etc. that was brought forth through a process of inspiratior
has a greater likelihood of evoking inspiration in others; it contains or be-
comes the contagion itself.

64

Tobin Hart

We often seemed pulled to the level of those around us. We may find that
vith a good tennis opponent, the quality of our game is raised. The same kind
)f shift can occur when we are around someone whom we recognize as par-
icularly healthy or holy, for example. We may unintentionally be dragged
lown or raised up depending on our diet of company we keep. Parents of
:eenagers often become poignantly aware of this. With respect to inspiration,
ve discover that our own inspiration may catalyze another person's experi-
ence and their inspiration may move us. The inspired teacher affects the stu-
lent, the therapist who is engaged in this altered way of knowing seems to
ipeed up his or her client's understanding. In such an exchange there appears
m expansion or elevation to inspiration's broader cognitive-emotional style.
5ince inspiration not only provides valuable knowledge or perspective but
ilso becomes self-reinforcing, our use of it as an intentional catalyst may open
lome possibilities in helping and teaching roles.

Four characteristics describe the internal "set" for inviting inspiration: fo-
;us, trust, letting go, and "listening". This, of course, only invites it, and does
lot create or construct an experience. Assessing our ability on each of these
ispects may suggest a means for growing in graciousness toward welcoming
nspiration. It may also be described as a way of honing our skills of knowing.

A change in focus involves unhitching from the train of normal waking
:onsciousness. Focus often emerges out of conscious and deliberate intent,
ometimes initially as an invocation of sorts. This takes the form of prayer,
neditation, or formulating and asking a specific question directing one's
ttention in a particular way or toward a particular object. For example: "In
ontemplation I throw my attention toward something, knowing Mother Mary,
or example, and if I am paying attention, in time I notice a difference, a
welling in my chest, a kind of seeing or knowing that I had not been aware of
n the previous moment." The power of ritual, personal or collective, is com-
lon to many styles of focusing. The ancient Greek poet asks the Muse for
:isight, the devout or desperate pray, the religious service attempts to funnel
s into a partially common experience through liturgy, communion, common
/ords and actions, the scientist reviews the data and frames the question that
> most appropriate to answer, the artist prepares his or her physical and psy-
hological space and directs her energies toward a project.

This is a delicate act in that too much willful focus may enamor us with
le apparent control or power of our act of directing, preventing us from mov-
ig beyond this set. Too narrow a focus may frame the "question" two tightly,
ot allowing room for what may come. Without adequate presence or focus
^e may spin from one thing to another keeping inspiration at bay. An experi-

65

Inspiration

enced meditator hints at the role of sustaining attention in facing some un-
comfortable area of his own existence: "Sometimes I deliberately try to stay
focused on the painful area. There is a natural tendency to want to shove it
aside and attend to something else. But I know when I immerse myself in it,
stay focused on it, there can be a kind of softening, loosening it up. I can't
make it happen. You have to hang in there. It does it's thing."

Reaching out is another way to name this focusing. Husserl describes an
"emotive and cognitive reaching out to the other in a self-transcending em-
pathic understanding" (Kohak, 1984 p. 206). This implies an intentionally,
direction or a desire to make contact with some "other" (e.g., part of self, an
idea, a person, etc.). This too is a delicate move, as our reaching out may
become compulsive and our attention obsessive, degenerating to an addictive
grasping or attachment that "must have" the outcome and as such makes it
difficult to allow or let go. Dossey (1993), in reviewing research on prayer and
healing, summarizes an interesting observation that healing may be most likely
to occur not when a particular outcome is prayed for but when the focus is in
the spirit of "thy will be done". While presence or focused attention is critical,
the "need" to have a particular outcome may get in the way, including inhib-
iting inspiration.

While our intent often sets the stage, at times our focus is narrowed for us
despite our own direction. A riveting event such as a death or anything else
that provides a break from our routine, for example, exhaustion, fasting, mind-
fulness, etc. may suddenly catapult one into a clearing which inspiration vis-
its. There is, in many of us, a longing for this style of knowing and for a cessa-
tion of the train of thinking.

Beyond focus is trust, which is a belief or attitude that appears essential for
this process. The trust or faith is in a non-rational, post-reflective way of know-
ing, although it is sometimes personified (e.g., faith in God, etc.) or otherwise
explained (e.g., the benevolence of nature, knowing my deepest self, etc.).
The trust was sometimes weakened by an almost exclusive dependence or
faith in rational-sensory knowing and was strengthened by experiences of in-
spiration: "This reminds me that ultimately the world is trustworthy and that
1 can trust myself and the natural order of things." "I remembered to trust
myself." "I recognized the inherent wisdom... that I knew was there all along";
"I think it is an affirmation of something I already know, but that I usually
forget."

The interviews I conducted ended by asking participants what advice they
had for themselves in relation to inspiration. Consistently, the majority oi
responses looked like this: "trust myself; "trust the benevolence and wisdom
of the spirit"; "trust and stay attuned with the spirit"; "Letting myself be vul-
nerable ...trusting that an answer will come."

66

; Tobin Hart

Gerald May (1982) uses the term "willingness" to describe an attitude of
list and allowing and suggests that our overly willful, in-control cultural norms
ften exclude the possibility of constructive surrender. I argue that this style
f control is held in place by our narrow epistemic norms.

"Letting go" or "allowing" follows naturally from trust, but while trust or
'illingness implies an attitude, letting go is closer to an action. It is paradoxi-
al in the sense that we must be intentional (willful) as we move toward let-
ng go, but we let go in this moment of surrender. This has been referred to as
releasement" (Heidegger), "detachment" (Eckhart), "wuwei" in Taoism. It
ccurs subtly, unexpectedly, often with a "give". One person describes: "It is
ke crawling through mud or wading your way through a jungle. That is your
rdinary way of being. It's so subtle... suddenly there is a clearing in the jungle,
our awareness pervades through these jungle structures and they start melt-
ig away, ... dissipating and then you are in a clearing."

We often have insights and inspirations that go unused or seem wasted,
hat is, our recognition is fleeting, a glint that is easily clouded by the haze of
urried everyday consciousness. As such there may be no translation into a
reative product or no sustained shift in our perspective or our self. How many
ood ideas or expansive views slip away before we are filled by them? While
ispirations are somewhat harder to ignore than intellectual insights, they are
elicate experiences that require psychological space if they are to come to
ill bloom. Within the allowing or letting go we must pay attention or listen.
When Michalangelo did the Sistine Chapel he painted both the major and
le minor prophets. They can be told apart because, though there are cheru-
im at the ears of all, only the major prophets are listening." (Gowan as cited

I Harman and Rheingold, 1984, p. 8.) It is this listening or paying attention
lat enables us to be meaningfully effected, allowing the inspiration its flow-
ring.

Mystery

And again, despite our best efforts and intention, inspiration often comes
nexpectedly and out of our direct control. It remains, at times, mysterious. I
m reminded of how the action of subatomic particles is described by the
uantum physicists. While probability may suggest where and when the next
sighting" may occur, it cannot predict or make it happen, and so is the case
nth inspiration. Using other language, it is sometimes experienced as a grace,
s free giving of a gift which implies the direct control is not fully ours.

Focus, trust, letting go, listening the extent that these are manifest in

II our activities is reflective of the degree to which we feel the benefits of
aspiration in our lives: uplifted, clear, connected, peaceful and loving, al-
lough certainly not without struggle and suffering. Some of the research par-

67

Inspiration

ticipants have had more inspirational events than others, and while it never
became commonplace, for some it became frequent, a part of their daily lives,
a way of living and knowing. Our development in each of these dimensions
relates to the regularity of inspiration in our existence. And such regularity
may alter the experience a bit. For example, the intensity of ecstasy that was
often associated with the first remembered events of inspiration mellowed a
bit for those in whom this experience became more common. "My early expe-
riences were more like rapture, ecstasy. Now it is more like an incredible sense
of well-being, of clarity and lightness."

Someone suffering from mental difficulties may not only lack the direct
benefits of inspiration but also the prelude to it, the set or techniques that
welcome it. This suggests that both the experience itself and the understand-
ing of the mechanism or process that invites inspiration may be facilitated
and be useful in helping others. Assessing one on each of these dimensions
may provide some direction for therapy or other growth work. For example,
we might find our ability to focus and be present, or to still our minds and
listen, or our faith or trust in the viability of this process, may keep inspiration
at bay; developing practical skills in the needed area may help to invite inspi-
ration.

We also notice that some people find inspiration in some domains but do
not extend this to others areas of their lives. The artist or athlete who describe
their work as regularly benefiting from inspiration may not always generalize
this form of knowing. Other dimensions of their life may be wholly uninspired,
as if the same rules of knowing do not apply. As has been suggested, the extent
to which one applies these principles to all aspects of living may be a marker of
their satisfaction connection, clarity, etc. Inspiration in one arena may also
provide the basis for generalizing the learning. Some of us may be especially
"tuned" to inspiration in art, for example, but like the meditator who has won-
derful peace and insight in their practice but can not seem to embody the
wisdom in their daily life, the practice may become a hideout. Tart (1990), for
example, has addressed the importance and the pragmatics of bringing the prac-
tice of mindfulness to everyday activities, better suited to the non-monastic,
non-reclusive style of most of our lives. With respect to inspiration, the lack of
understanding of it as an available and relevant process of knowing in nearly
any context may hamper its extension in other areas. We may not recognize
that the way we deal with our family, work or our even our next meal is as
much an opportunity to be inspired as is our sacred practice of art or religion.

Conclusion

Rather than a rare event reserved for the gifted artist or great mystic, inspi-
ration appears to be something that nearly all of us experience and have some

68

Tobin Hart

mderstanding of. Inspiration is a specific epistemic process that provides psy-
;hological and spiritual sustenance. This involves an expansion of awareness
vhich includes an intimate relationship or a transcendence o{ conventional
ubject-object distinction with some idea, object or person. As such, inspira-
ion describes a non-rational, post-reflective event of knowing that can be
;ultivated but not willed.

Walsh ( 1 995 ) has argued that Western culture is monophasic, our worldview
Irawn largely from a single state of consciousness, the usual waking state. The
:vidence of inspiration as frequent and significant helps to continue to shift
he center of gravity away from the exclusivity of the normal waking state and
vith it a narrow form of rational-empiricism as the only viable source of know-
ng and being. As we re-member our epistemic means, we may reclaim the
ignificance of inspiration in our own lives. As we consciously integrate in-
piration, we can shift the ground of our normal waking state itself.

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71

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction:
Through the Ontological Looking Glass

Peter L. Nelson

Introduction

It has always been claimed by mystics and spiritual seekers that once one
has encountered the mystic's "ultimate ground of being" (a direct encounter
with God, Goddess, the "Mysterium Tremendum", the Void, or whatever name
is given to the ontic source of our existence), then one has gained a profound
spiritual knowledge which subsumes all other knowing thereby bestowing on
the knower a unique epistemic position and certainty.^ This position is one in
which it is claimed that the "truth" behind all appearances is revealed and the
ultimate ontological source of our knowing, indeed of who we are, is now
directly accessed. Those who have this sort of encounter argue with great
sincerity and force that this new knowledge is sui generis and final it cannot
be questioned because it is not a matter of intellectual debate, but rather the
result of a unique and direct awareness a unique spiritual knowing. The
argument usually given is that, if one fails to accept these assertions, then it is
because one has not yet had such an experience and without the shared expe-
riential base all attempts at explanation are useless, viz., to know color, one
must not be color-blind.

In 1971, while a graduate student at the Psychological Institute of the
University of Copenhagen, I had what I believe is such an experience. At the
time, my reaction and understanding was not unlike that sketched above. 1
felt and believed with every fiber of my being that I had gone through the
looking glass of phenomenal appearances and had encountered the ultimate
core "emptiness" of being the ontological source. At the time I believec
that 1 understood the very nature of the ontological bottom line and my en-
tire world was re-interpreted from this view which I believed was given as a
result of my new and apparently elevated epistemic platform. Although I ac-
cepted, absolutely, the truth of my new vision at the time, 1 have come tc
understand this episode somewhat differently with the passage of time. 1 ac
cept that the experience was a move into a new epistemic frame, but 1 nc
longer accept it as the ultimate and final position from which one can attair
for making sense of the phenomenal world - nor do I believe that there is suet
a final position.

Peter L. Nelson

I now claim that it is but one of many possible epistemic frames. It is not
chat I believe that there is no truth revealed through such encounters I
:ertainly do. However, I no longer believe that there is one final position from
kvhich all truth is knowable in any ultimate sense. Although this encounter at
irst set me in the philosophical and religious mold of an ontological absolutist
there is one and only one final reality and truth that position, itself,
eventually opened my eyes to other possibilities. Once one other possibility
ivas admitted, I then had to entertain the likelihood of still others. As I fol-
lowed this process of intellectual and spiritual exploration I was inexorably
led to a clearing in the forest which I now identify as part of that collocation
of intellectual perspectives known as Postmodernism. I later realized that my
primary compass guiding me there was a post-analytic critical method which
tias emerged as the primary technique of the postmodern school known as
Deconstructionism.^

Some would immediately accuse me of having lost my spiritual direction -
a loss of faith and belief in what I had directly encountered. Rudolph Otto
(1958), the Nineteenth Century theologian, might have charged me as hav-
ng forgotten the "creature feeling" experienced at the time of my encounter
vith the "tremendum" (p. 8) and, similarly, some of my Buddhist friends cer-
:ainly believe that I have re-descended back into the samsaric depths from
vhich I had temporarily emerged. This remains to be seen.

However, while 1 await final judgment regarding my spiritual health, I will
;ive, first, a brief description of my encounter with the "absolute" and, sec-
)nd, using perspectives drawn from consciousness studies and postmodernism,
nake an attempt to demonstrate that this progression I have followed is deeply
ongruent with spiritual knowing as I have come to understand it. This "path",
f 1 can use this term, led me to a recognition that epistemic frameworks are
)perationally created and I now call this viewpoint Ontological Neutralism -
in attempt to maintain no privileged ontological position while simultaneously
nderstanding that any such attempt, ipso facto, creates such a position, but
nore on that later (Nelson and Howell, 1993-4). Thus, I will finally argue
hat spiritual knowing is to live consciously, with as full an awareness as pos-
ible in an unresolvable paradox while still acting and taking responsibility for
ine's life.

I believe that the following analysis also will give us a fresh view through
he looking glass which seems to separate the sacred from the profane. But for
low, on to my encounter with the Void...

A Personal Encounter

My mystical experience began as a rather ordinary evening of listening to
lusic at a friend's apartment in the Christianhavn's district of Copenhagen,

73

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstmction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

Denmark. The apartment in which he Uved was condemned but, as was com-
mon in Europe of the early 1970's, squatters mainly students often re-
claimed these buildings because of the severe housing shortages existent at
the time.

His dwelUng was on the top story of a five floor walk-up and I arrived at
about 8pm one weekday evening, somewhat out of breath from lugging my
guitar up all those flights of stairs. I was a graduate student in Psychology and
he in Biology and every Friday night we played music together in a local club
to supplement our meager student grants. This evening was supposed to be
our rehearsal night, but as I entered, I found him preparing to leave. An emer-
gency meeting of the squatters committee had been called and he had to at-
tend. Jorgen explained how to use his tape recorder and gave me a tape of
blues music to listen to as he rushed out the door. His idea for our rehearsal
evening was to take some tunes from the tape to add to our usual repertoire.

After he left I spooled the tape onto the machine and sat down to listen,
but for some reason I was unable to focus my full attention on the music. Each
time I attempted to "get into" the tune playing and "map out" the guitar lines
I found myself staring, in my mind's eye, at a very vivid and stylized eidetic
image of myself. This image was an exaggerated caricature of a role which had
long been part of my self-image Peter, "the brilliant graduate student". In
my mind's eye I could see me talking and gesturing with the exaggerated self-
importance and conceit that I usually managed to disguise from myself in those
days. However, seen in such direct bold-relief and painful clarity, this internal
"picture" made me mentally flinch. In my mind I scrambled to find something
else on which to focus my attention and thus to rid myself of this unwanted,
absurd specter. Yet, each time I tried to focus my attention back to the task at
hand, I seemed unable to sustain any real concentration with my focus con-
tinually drawn back, as if by a magnetic force, to my inner caricature.

I cycled through this confrontation and avoidance several times and as I
struggled with it for the third or fourth time I was startled by a "voice" talking
to me - apparently from my left side. It seemed to come from "outside" like any
other aural veridical perception, but no one was there and the quality o{ the
voice was definitely unlike my own internal discursive commentator. It was,
in a sense, both "inside" and "outside" of my head at the same time. I paused,
looked around and thought, "An hallucinatory projection." Again I attempted
to return to "normal" thoughts and to the music, but as I did, I heard the voice
again, very clearly this time, and it said, "You are what you are and no matter
what you think you are, you will remain what you are. It's all you've got, so you
might as well look at it." I was startled by the suddenness and clarity of this
second intrusion and my heart began to pound, but, like a man whistling in
the dark, I nervously attempted once again to return to what I believed should

J

Peter L. Nelson

ave been my "normal" world. However, as I endeavored to reconnect to the
lusic, which now seemed to be playing somewhere on the distant periphery
f my awareness, the caricatured "self-picture" again returned. This time, for
o apparent reason other than a feeling of "why not", I decided to heed the
dvice of the "voice" and look more closely at this image I was struggling to
iject.

I now turned my full attention to that inner picture. My examination of
\y persona's behavior and qualities proved to be an exceedingly uncomfort-
ble task and my continuous impulse was to drop the whole process and es-
ape into some other, less confronting activity. However, as I persisted the fear
bated and my interest in who this person was grew. A sense of curiosity and a
Dmewhat detached interest now took over. I found, that as I persisted in stay-
ig with the image, my fear and revulsion lessened and, as that happened, the
emand that I look at it diminished. This led to an abatement of my avoid-
Qce behavior which eventually was followed by my caricatured self-represen-
ition fading from consciousness. In other words, the less I fought it, the less
isistent it became. As it finally disappeared I thought that I had been re-
iased and at last was done with the whole business not for long, however.

After this first image finally vanished, it quickly was replaced by another
- Peter, "the world traveler". Yet again I was confronted by the same feelings
f discomfort and an impulse to reject, but this time I decided not to resist
om the start, so instead of struggling against it, I continued the process of
iner observation I had started with the first appearance. If not very pleasant,
; was at least edifying in that it seemed to be a view of myself through a mirror
ot usually available to me.

During this process I made an important discovery the negative power
f these self-representations seemed to be directly proportional to the harsh-
ess of my judgment of them. The more I suspended the judgmental process
nd became an impartial observer, the more I could see and accept them with
le subsequent diminishment of their power to offend. Again, as in the first
istance, the new image eventually faded but soon was replaced by yet an-
ther Peter, "the lover". This "self was more fraught with difficulty for me
nd I found myself back in the previous struggle as I harshly judged what I
saw". However, as I gradually relinquished my stance as judge and reentered
ly newly discovered attitude of impartial witness, the voice spoke again. It
sked, "Who is doing all this judging?" My mind raced as I attempted to find
tie "person" who had been evaluating all these personae.

I can only describe my next response in metaphorical terms. In an attempt
3 discover the "knower" who was observing the scenes I had been witnessing,
: was like I rotated my eyes 180 degrees around to look inward to the "place"
he" was felt to reside inside my head. However, this total redeployment of my

75

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstmction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass <

I

attention "inward" had an immediate and dramatic effect of its own. First, the
room disappeared from my view, next, I heard a very loud rushing sound like a i
waterfall which was accompanied by intense waves, somewhat like convuls'
ing shivers, that ascended repeatedly upward through my body. It was likei
being cold, but yet I was not chilled.

Second, as the experience rapidly increased in intensity it culminated with \
the sound roaring in my ears and the discovery that I was now apparently!
standing in a great cathedral-like marble hall much like a Byzantine mosque '
or church but without any evident religious symbolism or icons observable. \
Many years later I found a painting by Salvador Dali (in one of those very,
large coffee table collections of his work) which contained a reproduction of a '
painting that contains many key aspects of the scene in which I found myself]
at that moment. When I say "found" myself, I mean that there was some kind |
of discontinuity in my awareness such that one moment I was sitting on a |
make-shift couch in a semi-derelict apartment and the next I was in a great
stone hall without having instigated any physical change of which I was aware, i
The experience was fully veridical in the sense that, to my awareness at the
time, it had all the apparent properties of my actually being physically in that i
place. It certainly was nothing like any locale I had ever been or seen previ-
ously, which added to its strangeness and the overpowering awe I was experi-
encing.

As I stood staring in amazement at this utterly strange and impossible scene
around me, I noticed that the ceiling above me was comprised of a enormous i
translucent glass dome with a large hole at its apex through which a luminous !
blue/white light was streaming. The light was almost like a spotlight which
shone down on me where I stood. There I stood, bathed in this supernal lumi-
nosity, mystified, dumb struck. Looking down, I discovered that I was fastened
to the floor in my upright position by a series of leather straps circumscribing
where I stood like spokes which were connected to a heavy leather belt
around my waist by brass fittings at one end and to the floor by a similar brass
hook at the other end. As I looked at my bonds they had a "presence" which
seemed to "speak" to me as a symbol in a painting might convey meaning
beyond form.

In this state of knowing I understood that these straps were the images or
"ego-trips" that I had been inspecting in the "theater" of my mind only min-
utes before. At the very moment that I understood their symbolic import, the
straps spontaneously unhooked from my belt one after the other in rapid suc-
cession - the action circumscribing my waist like a wave of activity. As I watched
them unhook I had another thought: "it's me who always holds me 'down' by
living in my 'false' selves." Now, no longer "fastened" to the floor, as it were,
I seemed to become weightless and I began to float upward. My ascent was

76

Peter L. Nelson

apid and I was soon passing through the hole at the top of the dome and into
he light.

As 1 advanced through the opening in the dome, the sound of rushing
/ater which had been continuing throughout the episode abruptly stopped
nd, looking down, 1 discovered that my body also had vanished. All that
emained of "me" was an undifferentiated awareness and a total conscious
bsorption of that awareness into the "light" which seemed to bath me in
otal peace. 1 felt free freer and lighter of being than I had ever felt in my
ife before or could have ever imagined feeling. My overall state was one of
otal and unqualified bliss and peace. There was no longer a "me", but some-
how total awareness was still there, but it was not really clear exactly who was
aving this awareness. 1 was conscious but did not exist in the usual sense that
had always understood as being in the world 1 and everything were one.
I do not know how long 1 remained in this state it might only have been
linutes, but it could have been hours. There was no reference point for time,
3, effectively, it did not exist. However long 1 remained in that blissful "light"
oes not matter. Having "arrived" there and being there was all that mattered,
ut that was not a thought at the time. Later, when first attempting a post hoc
iterpretation of this episode, 1 came to identify my experience as a direct
lerger with the void the ultimate ground of being. Nevertheless, however
ne interprets this encounter of merger into the light, what remains with me
) this day is a wordless and core knowing of who 1 am beyond role or form.

There were no thoughts while there, so it was somewhat of a shock when
le voice abruptly returned and asked, "What are you going to hold on to
ow." The impact of hearing this question intruding into my bliss caused me
) become abruptly self-conscious. With that question came the thought that,
ideed, I had given up everything I usually held on to and suddenly 1 felt very
Lilnerable like a cripple without his crutches and I started to feel that I
light go into a free-fall or possibly even die if 1 did not grab hold of something
)lid and stable immediately. In retrospect, it was at that moment that I exis-
intially understood Otto's (1958) "creature feeling" when confronted with
le My sterium Tremendum. At the core of my fear was the intense dread of not
sing able to return to my life as I had known it. This entire thought process
inerated an intense anxiety and with the emergence of this agitation the
)und of rushing water returned rapidly followed by a feeling that I was plung-
Lg downward and out of the bliss of the light. I was like Icarus falling away
om the sun. The descent was short, very intense and felt like free-falling in
lace accompanied by a "whooshing" sound which grew in volume with the
xelerating speed of my fall and ended in a very loud, jarring but muffled
lud as I re-entered my previous reality frame. Once again, I found myself
tting on the couch in the Christianhavn's apartment.

77

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstnjction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

The sound of rushing water was still quite loud and the waves of convul-
sive-like shivers continued as before my "exit" from the couch. 1 felt confused
and torn. I desperately wanted to go back to that blissful place/state, but the
requirement to let go of everything and feel like I was in a free-fall with noth-
ing to grasp for safety held me back. I sat and struggled between the two im-
pulses for over an hour and gradually the sound subsided and I knew that the
window of opportunity for re-entry had past. 1 tried to speak to an American
friend who had come there with me that night, but for once in my life words
failed me.

Spiritual Emergence?

At the time I had no way of clearly labeling what had happened to me. All
I knew at that moment was intense awe, ecstasy, fear and excitement as I
made an entry into a vastly different experiential world. Immediately after
this encounter I found myself trying to label, categorize and explain the expe-
rience, but without any success. Many months were spent at this which in-
cluded intensively reading, researching and talking to people who seemed to
be "in the know". However, this left me no wiser or conceptually better off. Of
my first 28 years on earth this had certainly been the most intense, all-encom-
passing experience I had ever had. My understanding, or what I thought I
understood at the time, of myself and the world around me had been radically
altered in a matter of minutes. I would spend the next five years obsessed with
my attempts to understand how and why this happened to me while at the
same time employing various techniques I believed would help me to find my
way back to that dazzling state of blissful knowing.'

During this period 1 read a great deal about apparently similar experiences
of others, but all these reported encounters came with an attached worldview.
These explanations and justifications of why some of us have these encoun-
ters, and others not, all seemed to rest on arbitrary moral judgments and a
supposedly externally bestowed grace. Having already rejected Western reli-
gious traditions, I turned to practitioners of Eastern disciplines who offered
explanations ranging from their guru's "mystic power" having been focused on
Copenhagen at that moment to, simply, it was my Karma. * In the conceptual
hands of these Hindu/Buddhist flavored Westerners, Karma meant nemesis
and gurus were quasi-supernatural beings who made or broke you in the spiri-
tual marketplace. In my current understanding much of this kind of western-
ized Eastern thought can be traced back to two primary sources - the teachings
and practices o{ Blavatsky, Besant, Leadbeater and the Theosophical move-
ment in the second half of the Nineteenth Century^ and to Vivakananda's
introduction of Hindu thought and practices into the West at the beginning
of this century (Bharati, 1976; Gupta, 1973).^

78

Peter L. Nelson

Having been well indoctrinated in the empiricist/reductionist philosophi-
al perspective of the West, I felt ill at ease with most of the wide variety of
eligious and spiritualist theories that were offered by way of "explanation" for
ny encounter. Most of these explanations seemed to be justifications for a
losely held faith now collectively referred to as New Age thought. For ex-
imple, a typical explanation of the good or bad events of our lives is that we
ire being carried along by a "spiritual evolution", which is taking all of us
:ventually to Cosmic Consciousness. Although I instinctually felt and be-
ieved that I had experienced the bottom line of what was real, I made the
lecision to put the experience "on the shelf for awhile, as it were, viz., delay-
ng any final epistemological interpretations or ontological asciptions until
uch a time that I could piece together the puzzle of what had happened to me
md what, if anything, it meant.

From the start of this new chapter in my life I began to understand James
1936) listing ineffability as a primary characteristic of mystical experience,
iowever, from my own encounter I felt that it was not so much that one
:ould not express what had happened, but that the use of language, when
tying to describe the experience, so often led to self-contradiction or involved
I signifier pointing at signified which was not available to the knowing we
isually depend on transsubjectivity hence, it is non-consensual. Also,
here was no way to convey the true quality and impact o{ affect, atmosphere
ind cognition I experienced through mere phenomenological descriptions of
nental content and emotional state. I was often left groping for words while
he eyes of my listener signaled patient non-comprehension.

This confusion led to endless frustration for me with each attempt at com-
nunication with my fellow, but uninitiated, beings. Although I knew that my
ational description was well understood, I was aware that it was not convey-
ng the quintessential quality that marked the mystical state as phenomeno-
ogically unique.^ There seems to be a quality to the "reality" of these experi-
ences which is sui generis and to which we cannot find any clearly related sign,
nstead, we are left with an indirect and metaphorical use of language because
)ur language does not deal well with concepts and experiences which are not
patial-metaphoric and objective-like (Carroll, 1956). At the time, for me, it
vas like the qualitative difference between the experiential reality of dreams
is opposed to waking states, where entering the mystical state appears to be
ike waking from a dream and it is difficult, if not impossible, to relate the
lifference to any person who has not yet "awakened".

I now believe that, mistakenly, this initiation is often taken by those "in
:he know" as indicating a profound spiritual emergence because of the way it
ipsets the ontological apple-cart. But in time I came to realize that the mysti-
:al state does not necessarily imply greater spiritual attainment or know-how

79

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstnjction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

for experients, but more accurately underscores the difference between exis-
tential and conceptual knowledge. I now believe that these experiences are
more about the reality perceived and known in various states of consciousness
and the making and remaking of experiential reality frames with their par-
ticular styles of knowing. I eventually came to conclude that spirituality seems
to be more a style of how one is in the world rather than the result of a massive
shift in consciousness. Certainly the shift may be the beginning of the spiri-
tual emergence, but great self-discipline and ethical re-making are required
over some considerable time. As Bharati (1976) has asserted, one who was a
"stinker" before having a mystical experience will remain so unless a great
deal of moral effort and ethical transformation occur.

So, if mystical experience is not an automatic spiritualizing of the experient
what is it? 1 believe that question only can be answered if we radically revise
our notions of awareness, consciousness and reality and understand mystical
encounters as the remaking of one's epistemic frame of reference and, hence,
style of knowing.

Reality and Existence

Science, and our derivative commonsensical understanding of the universe,
with their absolute Democritian ontologies are, in the words of the philoso-
pher C. D. Broad (1914), "naively real." However, if science is naively real in
its epistemological processes, then religio-mystical systems such as Buddhism
and Vedantism are naively phenomenological particularly in the concep-
tual hands of most Westerners.

What we must recognize is that we are human beings living in a uniquely
human existence and awareness a human epistemic frame. This may seem
to be a trivial assertion, but I believe that it is the key to understanding the
difficulty we get into when attempting to unpack the world of mystical and
hence spiritual knowing. Spiritual knowing attempts to address ultimacy not
only in values and meaning, but in terms of ontological ground. We must ask
the question "what is ultimately real," but being very careful to avoid naive
assumptions about the existence or not of things-in-themselves.

Ninian Smart (1973), one of the founders of modem Religious Studies,
makes this distinction quite clear when discussing the objects of belief of the
religious mind. He states that non-existent objects can be phenomenologi-
cally indistinguishable from existent ones.

...1 shall distinguish between objects which are real and objects
which exist. In this usage, God is real for Christians whether or
not he exists. The methodological agnosticism here being used
is, then, agnosticism about the existence or otherwise of the main
foci of the belief system in question. It is worth noting a compli-

80

Peter L. Nelson

cation. I am not denying that existent things can be treated as
unreal, just as real things can be non-existent, (p. 54)

He is suggesting that the "reading" of the "real" for any given socio-cul-
ural group is in fact the direct "writing" of a consensually experiential "text"
or world) whose meaning derives from the acceptance of the cultural "pro-
ection" as an absolutely existent entity. As Taylor (1983), expounding on
)econstructionism, argues the reading of the text is the writing of the text. In
. sense the construal of the world is a constant interactive process in which
he map and the territory are interactively involved in an act of mutual cre-
tion. True, the map is not the territory but the map and the territory are
nextricably bound to each other in an act of continual and mutual becoming.

Semiotics, or the study of signs suggests that the "signs" of our world con-
inually "add up" and point, as powerful and compelling inference generators,
o Reality. Umberto Eco (1984), a semiotician, brings this idea out with power
nd clarity when his main character in his novel, The Name of the Rose, at-
empts to solve a mystery without remembering the power of the relationship
f signs. Here, William of BaskervlUe confides in his assistant, Adso of Melk,
t the end of their long investigation of a series of deaths at a monastery.

I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only
things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What
I did not understand was the relation among signs. I arrived at
Jorge [as the perpetrator] through an apocalyptic pattern that
seemed to underlie all the crimes, and yet it was accidental. I
arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we
discovered that each crime was committed by a different person,
or by no one. I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse
and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, Jorge him-
self was overcome by his own initial design and there began a
sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting
one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations
that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom, then? I
behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should
have known well that there is no order in the universe, (p. 492
brackets are mine.)

The deconstructive act is thus the separation of signs from one another
ind their context which allows for a reconstruction into a new or revised
eality an endless process which Sartre (1972) calls sorcery.

We are thus surrounded by magical objects which retain, as it
were, a memory of the spontaneity of consciousness, yet continue
to be objects of the world. This is why man is always a sorcerer for

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Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstmction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

man. Indeed, this poetic connection of two passivities in which
one creates the other spontaneously is the very foundation of
sorcery, the profound meaning of "participation". This is why we
are sorcerers for ourselves each time we view our me. (p. 82)

What I am suggesting is, that for mystics and scientists alike, reality is
experiential the difference between their conceptions appears to arise more
as the result of the assignment of ontological value than through the exist-
ence of absolute differences. It should be noted that within both the scientific
and mystical worldviews there is no clear cut agreement as to how ontological
status should be assigned. In general, however, the scientific position is that
the "ultimate ground" is an objective, existent material reality with an onto-
logical status separate from that of the observer, and for the mystic it is an
"inner", revealed "truth" or ontological principle grounded in a transcenden-
tal entity and/or consciousness. In the case of the former, consciousness is
merely the "place" where the "real" world is reflected in order to be "known"
by the observer, but for the latter it is often taken as the experiential "ground
or being" as reality itself.

Radical Consciousness

Perhaps James' (1936, 1967) most important contribution to this discus-
sion of mystical experience is not his very general definition of the mystical
state, but rather his later attempt to move us away from object or subject as
ontological ground and into a radical empiricism. In his final published think-
ing on consciousness before his death James explicitly denied the existence or
"thingness" of consciousness as "container" or "place" but not its reality as a
functional property intrinsically connected to our here-now experience. This
notion of consciousness can be understood as being like the "backward cast
shadow" as posited by Sartre (1972) in his critique of the transcendental "I" in
Husserl's (1962) phenomenology.

This "shadow" we call consciousness is the result of the contiguity of the
series of connected present moments each of which becomes a past but, when
the whole chain is remembered as a collectivity in the moment of the present,
it seems to imply an ongoing experiential entity or being we identify as the
"thing" or "container" we call consciousness. In his functional approach James
wishes us to consider and to take "pure experience" as the singular operational
"stuff of which the human world is made. From this stance he argues for a
radical empiricism that places "subjective" events on an equal ontological
footing with "objective" ones which, in his system, appear to vary more in
degree than in any absolute kind from each other.

Here's how James (1967) describes the primal "stuff' or what we can think
of as the human universe.

82

Peter L. Nelson

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only
one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which every-
thing is composed, and if we call that stuff "pure experience",
then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of rela-
tion towards one another into which portions of pure experience
may enter, (p. 4)

James accounts for the apparent dichotomy that we all intuitively sense
jetween "inner" and "outer", "subject" and "object", as being the result of the
elationship between these qualities becoming part of this pure experience in
vhich one of its "terms" becomes the subject or knower, and the other the
)bject, or the known. He describes the paradox of how, in his system, an expe-
iential event can be both internal and external by reference to an analogy of
wo lines sharing the same point at an intersection. It is the intersection of
wo processes of pure experience which have two different sets of associations
ind can be counted as belonging to different groups the inner or the outer.
Dne such group is the context of our inner biography and the other is the
:ontext of an experience we take to be the outer perceptual world. James adds
hat the central feature of the experiential reference in the creation of the
'me" of our biographies is the ongoing experience of our own breathing. This
ipparent duality of contexts, biography and perceptual world, gives the im-
pression of both subjective and objective worlds simultaneously and separately
existing but operating in parallel.

However strange his mechanism for explaining the creation of the subject/
)bject dichotomy might appear on first inspection, by placing James' (1967)
'pure experience" at center stage, ontologically speaking, he is, in effect, hint-
ng at a functionally useful way of conceptualizing human reality. Starting
vith James "pure experience" we can imagine reality as being operationally
lefined by the type and style of the attentional and awareness processes used
n the act of knowing. Thus, scientific observation and method, which is a
:ognitive and behavioral approach employing a particular set of experiential
operations, is the style of scientific knowing which generates scientific knowl-
edge. Likewise, religio-mystical practices (experiences) are styles of knowing
vhich lead to spiritual knowledge.

Thus, without having to make any decisions concerning ontological pri-
Tiacy or requiring a demarcation between knower and known, James' approach
suggests that the disjunctions across subject and object as well as different
rames of knowing are a product of the operations of awareness and not per-
:eptions of some thing-in-itself. In other words, James' radical empiricism is
ontologically neutral in that it does not require us to decide what ulti-
nately exists (as in Smart, 1973) outside of our awareness. Also, it is non-
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Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction: Tlirough the Ontological Looking Glass

epistemic in that epistemology arises only when there are two distinct ontologic
categories subject and object or knower and known. At its core it is simply
knowing before road maps are made. In this book Kaisa Puhakka's notion of
the experiential contact before the thought or object is grasped comes closest
to what is being suggested here and the grasping is "a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter" (James,
1967, p. 4).

How can this be the case in any realistic sense you might ask? If we accept
the objective world as a given Kantian thing-in-itself, then crossing the bound-
ary of the "inner" person to "reach" the object in order to create an "inner"
knowing is impossible. Between the two lies an infinite epistemic chasm sepa-
rating two completely different ontic categories. However, if, as James sug-
gests, we look to the "stuff' of the world as being pure experience, then we can
imagine a field of experience in which knowing across the borders of objecti-
fied inferences is not at all illogical or impossible.

Ontic Shift

Much of what is being suggested about the malleable quality of the real
[again, in the sense indicated by Smart (1973)] has been reflected partially in
the social constructionist movement in psychology and sociology. Gergen
(1985), a leading exponent of this view, summarizes the position.

Social constructionism... begins with radical doubt in the taken-
for-granted world whether in the sciences or daily life and
in a specialized way acts as a form of social criticism. Construc-
tionism asks one to suspend belief that commonly accepted cat-
egories or understandings receive their warrant through observa-
tion. Thus, it invites one to challenge the objective basis of con-
ventional knowledge, (p. 267)

Which leads to a notion that:

The terms in which the world is understood are social artifacts,
products of historically situated interchanges among people. From
the constructionist position the process of understanding is not
automatically driven by the forces of nature, but is the result of
an active, cooperative enterprise of persons in relationship. In
this light, inquiry is invited into the historical and cultural bases
of various forms of world construction, (p. 267)

Of course, the "person" and his/her subjective world at the knowing center
of this picture is no more absolute than any other construction in the final
description.

84

Peter L. Nelson

According to Berger and Luckmann (1971), the experiential world of ev-
;ryday life is taken for granted as being the reality (the natural attitude) and it
s a world that originates in thought and action and which is maintained by
hese same processes. It is more likely that we live in a world of multiple reali-
ies not unlike what has been suggested by the physicist Wheeler when he
)osited the notion of multiple universes as a way of understanding the diver-
ity of outcomes which can arise from a single set of causes in the quantum
vorld (Davies, 1990). From this we might conclude that the world is consti-
uted from multiple realities and as one moves from one reality to another one
ixperiences a kind of "shock" (p. 35). Berger and Luckmann attribute this
hock to the shift in attentiveness caused by the transition across a kind of
;onsciousness boundary, an example being awakening from a dream.

They argue, that of the multiple realities possible, the one which presents
tself most convincingly is the reality of everyday life. It is impossible to ig-
nore, it imposes itself with the greatest force, thereby dominating conscious-
less to the greatest degree. Although human experiential reality tends toward
he everyday stratum, it is most often induced into transition by aesthetic and
eligious experience. For Berger and Luckmann (1971) "leaping" (p. 39) to
lew provinces of meaning is a metaphor for entering the sacred domain and
hat all these non-ordinary "finite provinces of meaning" (p. 39) are charac-
erized by a turning away of attention from the reality of everyday life.

While there are, of course, shifts in attention within everyday life, the shift
o a finite province of meaning is of a much more radical kind. A fundamental
:hange takes place in the tension of conscious awareness. However, it is im-
)ortant to stress that the reality of everyday life retains its paramount status
:ven as such leaps take place. If nothing else, we return to the interaction and
liscourse of the everyday and in this frame o{ reference language keeps the
iveryday process on track. Although the reality of everyday life may remain
)aramount, this does not necessarily give it a sense of ultimacy. It is, rather,
)ur writing of the life text in a repetitive and continuous way which declares
he events of normal, everyday consciousness to be paramount. It is, in effect,
m existential (living) operational definition of reality.

It thus seems to me, looking at the issue as both mystical experient and
cholar, that the conviction held by mystics, vis-a-vis the ultimateness of mys-
ical reality, is due primarily to the complete suddenness, newness and the
adical experiential differences engendered in the leap across the worldview
)oundary especially when the new (mystical) state appears to subsume the
)ld. It is here that the old now emerges as a mere fragment of the new, larger
experiential domain arising from the reshuffling of signs. Thus, this entire
)rocess of deconstruction and reconstruction engendered in the mystical en-
:ounter would be experienced as a sense of ontic shift which is unconsciously

85

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction: Through the Oncological Looking Glass

molded and then, in retrospect, consciously given a revised ontological as-
cription with both processes, nonetheless, still being linguistically and cultur-
ally contextualized.^

This leap into the sacred can be thought of as a quantum-like event. In
fact it also may be that the leap itself is a retrospective inference arising as a
linguistic filler which is used to conceptualize the "empty" moment during the
shift from one experiential world to another. The quantum-like cloud of un-
certainty, vis-a-vis knowledge, is "collapsed" into a determined knowing by
linguistic filtering and categorical assignment (in effect, observation) in a man-
ner similar to that proposed in quantum physics.'^

Ordinary experiential reality is not experienced as a leap or coming with a
shock because it is the base "text" or operational definition of reality in which
we normally live. However, for the mystic, the return to this state after leav-
ing it is also experienced as a shock and it is the result of this exit and re-entry
which impels the mystical experient to engage in a subsequent ontological
realignment. Thus, it would appear that religious experience is, in some sense,
ordinary experience (text), but one in which the shock of transition is great
enough to cause a linguistic-ontological reconceptualizing and reordering.
Hence in James' (1967) view the experiential connectivities are being re-
ordered such that the meaning and linkages of the chaining of percepts and
concepts are redefined and thus point to a new reality.

In the operational notion of the mystical frame being posited in this chap-
ter, reality is conscious experience, which is the "doing" involved with know-
ing, which then is taken in a retrospective sense to be an overarching struc-
ture we label consciousness, which in turn appears to be reality itself. I further
would argue that the ontological certainty generated in these shifts to mysti-
cal consciousness happens only when there is a total subsumption of our usual
experiential "self into the new experiential operations which define the new
reality. Or, to put it another way, the reading of the "text" of the mystical
reality becomes the rewriting of epistemological "text" of self and everyday
life in the sense that James' intersecting lines of object and subject appear to
become one.

As I have suggested above, in the mystical frame of reference conscious
experience often appears to be reality itself. So, experience known across states,
such that the experiential world of one state seems ephemeral or less impactfully
real when compared to that of another state, will not be taken as having onto-
logical status and therefore not ultimately real. However, when an experien-
tial state engenders a sense of absolute onticity, because it is able to subsume
self and world at its onset with a sudden, all-pervasiveness, it then will be
regarded as the state from which the one "true" reality can be known. Thus,
this state will be taken as the pointer to the absolute ground and everything

86

Peter L. Nelson

that is known through it will automatically be taken as arising from the onto-
logical bottom-line.

In my own research into mystical and paranormal experiences 1 have been
able to map a general "technology" of the preternatural which accounts for
both the attentional resource issues raised by James (1967) as well as social
constructionist notions as they participate in the maintenance or re-framing
of ontology (Nelson, 1990). In my investigations 1 found that state of con-
sciousness and hence one's epistemic frame are defined by the "set" and "set-
ting" of the experiential process including socio-cultural context, place,
personality style, content of experience at the outset and deployment of
attentional resources immediately prior to the shift. It also was revealed in a
later study that, phenomenologically, many mystical experiences are quite simi-
lar to paranormal ones (Nelson, 1991-92). The crucial differences that lead to
different interpretations for experients are to be found in personality style and
whether the leap of the transition is intense enought to engender a sense of
ontic shift.

The most important personality attribute associated with those who can
make these state shifts appears to be Trait Absorption (Tellegen and Atkinson,
1974). In addition, some of my recent preliminary experimental work indi-
cates that an individual's ability to consciously redeploy attentional resources
in unique ways represents the key operational basis for these state shifts. Thus,
an unusual redeployment of attention taken in the context of an absorptive
personality sets the stage, so to speak, for the restructuring of frames of mean-
ing and possibly the entire ontological horizon as well.

While in this altered attentional state, it is also possible to actively
deconstruct meaning structures which are taken as given in our more usual
states. As it happens there already are a number of traditional self-dialectic
techniques for accomplishing this sort of shift which come to us from the East.
These are practices such as "neti, neti", as advocated by Sri Ramana Maharshi
in a yogic tradition of southern India, and the method described in The Wheel
of Analytic Meditation from the Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist tradition
(Maharshi, 1982; Mi-Pham, 1970). Below, I have reproduced a few illustra-
tive examples taken from a modem translation of the latter 19th Century
Tibetan text by Lama Mi-Pham where this process can be seen in action quite
clearly.

It should be remembered, however, that when reading these excerpts, it
most likely will not automatically engender the kind of shift 1 have been de-
scribing. What is required is the personality "set" and the functional "setting"
as described previously. However, done against the necessary operational back-
ground (such as meditation practice) the dialectical process can produce the
epistemic deconstruction and ontic shift I have been outlining.

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Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

The text, like most of Buddhist writing, starts with a description of the
nature of suffering which is beUeved to arise from the transient quality of
reality. In effect, it defines the meaning frame from which the deconstruction
will take place by stating the cause of the problem as well as its possible solu-
tion.

The cause of confusion and frustration in life
Is the virulent passion of the mind.
Distortion and dispersion, the causes of passion.
Must be replaced by incisive attentiveness.

This is followed by an explanatory commentary.

The cause of our frustrations, failings, misfortunes and anxieties
is not external. It is to be found within. The confusion of emo-
tional conflict dependent upon distorting vagaries of the mind is
the primary obstacle to an understanding of Samsara as Nirvana.
Discipline of the mind, concentrating it upon each moment of
perception, leads to insight into its nature and its function. Thus,
emotional confusion is eliminated.

Notice the emphasis on the "moment of perception" in the above seg-
ment. This should be understood as the moment of knowing. The text now
describes the first dialectical procedure to be followed.

Imagining an image before one

of whatever is desired most

And distinguishing the five groupings of elements

Begin to analyze the imaginary body.

Flesh, blood, bones, marrow, fat and limbs.
Sense organs, internal organs and cavities.
Faeces, urine, worms, hair and nails -
Distinguish the foul parts of the body.

Categorize and classify these parts
By composition and sensory field.
Then divide and analyze them
To irreducible particles.

Looking for arising desire for any part.
See this "body" as nothing but foul fragments.
Remember it as a dirty machine or frothing scum.
Or a heap of sticks, stones and pus.

These directions are further explained in a commentary.

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Peter L. Nelson

The search for the nature of reality begins with the visuaHzation
of the most fascinating object of sexual desire. Men should take
a woman as the object of meditation, women should take a man,
and homosexuals one of their own gender... The mental object is
fixed by the faculty of mind which tends to lock into a perceptual
situation while the discursive faculty of mind thoroughly exam-
ines it. The search is for both the external base of desire for the
sex object and for something substantial or self-existent in the
world of created things, the elements of which are collected to-
gether under one of the groups of bodymind constituents.

Thus, the dialectic between the concept of the body as usually held in
awareness and the body re-conceived into unappealing reductions leads, in
the context of the meditative redeployment of attention, to a reframing of
meaning both cognitively and affectively.

The other variant of this analytic technique mentioned above is part of
the Hindu tradition and is best illustrated by the teachings of Ramana Maharshi
in his now classic text. Who Am 1? The phrase, "neti, neti," at the heart of this
method simply means "not this, not this." In this technique any aspect of our
world of objects is examined and the surface appearance is denied as being the
"real". Continuing to dissect inward we will eventually find that nothing re-
mains and that nothingness, too, is finally dissected away in an attempt to
deconstruct the very ontological core of our perceived reality. Of course, this
dialectical investigation also takes place in the context of a developed medi-
tative practice which is the "setting" requirement for a redeployed attention.

A Postmodern Interpretation

When the deconstructive process, as conceived above, is fully engaged over
a period of time, eventually there is an epistemic reframing which then, as in
the mystical experience, may be followed by a revision of ontological ascrip-
tion. Umberto Eco's (1984) central protagonist in the Name of the Rose, Wil-
liam of Baskerville, reflects on the process of knowledge building.

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder,
built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the lad-
der away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was
meaningless, (p. 492)

However, what William does not tell us is that there is an immediate re-
building of a new net and/or ladder, whether consciously or unconsciously
accomplished. In fact, the late philosopher of science. Sir Karl Popper (1982),
describes scientific theories as being like nets as well. In our construction of
the empirical "picture" of the world through science, we are actually only

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Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction: TTirough the Ontological Looking Glass

"catching" what the shape and character of our nets will allow. However,
whether the deconstruction of the net is accomplished through the use of the
scientific analytic method or through spiritual practices, there remains the
belief for most that there is a final position or net which is capable of captur-
ing the bottom-line reality.

What I am suggesting is that the very belief in the ultimately real, however
engendered, is also subject to possible deconstruction and, through the con-
tinual application of that process, we have the possibility of eventually arriv-
ing at the realization that there may be no final bottom line. In fact, the real-
ization itself is not merely a new bottom line that there are no bottom lines,
but is an entry into a profound unknowing which must be lived as an abiding
existential ontological uncertainty and this, in the sense of spiritual know-
ing, is what is meant by ontological neutralism. Thus, one arrives at a
postmodern revisioning in which one becomes conscious that every choice of
word or each deed is an epistemic positioning implying an ontology, but at the
same instant we know that this "truth" or "reality" is in some sense temporary.
Every position is a reconstruction and we only stop when the new epistemic
frame is successful in deafening us to the next knock at the door of our un-
knowing which is asking us, yet again, to wake up and know anew.

McCance (1986), in his review of physics. Buddhism and postmodern
thought, asserts that the crisis of understanding for the Twentieth Century
has been precipitated by the collapse of naive realism or our belief that can
have our ontological cake and eat it, too.

In the decentering of the Cartesian subject, then, we confront
the de-realizing not only of the reified objects of mechanistic sci-
ence but also of their counterparts, the abstract entities of atom-
istic individualism. The "I," who created the illusion of objectiv-
ity "out there" simultaneously with the creation of itself, is now
in crisis, (p. 289)

McCance asserts that the way out of the dilemma today is the same as that
suggested by the Buddha in his time to shatter the illusions of independent
objects and the detached neutrality of the observer. But, of course, that in-
cludes the illusion of the illusion of objects and observers. And this will cause
us to eternally re-enter the crisis of unknowing with its panicked inner call to
remake meaning. McCance's solution is that we embrace the whole and he
concludes by insisting that scholars (and I would argue everyone else as well)
must pay closer attention to the "wholism" of the recent interpretations of
postmodern physics as argued by a number of physicists such as David Bohm
(1980). The attention we pay is not one of epistemic reframing, but rather a
recognition of the interdependence of self and other, true and false, etc. In

90

Peter L. Nelson

ither words, to keep our attention on the moment of knowing before it is
olidified into knowledge.

This is, after all, a view of the sacred and profane which was well expressed
n the wisdom of one of Christendom's great mystics, Meister Eckhart (Blakney,
957).

...the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God
sees me... one vision or seeing, and one knowing and loving, (p.
288)

This affirmation of spiritual connectedness does not tell us where the on-
ological ground is and it allows us to frame the position of the knower on
ither side of the subject/object or human/divine divide. We only make a bi-
arcation and take a side within it because to embrace the whole without a
lear definition of where we stand within it can appear to make dealing in the
ealm of the day to day seemingly impossible. I thus would argue that the
ejection of the wholism, the totality of experience, knowledge and reality, as
/ell as the plurality this whole implies, simplifies decision-making for most of
s, but not only at the cost of the quality of our physical lives, but our spiritual
wareness as well.

This postmodern deconstruction of our absolutes suggests a need for a re-
iterpretation of the sacred and the profane. Traditional scholars of religion,
uch as Mircea Eliade (1959), argue that the sacred and profane are two dis-
Inct modes of being in the world or "two existential situations assumed by
lan in the course of his history" (p. 15). They are in the final analysis, modes
f being dependent on "the different positions that man has conquered in the
osmos" (p. 15). Eliade asks us to look back to some halcyon time when a
erson of a traditional society was the true, uncorrupted homo religiousus and s/
le occupied a "sacred space" (p. 21) characterized by a hierophany which
mtologically founds the world, "an absolute fixed point, a center" (p. 21)
xisting in the homogeneity and infinite expanse of the totality of "profane
pace" (p. 22). According to Eliade, life's moment-to-moment experience, by
leing centered in this hierophany, is made sacred.

If the world is to be lived in , it must be founded and no world can
come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of
profane space. The discovery or projection of a fixed point the
center is equivalent to the creation of the world, (p. 22)

1 believe that Eliade 's description of the connection to the sacred is correct
s far as it goes. It is an operational description of how we make the relation-
hip between the sacred and profane, but he seems unaware that it is the ere-
tion of the sacred and profane as well. It is being argued here that the sacred

91

Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

appears to arise as a result of existentially "writing" the ultimate fixed point
from which all meaning is suspended. For Eco (1989), that fixed point is death,
as symbolized by the creation of a new point of suspension for Foucault's Pen-
dulum which was created by his character Belbo when he was executed by
being hung in the pendulum's wire.

Eliade is suggesting that the sacred, and hence the experience of the world
from a spiritual epistemic, arises as an act of creation or, in the tenns of my
thesis, as an intentional "reading" and/or "writing" of the life "text". In this
context the enactment of religious ritual and initiation appears to be an at-
tempt to create sacred time and space and hence to sanctify experiential real-
ity through a participation which takes us through the ontological looking
glass. Eliade claims that this is not merely a re-enacting of the sacred time, but
it is a re-connecting to the sacred time and hence the foundations of reality
itself. The ritual not only defines the occurrence of this rebirth, but its style
and quality as well. It is, in essence, the "writing" of the "text" of reality through
enactment.

However, from a postmodern perspective it appears that we are not so much
contacting an absolute sacred center as we are sensing and coming to know an
ontic otherness through our rewriting of the possible and hence the real in
ways which radically separate us from the epistemology of everyday life. The
fixed center is not so much found as it is made and re-made. This is also evi-
denced in an historical context. What constitutes a sacred act and/or experi-
ence in some past time can, and often does, become today's ordinary and hence
profane activity. This process, of course, also works in reverse. The text and
signs of the sacred and profane are, therefore, continually in transition as they
are read, written, reread, rewritten, read, and written yet again.

Further, I would assert that our fragmented state, the profane life, leads to
a relationship to the world in which we deny the sacred, even when it irrupts
into awareness, because it does not fit the pictures given by the Newtonian
and Judeo/Christian worlds which most of us inhabit. What I am suggesting is
that our way of knowing prevents us from recognizing that we are taking every
"text", or life scenario, and unconsciously giving them all the same rewrite
thus always finding the sacred and profane to be what we expect.

There are, of course, dangers inherent in this deconstructive/reconstruc-
tive process. In a culture such as ours, which does not have any clearly defined
roadmaps or guides for this process, there is the danger that the deconstuctive
process will spin out of control into an infinite regress of self unmaking, fear,
panic and further unmaking. It has been an observation of mine that a signifi-
cant percentage of those who have been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics
are, in fact, failed mystics. They have entered the tunnel of transition and
never fully reemerged in a stable epistemic frame. They are permanently in

92

Peter L. Nelson

he transitional phase of multiple "readings" and "writings" against which they
ight a losing struggle to return to the pre -deconstructed state. They want to
brget, but every attempt at doing so re-engages the deconstructive process
eaving them as blissless failed mystics.

Conclusion

I would assert that behind the activity of most o{ our lives there lies a
profoundly spiritual impulse a passion to know the ontological bottom line.
This search appears to be, like Ricoeur's (1970) description of the discipline
)f Religious Studies, hermeneutics engaged in the restoration of meaning. In
lummarizing the postmodern position of this chapter in its attempt to reframe
DOth the mystical and sacred, I would alter that definition to read: hermeneu-
ics in search of a hermeneutical position. Inevitably, this restorative action
vill require the breakdown of old structures and a reframing of the relation-
ihip of signs to each other in ways which can profoundly disturb our ontologi-
;al certainty. However, if we persist in our spiritual inquiries we must each
participate in a creative process where creator and created speak to the one
mother in a dialogue of mutual construction, deconstruction and reconstruc-
ion. It is from this process that new meanings arise which are valorized and
eventually reified into spiritual knowledge.

Thus, spiritual knowledge, and hence the sacred as known through mysti-
;al experience, or any other type experiential move through the ontological
ooking glass, seems to arise from the sense of awe we experience during the
process of our participation in connecting to what we sense as the ultimate.
OC^ether or not this contact, such as Otto's My sterium Tremendum, refers to
in encounter with an actual existent ontological otherness is of no account.
W\\2Lt is important from my point of view is the sense of ontic shift which
irises as the result of a leap across a boundary. The post hoc ascriptions of
source and cause, whether they be Karma, spirit guides, higher intelligence,
livine grace or ultimate emptiness, are of little consequence. From my per-
spective life, in its constructive and deconstructive cycling, becomes the sa-
lted which again becomes the profane as we ebb and flow between the various
readings and writings of the existential text. In this scenario spiritual knowing
is that immediacy of connected awareness which occurs at the border between
the "reading" and the "writing".

So, the question remains, how does this interpretation of spiritual know-
ing and the sacred connect to and illumine my mystical experience? My ex-
perience certainly subsumed what I understood at that time to be my self struc-
ture and radically altered my relation to otherness sacred or profane. At
the time the revolutionary nature of the experience automatically called to
me to reframe my knowledge of self and world. That I certainly attempted to

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Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstnjction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

do. However, as the years went by and I reflected back on the event, I thought
more and more about the voice which had called my attention, first, to the
guises I had used as personae and, second, to the guise of my supposed Uber-
ated state.

That first call made me aware that I was clothing myself in a series of
constructed selves. As I entered into the experience I discovered that I could
deconstruct these selves through an act of discriminating but dispassionate
awareness a kind of disidentification. The second call, however, provided
the clue which eventually led to my postmodern reevaluation of mystical ex-
perience and spiritual knowing. At the moment that my bliss and sense of
liberation were at their pinnacle, the voice returned to make me aware that
my new existential position was being created by way of contrast freedom
and liberation versus ego disguises versus freedom and liberation versus... The
shock of crossing the boundary from the ordinary to the mystical was an onto-
logical wake-up call as was the shock of moving back across the boundary.

What 1 finally understood is that it is the discovery of the relativity of
epistemic frames which liberates us from being stuck in spiritual unknowing,
not the reifications which are built from the remains of one crossing. Thus,
the subtle contact of spiritual knowing emerges only when we let go of what-
ever ontological anchor that secures us and realize that reality is but one face
of one looking glass and spiritual freedom is to consciously leap through it as
an act of intentional, creative play.

References

Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1971). The social construction of reality: A treatise in
the sociology of knowledge. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books.

Bharati, A. (1976). The light at the center: Context and pretext of modem mysticism.
London: East-West Publications.

Blakney, R. B. (Ed.). (1957). Meister Eckhart: A modem translation. New York:
Harper Torchbooks.

Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge &. Kegan
Paul.

Bohr, N. ( 1958). Atomic physics and human knowledge. New York: John Wiley and
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Broad, C. D. (1914). Perception, Physics, and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Carroll, J. B. (Ed.). (1956). Language, thought and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin
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Davies, P. (1990, Oct 20-21). Waves of paradox. The Weekend Australian, p. 22.

Eco, U. (1984). The name of the rose (W. Weaver, Trans.). London: Picador.

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Eco, U. (1989). Foucault's pendulum (W. Weaver, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace
ovanovich.

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The rmture of religion (W. R. Trask,
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Gergen, K. J. (1985). TTie social constructionist movement in modern psychology.
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Gupta, M. (1973). The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Swami Nikhilananda, Trans.),
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Happold, F. (1963). Mysticism: A study and an anthology. Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and philosophy. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Husserl, E. (1962). Ideas: General introduction to phenomenology (W. R. Boyce-
jibson. Trans.). New York: CoUier-Macmillan.

James, W. (1936). The varieties of religious experience. New York: The Modem
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James, W. (1967). Essays in radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe (R. Barton
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Jeans, J. (1958). Physics and philosophy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
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Maharshi, R. (1982). Who am I? Tiruvannamalai, S. India: Sri Ramanasramam.

McCance, D. C. (1986). Physics, Buddhism, and postmodern interpretation. Zygon,
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Mi-Pham, Lama (1970). The wheel of analytic meditation. Berkeley: Nyingma Press.

Moore, P. G. (1978). Mystical experience, mystical doctrine, mystical technique. In
!. T Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (pp. 101-131). London: Sheldon
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Nelson, P. L. (1990). The technology of the preternatural: An empirically based
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Nelson, P. L. (1991-92). Personality attributes as discriminating factors in distin-
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Nelson, P. L. &. Howell, J. D. (1993-4). A psycho-social phenomenological
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Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Popper, K. R. (1982, 29 July). On theories as nets. New Scientist, 319-320.

Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven,
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Sartre, J. P. (1972). The transcendence of the ego: An existentialist theory of conscious-
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Schrodinger, E. (1959). Mind and matter. London: Cambridge University Press.

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Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstmction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass

Smart, N. (1973). The science of religion and the sociology of knowledge . Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Tart, C. T (1972). States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, J 76,
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Taylor, M. C. (1983). Deconstruction: NVhat's the difference? Soundings, LXV/, 387-
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Tellegen, A. &. Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering
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Notes

' See various accounts in Happold's ( 1 963 ) anthe:)logy.

^ The Western notion of deconstructionism has its origins in the work of the French
philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Derrida's deconstructions of Western thought from Plato to
Heidegger attack what he identified as "logocentrism," or the human habit of assigning
ultimate truth to language and the voice of reason in essence, making them the word of
God. Taylor (1983) explicates Derrida's overall position by making us aware that there is a
broad context which saturates all texts, including the internal maps of knowing. This i
summarized by Taylor in his assertion that the reading of the text is the writing of the text.

In the East one finds prototypical forms of deconstructionism given as spiritual practice
In the Tamil speaking world of India, a classic method of attaining the enlightened state
was known as the practice of neti, neti (not this, not this) which was expounded by the 19th
Century Yogi and mystic, Sri Ramana Maharshi (1982). In Tibetan literature, the classic
work of the Lama Mi-Pham (1970) attempts to explicate the same process through a de
tached examination of the body.

' 1 attended yoga classes, learned various meditation techniques, fasted and ingested psy-
chotropic substances. I finally settled on Vajrayana Buddhist practice under the tutelage of
Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche. This, however, eventually proved not to be very useful in terms
of my original purpose.

'' 1 remember asking a fellow American living in Copenhagen at that time who followed
an Indian guru called Muktananda. He explained that his guru had recently been focusing
his attention on Copenhagen which had "raised" the "spiritual consciousness" of everyone
in the city and this is what had affected me.

^ The history of the Theosophical movement is well observed in the critical analysis
offered by Peter Washington (1995). Many of the concepts currently used to define and
explain spiritual life were first introduced to the West through the teachings of Theosophy
and these ideas were themselves distortions of Hindu and Buddhist thought or ex nihilis
creations from the fertile imagination of Helena Blavatsky.

"^Although Vivakananda was an Indian Hindu, his Anglicized education in India, his
participation in the Brahmo Samaj and his less than clear interpretation of the teachings oi
his guru, Ramakrishna, taken in the context of his Indian middle-class upbringing in

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Peter L. Nelson

British dominated culture, generated a system of beliefs which was far removed from the
:raditional Hindu worldview existent before the British Raj. Thus, in this cultural cross-
Dver world many then current Indian beliefs were in fact an admixture of traditional East-
ern thought coated with a thinly disguised Calvinist Protestantism. Although Ramakrishna
ivas supposedly an authentic master of ecstatic states, which he experienced frequently and
jvith great drama while a priest of Kali, at the temple dedicated to the Goddess at
Dakshineswar near Calcutta, Vivakananda never was able to enter into this experiential
iide of his Master's life. So, according to scholars like Bharati, Vivakananda is to be con-
sidered as a very Westernized revisionist who only partially understood and incorporated
lis master's teaching.

'For example, Charles Tart (1972) would argue that knowledge is state-specific and it is
difficult, if not impossible, to describe state-specific phenomena across states of conscious-
less.

^ Peter Moore (1978) argues that mystical experience is subject to three levels of inter-
Dtetation by the experient. Part of that interpretive process results from a top-down in-
itantaneous cognitive filtering which he refers to as "reflexive interpretation". Another,
)OSt hoc, aspect of the interpretive process he calls "retrospective interpretation". The
:hird forms he refers to as "incorporated interpretation", which includes the cultural belief
ystems the experient uses as a bottom-line perspective and is also partly reflexive.

''In the quantum physical world sub-atomic 'particles', such as electrons, appear to have
)oth wave-like and particle-like characteristics. What determines whether such an "ob-
ect" is known as either a particle or a wave is, according to standard interpretations, the
ict of observation. This problem was framed by Heisenberg (1958) as the Uncertainty
rinciple. The indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles is terminated only by the act
)f observation. One way that this cloud of uncertainty is described uses the mathematics of
vave mechanics as invented by Erwin Schrodinger (1959). In this wave description the
letermination of the position of a sub-atomic particle, or the termination of its uncer-
ainty, occurs with the collapse of the Schrodinger Wave which always results from obser-
vation (measurement) of the event (Jeans, 1958).

97

Revolution at Centerpoint:
Divesting the Mind, Dismantling the Self

Fred J. Hanna

The experience of being "centered" has become a common expression in
the last decade. The term is utiUzed by Gestalt, existential, humanistic, and
cognitive therapists, as well as transpersonal psychologists and those studying
and practicing various meditative or other spiritual disciplines. This article is
an attempt to describe the scope and limits of centeredness in the context of
my own experience over the course of three decades of sustained meditative
and introspective practices. What follows is not based on theory so much as
descriptions of actual events and experiences. The focus is on changes at the
"center" of consciousness. From a different perspective, this inquiry is an ex-
amination of changes at the core level of the self as a result of meditative
practice.

Looking back on my experience, and at many interviews of others, I have
come to regard the notion of a center as a pivotal point in which to view the
progression and momentum of meditative practice. For the sake of illustration
and discussion, the idea of a center and the self are considered to be somewhat
synonymous. If the self or ego is considered to be at the center of the human
psyche, as some developmental psychologists have claimed (for example,
Loevinger, 1976), then self and center may well be different labels for what is
largely the same general region of experience. Both self and center may also
be functionally understood as the origin point of awareness. Each seems to
serve as a sourcepoint from which, at a mundane level, consciousness seems to
spring. Of course, there are different ways of looking at this but it is precisely
the nature of this sourcepoint that has held my fascination for 30 years. I
consider the centerpoint to be a potential touchstone for the measurement of
progress on the contemplative path to personal and psychospiritual growth
and development.

In this article 1 will describe three major stages and several substages which
may be identified in the transformation of the center of awareness, or the self.
I would like to clarify that these stages are descriptive of my own path and
development. Unlike most developmental stage schemes, these may not ap
ply to the experience of others. The major stages are that of being precentered,
centered, and decentered. Each of these three stages, along with their respec-
tive substages, will be defined and described in terms of my own experience,

Fred J. Hanna

vith occasional references to the experiences of others. My purpose is to show
he complexity of the psychospiritual path and to outline a different way of
aewing the developmental progress that occurs along the way. An appendix
s provided which lists all the stages and substages.

There are no claims made here that all practitioners experience or should
;xperience these stages in their psychospiritual growth. These stages are my
)wn. I delineate only the stages that I have experienced. Thus, when I do
efer to stages, I ask the reader to bear in mind that I am not implying that
hese stages are the same for everyone. These are simply milestones in my own
levelopment. What follows is a condensed narrative of a personal history of
)sychospiritual exploration and growth. Many techniques and methods to at-
ain these experiences will be mentioned in passing. However, these alone
;ould be the subject of an entire volume and are therefore not described in the
letail they deserve. This is also true of the details of the substages described
lerein. This article is meant to be an overview.

In view of the fact that this article is built on and around the notion of
:enteredness, and what it means to be centered and decentered, it may be
lelpful to define the term before exploring the stages. Centeredness is an ex-
)eriential sense of being that is intimately related to the idea of "I-am-ness"
hat sense of being aware, alive, and at the centerpoint of conscious experi-
;nce. In the context of this article, it is a sense that is usually brought about by
various introspective, contemplative, or meditative endeavors.

The Precentered Stage

Only after I had experienced centeredness did it become clear to me that
he majority of my life was lived without being centered. In other words, I did
lot understand the Precentered Stage until I knew and had experienced be-
ng centered. In 1966, at the age of 16, 1 began a series o{ introspective experi-
nents that have continued for 30 years. My experiments began with trying
echniques I found in a book on self-hypnosis. My interest was not so much in
autosuggestion as much as to examine the fascinating trance states that I found
;ould be brought about using these techniques. I found trance to be very peace-
ul and relaxing, especially when combined with the progressive relaxation
echniques which were included in the book. Eventually, I was able to arrive
It what I considered to be levels of considerable "depth." What I found par-
icularly valuable was the feeling of having submerged myself far below the
surface activity of the mind by diving beneath it and resting in what appeared
o be an inner region of silence and peace. I vividly recall the feeling that
accompanied being wonderfully alone, peaceful, and centered for the first time,
did not know at the time that this was the beginning of what was to become
the single greatest interest and passion of my life.

99

Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

In late 1967 I discovered a now out of print book that described the tech-
nique of meditation from the perspectives of each of the world's religions as
well as from a nonreligious perspective. It was called The Teachings of the Mys-
tics by Walter T. Stace (1960). The book consisted of an anthology along with
Stace's invaluable commentary. After studying the technique of concentra-
tive meditation I was initially daunted by statements found in the ancient
texts referring to the necessity of transcending mind and thought processes.
However, my experience with self-hypnosis suggested that the difficult task of
transcending the mind could be alleviated somewhat by placing myself in the
deepest trance possible and then beginning to meditate from there. This in-
volved the body becoming completely relaxed and disconnected from my im-
mediate conscious control through autosuggestion. It also involved submerg-
ing myself far below the surface activity of everyday thought and mental pro-
cesses, finding that peaceful centered feeling and then commencing with the
technique. It worked surprisingly well.

Without a teacher, and without any specific goals or expectations, 1 enthu-
siastically began to meditate by silently repeating the syllable "OM," that 1
had picked up from reading the ancient Hindu texts called the Upanishads
(Nikhilananda, 1963). I was very excited. Looking back on those moments 1
see that I intuitively sensed the power of the technique. I felt as though I had
found a secret pathway into the inner caverns o{ the mind and self. 1 told no
one of this activity. It just didn't seem appropriate at that time. As it turned
out, this was a wise decision, for it meant that I had no one to tell me that 1
was weird, that meditating was difficult, that the activity was silly, or that
success was likely to be out of my reach. 1 concentrated only on executing the
technique as best I could, giving it my complete focus and attention.

My only purpose was to explore the inner landscapes that meditation re-
vealed and to practice it to the best my ability. I took the same experimental
approach that 1 had with self-hypnosis. That 1 was also undergoing a religious
conflict at the time was of great help in motivating my practice even though I
was not expecting any major breakthroughs or transcendence. Although I
found out later that 1 was pronouncing this sacred sound of OM in an entirely
incorrect fashion, it did not seem to matter. I was having fun as well as being
intensely interested in my newly found secret activity. In any case, my strategy
seemed to work in spite of my incorrect pronunciation of the sacred syllable. I
soon had experiences in meditation of intensely vivid scenes ranging from
galaxies to elaborate patterns and surreal landscapes. These were remarkably
enjoyable to me. Eventually, I had several experiences of clear, expanded aware-
ness well beyond any familiar modes of perceiving and knowing.

Then, on a fortunate day in January of 1968, a thoroughly remarkable major
event in my life occurred. I was silently repeating OM in my usual (although

100

Fred J. Hanna

ncorrectly pronounced) fashion, in the way the Upanishads had described the
nethod. Looking back, I recall that I sometimes visualized the mantra as de-
icribed in the ancient texts; the "raft of Brahman" moving across the waters of
he mind and through the winds of the world, toward the shores of transcen-
lent reality. In this session, 1 achieved a state of transcendence, arriving at
vhat 1 considered at the time to be the "core of reality." Brahman, of course, is
he ultimate reality in that classic text and in the Vedanta school of Hindu-
sm. 1 instantly realized that 1 had moved beyond the world of phenomena and
irrived at a primordial and fundamentally unique way of knowing. I had di-
ectly intuited what I intuitively recognized as the "source of all things." After
his experience 1 recall thinking to myself that 1 now understood what the
;ages in the Upanishads had been talking about. I understood the meaning of
phrases such as " the One without a second" and "Thou art That." This expe-
ience was thoroughly unexpected and uninvited. All 1 was trying to do was
he faithful and proper execution of the meditative technique. And somehow,
trusted in the process.

\. Taste of Centeredness

Following this experience and for the next several months, I found myself
ruly centered the first time in my life. The tone, temper, and tenor of my life
lad changed profoundly, pervasively, and positively. The structure of my think-
ng had been reorganized at deep levels and included deep appreciation for
iltimate meanings and realities. 1 recognized and perceived that "source of all
hings" everywhere I looked, and everything 1 saw sparkled with intrinsic beauty,
felt connected to, identified with, and in communion with all beings and
hings. I found myself in astonishment as new understandings blossomed be-
ore me in a series of continuous spontaneous insights that lasted at least three
nonths. Eventually, these insights stabilized, leading to my coasting on the
ligh feeling that accompanied them and eventually reaching a plateau. In a
vord, I was happy beyond any expectations I had ever had of life at that ten-
ler age of 18. 1 never dreamed 1 could be so happy. Life was filled with mean-
ng it made sense. 1 felt centered well into July of that magical year of 1968.
now regard this experience as opening the door to what I call the first sub-
tage of precenteredness the glimpse of a transcendent reality beyond per-
:eption of the world, and unavailable to access by mundane cognitive pro-
:esses.

However, at another level that I would not have admitted to myself at the
ime, some disturbing and unbalanced feelings and thoughts were brewing,
oon to rise to the surface. At a subtle level, 1 began to feel special, somehow
)rivileged, and amazed that such a thing would have happened to me. I mis-
akenly began to think that I had risen beyond the mundane concerns of life.

101

Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

Of course, these were issues rooted in a narcissistic psychopathology which I
would have to deal with later, as we shall see. In any case, after the "glow" of
the experience wore off, certain life events took place which diminished that
sense of centeredness. After about six or seven months had passed, I found
myself off-center and confused. Although my earlier experience continued to
serve as a "cushion" for life's hardships, depressions, and disappointments, I
was feeling many negative emotions and mood swings of considerable magni-
tude. As the saying goes, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone." This
certainly proved true for me. Years later I realized that this was my version of
the dark night spoken of by Saint John of the Cross (1959).

I had just begun to realize the nature of happiness, fulfillment, and joy
when I found that I was no longer centered and that I was being buffeted by
the winds of emotions and psychological manifestations that were quite new
to me. Much to my bewilderment, 1 longed for an experience as powerful as
the one in January to remedy my emotional instability and the cognitive con-
fusion. Unfortunately, the meditation on OM that had worked so well for me
was now not as productive. 1 had to find something else to continue on my
path or remain in this unpleasant state of rollercoastering between buoyant
joy, pervasive apathy, deep sadness, and a heavy despondency. I felt stymied,
obstructed, and stopped.

My initial passion during this time was to more fully extend my experience
of the "core of reality" in such a way as to reach a closure with that reality. In
other words, I knew intuitively and had inferred from my readings that the
next step was to merge with it. The problem was that OM was not working
and I did not have a clue as to how bring this about. I was saved by that
intuitively driven, psychoexperimental attitude. One of the phenomena that
regularly manifested during meditation was the realization that I, as a mani-
festation of pure being and pure consciousness, was not limited to any particu-
lar identity or viewpoint. In fact, 1 came to understand that 1 was in fact a
source of identities and viewpoints. Early in 1970, as a result of these insights,
I developed an exercise consisting of seeing the world as if through the eyes,
ears, and feelings of other persons and creatures such as birds and animals.
Actually it was an exercise in empathic relating. 1 eventually formalized this
into an entire set of exercises which were aimed at expanding viewpoints and
becoming free of the need for an identity. It consisted of assuming the per-
spectives and viewpoints of people, groups, animals, and physical objects. I
simply sought to "be" those objects and entities until I had a sense of what
they were about. Actually the exercise was more involved than this but that is
the essence of it. Eventually, I experimented with being entire communities,
nations, and ecological systems (I had studied ecology in my early adoles-

102

l: Fred J. Hanna

ence). It was an exhilarating endeavor and one that I took great pleasure in
racticing. Once again, I did not expect what was to take place.

\ue Center

In July of 1970 I was performing this exercise and its final phase which
wolved assuming the viewpoint of the entire universe. This time something
Dtally amazing happened. I was sitting in a living room chair when instantly
11 worldly perception, thinking, and feeling ceased. I found myself confront-
Tig, once again, the "source of all things," the "One without a second." Then
1 an instant and for no apparent reason, I suddenly became that "core of
jality," and I was a self no more. I was now the Self, the "I" of all of exist-
nce all that was and all that ever could be. It lasted several seconds before
normal" worldly perception ensued. But now things were very different. I was
terally no longer the same person that I was before. I fully saw that "I" was
le "Self the whole of existence and that my egoic self was an illusion of
onsiderable proportions. I realized even more deeply the meaning of the clas-
c statements, "One without a second" and "All this is That." The world
'ith all of its wonders, vagaries, and even its evils was my friend and I have
"usted it ever since.

I had finally merged with the transcendent reality and in the process had
ompletely transcended the egoic self. When I returned to being a function-
ig being, the entire world was shining brightly from within and I experi-
need the joy and light that 1 had in 1968 but now with even more intensity
nd magnitude. The volume of my joy had hit dizzying heights of euphoria
nd bliss. I realized that I could never be anything other than centered. I was
mistaken, of course, as I did not know that the realization would be transient,
levertheless, for the moment, I had attained a centeredness so global and all-
ncompassing that both perimeter and center were indistinguishable.

This transcendence and resulting insight was a clear pivot point which I
ow regard as the second substage of precenteredness merging with that tran-
;endent reality to the point of full identification with it. Curiously, after about
IX months, the heights once again settled down to become a new plateau and
le influence of mind that I spoke of earlier returned but this time without the
ramatic mood swings, dark nights, and depths. They were there to be sure
ut not as pronounced. Nevertheless, by this time I was acutely tuned to the
ynamic forces and seductive power of my mind and my own thinking and
naging patterns. In other words, I was more aware than ever of the need to
ttend to my mundane psychological issues, which now seemed to be surfac-
ig at a rate that demanded attention. I seemed convinced that following this
ath was intimately involved with stabilizing the center. Even though I was
lO longer the same self that 1 was, 1 vowed to continue to find the entrance

103

Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

point to the mind and maintain a state of freedom from its negative influ-
ences.

Precenteredness and Psychopathology

What I found was that in this state which I have come to call the Precentered
Stage, the self, or center, is not fully formed in the developmental sense. Even
though full transcendent knowing can take place momentarily at this stage,
there is still the eminent possibility of the person returning to narcissistic,
borderline, schizotypal, or histrionic traits which often remain untouched. As
Thera (1964) noted, even the highest meditative attainments "cannot pen-
etrate deep enough into the recesses of the mind for a removal of moral and
intellectual defilements" (p. 27). A pivotal issue seems to be whether a person's
transcendental experience opens the crucial doors to compassion and em-
pathic knowledge of others, and a resulting reduction in egocentric preoccu-
pation. As these latter traits are also major characteristics of certain personal-
ity disorders, the alleviation of such problems becomes central to the develop-
ment of the self. Indeed, egocentrism and lack of empathy are classic indica-
tors of the instability and lack of development of an authentic self typically
found in personality disorders.

In my case, many of my personal issues were dramatically arrested and
changed but by no means had most of them been affected. The experience
was so powerful that it only appeared to me that my personal issues had been
wiped clean. 1 was amazed at how much more empathic 1 had become. The
inner worlds of others now seemed to open before me and I was curious and
interested in exploring those worlds. However, as the glow wore off, more of
my old issues started to resurface even though their power and hold on me was
now considerably reduced.

In my readings and interviews with persons who have attained transcen-
dent experiences, I learned that this reorganization of the self does not auto-
matically take place. In other words, the mind can be transcended and one's
cognitive system reorganized, but the deeper emotional issues will still be there
when one returns. I have met several spiritual teachers who seem to have
genuinely experienced transcendence but remain chronically unempathic,
much to the detriment of their students. Much has been written of this in
recent years (see Feuerstein, 1990; Walsh & Vaughan, 1993). In such cases,
psychotherapy would be a proper prescription (Komfield, 1993).

It is likely that these experiences may have bypassed the essential step of
reorganizing the core self to increase the capacity for and capability of empa-
thy and compassion. In other words, initially experienced empathy and com-
passion may only be temporary, felt concomitantly with the glow from the
transcendent experience and wears off soon after. It may also be that in such

104

Fred J. Hanna

:ases, after the glow diminishes a person becomes infatuated with the fact of
laving been "chosen," or privileged to have reached beyond the mundane,
rhe person may now feel that he or she has become somehow superior
Deyond the ordinary person and projects himself or herself as a new standard
or humanity. This is, of course, dangerous, especially to those who trust them-
selves to the "wisdom" of such persons.

In my own case, I observed that I was much more given to illusory beliefs,
nagical thinking, and self- aggrandizement. This was very subtle and was prob-
ibly never noticed by others as I knew better than to give in to such impulses.
Vly saving grace was that I recognized these as psychopathological. I see now
:hat transcendence has a way of bringing these issues out in a person as part of
:he cognitive reorganization and the intense emotions aroused. The sanity of
1 person depends on whether these issues are adequately confronted and worked
:hrough. Thus, like the self, many insights at the Precentered Stage can be
:onsidered transitory, vague, fragmented, erratic, unreliable, and alloyed with
leeds and disorders of the personality. Furthermore, knowledge arising from
>uch transcendence is similarly unreliable, often impulsive rather than intui-
tive, and drawn from memory reconstruction of the transcendence rather than
the spontaneous experiencing and knowing in the here and now.

In retrospect, this was a period in my life where I learned of the difficulties
j{ staying centered and of the power of the mind to undermine and remove
:onsciousness from the center of being. Indeed, it was the mind that colored,
influenced, and destabilized that clear conscious awareness that once seemed
>o poised and unshakable. I began to study a wide variety of sources, ranging
from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Aranya, 1983; Deshpande, 1978; Feuerstein,
1989) to theosophy and the occult in a serious attempt to discover a way to
stabilize and enhance that way of being that I had come to realize was "true
normal." At the time, I had no idea of the magnitude of the task but I knew
that I had no other choice, for my path was laid out before me. During the
next 15 years I used many techniques to detangle myself from undue mental
influence even while continuing to occasionally experience the joys of tran-
scendence. These were productive and happy years with highs and lows tend-
ing to even out as the years progressed. At times I felt there was no end to the
work. Eventually, I was to discover what it was like to become stably centered.
But the path took some turns that I never expected.

The Centered Stage

The experiences of 1968 and 1970 seemed to provide me with an intuitive
sense of what was appropriate to pursue and what approaches would work for
me. The next 14 years were dedicated to finding the secret of stabilized
centeredness. It was my good fortune to have acquired a reliable, intuitive,

105

Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

inner source of guidance that served me well. I seemed somewhat hesitant to
let a teacher or group interfere with that intuitive sense of the perimeter of my
growth path. Curiously, 1 had little inclination toward finding a guru although
I found many teachers and learned much from many books during this time. I
faithfully followed that intuitive sense that seemed to "know" what was ap-
propriate and fruitful for my development at a given time. This intuition per-
sisted in spite of confusions and embroilments in my life that I may have been
experiencing at different times. 1 found out years later that Theravada Bud-
dhists refer to this intuition as the "knowledge of path and not path."

I continued to meditate and to study a wide variety of disciplines and sub-
jects. Many of these subjects were mainstream and many were far removed
from anything resembling a well traveled road. My study of dialectical phi-
losophy enabled me to acquire an intuitive wariness of packaged presenta-
tions of truth by various groups, cults, and disciplines. 1 maintained this air of
dialectical inquiry while studying disciplines that were both dogmatic and
flexible, mainstream and offbeat. 1 tried all manner of techniques and strate-
gies to become free of the snares and entrapments of the mind. My goal was to
become centered and stay that way.

I did make satisfactory progress. My experiments with the methods of the
phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl ( 1931 ) along with my con-
tinued readings of Patanjali's methods and the Indian Philosopher, Shankara
(Prabhavananda & Isherwood, 1970) brought me a deep understanding of the
phrase, "pure consciousness." The full understanding of this phrase, 1 was to
learn, was the key to the Centered Stage. In my meditations, 1 had several
encounters with subtle aspects of the mind that actually served to sully or
taint consciousness. 1 sought to free consciousness of such admixtures. This
kind of pursuit was not a matter of, nor it did it require transcendence. This
was closer to psychotherapy than meditation. Nevertheless, it directly led to
my realizing that consciousness could be pure, free of any adulteration caused
by identifying with subtle images, mental constructs, ego remnants, and self-
concepts. I learned that these aspects of mind obstruct transcendence and
may well be the chief reason that people need to meditate at all. I found that
to the degree these mental aspects are removed or divested, transcendence
takes place naturally and spontaneously. When consciousness is "pure" in the
untainted sense, there is always a sense, however slight, o{ centeredness and
connectedness to the transcendent, in spite of the turmoil and agitation that
may be arising from the mind.

Cleansing or Purifying Consciousness

While in pursuit of pure consciousness, a thoroughly remarkable experi-
ence occurred to me that firmly established me on my quest to become stably

106

Fred J. Hanna

centered. In the fall of 1970, a chemistry major friend approached me with
what he called pure mescaline. He told me in no uncertain terms that every-
thing I had sought through meditation could be supplied in one sitting with
this drug. I told him that I had quit using drugs. He insisted that I try one more
time and was quite sincere about it. He actually felt a bit sorry for me seeing
me working so hard on my meditative endeavors. I finally agreed to try it if he
were willing to hear what 1 actually thought of the experience. He agreed and
that weekend we went to a outdoor movie theatre and took the pills together.

The first three hours of this experience was wholly remarkable for the vivid
hallucinations, colors, racing thoughts, and blazingly bright perceptions that
the drug caused. I was quite enjoying myself when something quite unex-
pected took place. I recall thinking to myself at the time that this euphoria
made it easy to understand why some persons are so taken with hallucinogens.
When he asked, I told my friend that it was a good time but that this was not
at all comparable to the joy and bliss that transcendence in meditation pro-
v^ides. He was incredulous but listened with respect. An hour later, just as I
was beginning to "peak" I remember feeling that I could enter magical worlds
and see the magical beings that live there. The euphoria had intensified by
this time. Just then, this thought occurred to me: "1 wonder what would hap-
pen if I left my body."

I instantly felt myself leave my body and "float" out through the car and
nto the cool October night. It was a classic example of those dissociative
experiences which commonly occur under the influence of this class of drugs.
But what I observed was absolutely remarkable. In that one instant of seeming
:o leave the body 1 was no longer under the influence of the drug. The drive-
n theatre looked entirely normal to me. No more racing thoughts, buzzing
sensations, altered perceptions, and no more fantasizing about magical worlds,
rhe quality of my awareness was as normal as it could have been as though
. had never taken the drug. Then, just as spontaneously, I reentered my body
md was instantly deluged by all the altered perceptions, the rushing thoughts,
:he intensely varied colors that had been previously coursing through my aware-
less. I was quite literally astounded. I decided to detach consciousness from
;he body one more time. As I did so, once again everything was completely
lormal. What I had once seen as diamonds on the ground were now once
again stones. The movie screen no longer poured forth colors as though from
in enchanted pitcher. Everything was completely normal. The irony was that
. had to detach from almost all bodily awareness to know that.

As a result of this, I dramatically and poignantly realized that conscious-
less is not confined to the mind, brain, or body. Please note that I am not
naking a metaphysical case for out of body experiences or mind/body separat-
ism here. What I am saying is that once consciousness seemed to be free of the

107

Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

body, it also seemed to be free from the influence of a very powerful drug
which seemed to have my brain "on fire." I learned an indelible lesson in that
moment. Specifically, that consciousness could disidentify and consciously
detach itself from the senses and mental processes, and remain intact. In Yoga
this is called pratyahara.

The influence of the drug lasted another 1 1 hours. I treated the remainder
of this mescaline experience as an experiment. While I did not again experi-
ence the sense of being outside the body, I intently practiced watching the
effects of the drug the amazing array of thoughts, colors, and patterns that
filled my mind and vision. I watched without getting caught up in the flow-
ing, buzzing confusion that was a raging flame in my brain. Eventually, I began
to get bored and just sat and waited for the influence of the drug to wear off. I
finally got to sleep around nine o'clock the next morning. It was a 15 hour
trip. At no time did 1 experience any unpleasant thoughts or feelings. In addi-
tion to the lesson of pure consciousness, I learned another dramatic lesson
that night. Drugs are limited to sense and sensation. They directly affect the
brain but only indirectly do they affect consciousness. I concluded that drugs
are definitely not a part of my path. My friend was disappointed.

It is fascinating to me that this experience with mescaline occurred during
a time when I was intensely interested in observing the activity, operation,
and dynamics of mind and thinking. 1 was especially interested in conditioned
automatic patterns of reaction and association. These are at the source of
stress and lack of coping ability in dealing with the problems of life. 1 began at
this time to undergo sustained practice of experiential techniques designed to
release repressed feelings of pain and stress that I had habitually buried as part
of my early life style and as part of the stereotypical role of my gender. I fol-
lowed this line of inquiry and practice for seven more years. This kind of work
was akin to certain forms of psychotherapy, especially of the Gestalt and expe-
riential schools. It was arduous and often deeply painful. But the rewards were
a deep and satisfying sense of cleansing and purging of mind and emotions.

What I was actually doing was dissolving the samskaras (mental impres-
sions) that are literally the fundamental element of the conditioned mind.
This is an essential aspect of yogic practice. Years of this practice combined
with further transcendental experience eventually yielded an understanding
of an essential life force that moves through the body and mind and all living
beings. In Yoga this life force is called prana, while in China it is referred to as
chi. Initially, I simply referred to this as "energy" until one day it dawned on
me that this must be the life force of which I had read. I have since learned to
use this life force in a variety of ways to maintain the health of both body and
mind. 1 will return to this at the Decentered Stage.

108

Fred J. Hanna

By 1974, 1 had reached what I consider to be descriptive of a first substage
f centeredness. In this substage, consciousness is established as the center of
11 activity, largely freed of mental processes and reactions. This is not to say
hat these processes and reactions do not take place, only that consciousness
5 ever observant and aware of the tides, flows, and eddies of mental processes,
eactions, and emotions. Put a bit differently, it might be said that conscious-
less is released to some degree from the "shell" of one's personality and is able
o recognize consciousness as always being at the center. Of course, personal-
ty traits still need to be dealt with, as well as the deeper issue of the self. One
at risk to the degree that one believes that these traits are harmless or of
ittle consequence in terms of psychospiritual development. In fact, this why
he Buddha incorporated the technique of mindfulness meditation into the
5uddhist path (Thera, 1964). The most glorious meditative experiences do
lot touch the root causes of psychopathology (see also Feuerstein, 1990). In
foga these are called the defilements or klesas. These need to be dealt with
lirectly through mindfulness or specific techniques prescribed by Patanjali.

At this substage, consciousness and knowing appear to arise out of the
ame inner point which the self occupies. It would be as though the pit of a
)each (consciousness) was clearly embedded in the center of the fruit sur-
ounding it (personality shell) even though clearly differentiated. Transcen-
lental knowledge arising as a result of meditation or spontaneous experience
eems to arrive or take place through this central point of consciousness. Func-
ionally, a person at this substage no longer chronically or habitually engages
n thinking. Rather, his or her modus operandi is characterized by the sus-
ained action of looking, observing, and discerning. This is not to say that
hinking does not occur, it just no longer occurs at the center of one's being.
The center is now pure awareness. An important point is that consciousness
emains partially embedded in the personality shell which still contains un-
een egoic and samskaric manifestations, in spite of previous occurrences of
ranscendence. I continued my practices and exercises with no idea how many
ears it would take to reach the stability that was my aim.

leleasing the Center

Of the wide range of subjects that I studied in my attempt at freedom from
he mind, the Yoga Sutras contained the ideas that provided the key to free-
lom from the mind's negative influences. This ancient text is considered the
nost important source for the psychological theory and practice of the Yoga
chool of Indian philosophy. It also has wide influence upon other schools
uch as Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Jainism. In my quest for the proper
ipproach to mind, Patanjali's aphorisms about the mind were eminently con-

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

ducive to practical application and seemed to foster the experimental spirit
that 1 had found so valuable and workable.

The chief lesson I learned from Patanjali and his Yoga Sutras was that the
self is a construction of mind and that self and mind are of a different order of
existence than consciousness. In the Yogic scheme, there are two primary con-
stituents; prakrid, or materiality and purusha, or consciousness. Mind is a subtle
form of prakriti or materiality. This was borne out in my own explorations in
meditation where I found repeatedly that consciousness, or the faculty of see-
ing or looking, is much more subtle than any mental manifestation. And sure
enough, according to Patanjali, mind is of the nature of the perceived while
consciousness is of the nature of the perceiver. These categories are them-
selves sufficient to differentiate purusha from prakriti. According to Patanjali,
mind is of the same nature as physical objects. My insight was that if this is
true, then mind can be reduced to energy just as in the case of physical matter.
I soon became involved in experiments wherein 1 was attempting to dissolve
mental obstructions which are at the bottom of states of lethargy and depres-
sion into the pure mental energy of which they seem to be composed. 1 was to
have great success.

Confounding the process of converting mental constructions into energy
is the issue of identification. According to Patanjali, consciousness becomes
confused and entrapped when it identifies itself with mind and body. This was
one of the most significant insights of my life. My investigations indicated to
me that to the degree that consciousness identifies with a mental construc-
tion it will to that degree become unlikely to ever come to observe it. In other
words, what should be in the realm of the perceived is now hidden in the
realm of the perceiver. The perceiver has identified with these constructions
as intrinsic characteristics. For example, a young girl may have been con-
vinced that she is immoral due to her cruel father's verbal abuse. In this case,
she has identified with this belief, image, or mental construction as the case
may be. Before she can rid herself of the problem, she first has to disidentify
from it so that she can come to view it.

In this same way, various psychopathological traits such as arrogance and
lack of empathy never become examined as part of the psychospiritual quest,
largely because they have become infused into that which is doing the seeing.
It would be like a human eye attempting to turn around and see its own pupil.
The trick is to extract consciousness from the mind and its creations. There is
a technique which discusses this approach (see Hanna, 1991; Puhakka &
Hanna, 1988) although it takes practice to master.

In due time, I was routinely disidentifying consciousness from mind. After
a little practice, I realized that consciousness could eventually come to con-
front, envelop, and pervade virtually any issue or source of mental or emo-

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Fred J. Hanna

ional conflict or pain. The personality shell or husk that surrounded me was
jeginning to slowly dissipate as I continued to work on it. After several years
)f trial and experimentation, I clearly saw that consciousness can affect, rise
ibove, and/or dissolve any mental construction, image, thought complex,
nemory or emotional pain. This was and remains a profound insight for me
ind served to be tremendously liberating.

In fact, it was in 1974 that a host of meditative insights and experiences
:ombined to give me the certainty that consciousness was primary and ulti-
nately the master of mind and perception. Indeed, consciousness creates and
;onstitutes the inner world. Through my study and practice I eventually learned
:o undo anything that the mind created. I realized beyond any reasonable
loubt that consciousness had the capability to alter and dissolve virtually any
nental construction and indeed was the ultimate source of all mental con-
tructions. In my practice-inspired interpretation of Patanjali's Yoga, this ac-
ion is called pratiprasava. After seven years, I had found an effective tool to
ipproach centeredness I had sought for so long. I simply uncreated,
leconstructed, or dismantled any mental construct. I had discovered a crucial
;ense of mastery over the mind.

This mastery was the second substage of centeredness. When conscious-
tess is integrated, settled, and established in itself with no need for mental
deas or constructions as props and supports, it become liberated from being
hronically absorbed or lost in mental processes. It can exert direct influence
)n the mind and can change any of its manifestations. The pith is removed
rom the peach. Consciousness is now seen as separate from self, more primal
ban self and as absolute. This is not to say that consciousness no longer be-
:omes buffeted and blown about by internal mental forces, indeed it does,
he differences is that awareness of the clean and pure nature of conscious-
less is maintained throughout and that consciousness can directly act to change
nd diminish anything in the mind. Just as one knows that the dirt that accu-
mulates on the body is not of the true nature of the body, so is the mental
ebris that compiles and compounds in the mind is not a part of conscious-
less. Pratiprasava, or the uncreating, is the key to this purification.

xploding Outward from the Center

This realization was graphically played out as a result of an experience in
/lay of 1977. I was contemplating the rather rugged desert country of south-
m Idaho n^ar the area known as the Craters of the Moon. As I contemplated
he desert, I realized that I felt somewhat awed and a bit threatened by the
ast inhospitable landscape that rolled on before me from horizon to horizon,
then realized with something of a start that my concern was based on my
lody's inherent survival instincts. An insight flowed from this which indi-

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

cated to me that concern for the survival of consciousness was absurd, and
that my concern was for the body. Images flowed before me, times and actions
which were dictated by the need to protect the body. I saw moments of lock-
ing doors, stopping at red lights, taking karate, and eating healthy. When I
realized that relatively little time was devoted to consciousness and growth I
felt that for most of my life, I had compromised my spiritual integrity.

At that point, consciousness expanded and seemed to pour out of the cen-
ter to fill my body and the environment engulfing the horizon and beyond.
I was acutely aware in a serene, expansive sense and was suddenly hit by a
peculiar almost bizarre insight. I recognized this released core of consciousness
as somehow familiar. Instantly I saw images of myself praying to God as a very
young boy. I realized then, intuitively, that the God that I prayed to back then
and throughout my childhood was nothing other than this core of my own
being. Although there was no transcendence involved in this experience, I
was astounded. As a child I had sensed this part of me and was so much in awe
of it that I thought it must be nothing other than the God that I was taught to
believe was in my heart. I also felt a great sense of power as part of this expan-
siveness. But the most remarkable aspect of it was my vision of my "personal-
ity.

After getting a sense of the God that I prayed to as young boy, my percep-
tion then shifted to my personality that which everyone referred to as "Fred."
I saw my personality as objectively as I would view a rock or a lamp. I saw my
personality as a host of images, memories, and thoughts intertwined and held
together in a definite fluid structure which was literally pervaded by what
had come to know as prana or life force. I saw all of my characteristic person-
ality traits, reactions, preferences, values, aversions, and aspirations. I even
vividly experienced the quality or palpable sense of "Fred-ness" just as I was
known by my friends and family.

Upon seeing this I recognized that my desire to develop my personality had
led to what was tantamount to a meticulously constructed prison through my
act of identifying with this "Fred" entity. I knew that my quest for freedom, led
directly through this kind of entrapment by taking action toward directly dis-
mantling it. I saw that I no longer needed to be, or to have, the "Fred" that I
had presented myself as and identified with for so long. The "Fred" entity was
clearly a mental construct which was literally using up life force, wasting en-
ergy, and was used as a prop or crutch for being-in-the-world. This was a liber-
ating experience. So intricate and complex was the "Fred" entity that I spent
the next several years working on deconstructing it. It was a very rewarding
time in my development as I moved toward feeling more relaxed and comfort-
able about being alive and being-in-the-world.

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Fred J. Hanna

I now point to this experience as the culmination of movement toward the
hird substage of centeredness. The center explodes outward and stabilizes as
in expansive beingness. Since that time, Consciousness was no longer and
lever again experienced as a central point confined to being within the skull,
rhere was now a sense of size or spaciousness (see Govinda, 1960) at the
enter, as though consciousness was pervasive and encompassing. I should
nention that I did various exercises along these lines as early as 1969 but it
tabilized at this moment in the Idaho desert. Once again, there is nothing
ranscendent here only a dynamic, supple, fluid, and expansive way of be-
ng. 1 observed this sense of consciousness expand and contract in direct pro-
)ortion to the severity of challenges and difficulties in my environment. 1
:ontinued this line of inquiry of deconstructing the mind and self for the next
ive years with much success.

The Decentered Stage

I regret that I cannot more fully describe the Decentered Stage as I have
lot yet emerged from it. I sense that I have quite a long way to go. I can,
lowever, describe some early substages. Although transcendent experiences
eem to have had a way of enhancing my levels of compassion, empathy, and
:oncem for ecological issues (on this latter trait, see Smurthwaite & McDonald,
987), it was during this stage that these traits began to manifest in earnest.
X^hat was more liberating and satisfying was that at this stage I began to bet-
er understand "true normal." More importantly, there were several liberating
nsights that manifested during this time, not the least of which was a steadily
ncreasing disinterest in the state of centeredness.

mhpersonalities

As mentioned so often in the Precentered and Centered stages, I focused
)n balancing practice between transcending and mental maintenance and
herapy. I worked with mental constructs and beliefs of the type described in
hose sections of this article. The first substage of this level found me working
vith fragmented consciousness rather than purely mental phenomena. My
irst experience of this came with a shift in my meditations and practices to-
ward understanding and working with the phenomenon known as
subpersonalities" (see Assagioli, 1965; Rowan, 1990). Subpersonalities can
)e seen as minor selves, or fragmented consciousness, which operate within us
:onstantly and in a more or less automatic fashion which is usually removed
rom our awareness. Omstein (1986) referred to these as "small minds" which
lave their own agenda and function and are ultimately under the control of
he self, which he described as "awareness of awareness." This phenomenon
vas also known to Tibetan Buddhists and was described by Alexandra David-
^leel (David'Neel & Longden, 1967) who adequately captured the subtlety

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

and cunning that these aspects of mind can manifest in staying hidden. I also
believe that these were described in the Yoga-Sutras (see Hanna, 1994). All
of these sources agree that virtually all of us have this phenomenon but that
we are seldom if ever aware of it.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of subpersonalities is that they have
their own sense of "I-ness" as part of possessing a consciousness of their own. I
first discovered the sheer breadth of this phenomenon in October of 1982.
Once again, although I continued to practice transcendental techniques, deal-
ing with subpersonalities became the major focus of my psychospiritual quest
for the next seven years. Many of my most subtle neuroses and psychological
issues stemmed from these remarkable estrangements of consciousness. My
first encounters with subpersonalities was along the lines of what Jimg called
the "shadow." In other words, I found myself confronting and dealing with
"dark" attitudes and beliefs that were extremely subtle and were not easily
acknowledged. Among my first insights was how hard I had worked to sup-
press these and relegate them to the outer edges of my awareness. My ultimate
purpose in following this approach was to completely and utterly silence the
internal dialog of the mind. Much of our internal conflicts, negative self-talk,
and automatic negative thoughts, stem from this phenomenon (see David-
Neel and Longden, 1967). These make-up a significant portion of what is
called the unconscious and there is often a tremendous sense of relief when
these subpersonalities are released.

After years of experimenting with these schisms of consciousness, 1 finally
began to understand their nature an insight which proved to be both reveal-
ing and integrating. 1 have already mentioned chi and prana in this article. It
was in these terms that I could best make sense out of this fascinating phe-
nomenon. This fundamental life force seems to be intimately involved with
mundane consciousness. I discovered that in my own case, whenever I en-
countered an experience I could not easily integrate, 1 split off part of my own
conscious life force to deal with it. This is, of course, an unconscious process
and is related to the defense mechanism of repression. My assumption is that
this is done by most human beings. After decades of upsets, disappointments,
and trauma, these begin to accumulate in a way that takes up tremendous
amounts of energy and unconscious effort. After seven years of working to
reintegrate this wayward life force I was continuously amazed at the subtlety
and intricacy of this phenomenon. It is actually not difficult to relegate these
entities back into pure life-force of which they are composed through the use
of the technique of pratiprasava. At the end of those seven years, I had reached
a fairly continuous state of psychological quiet, lightness, and inner harmony.

The effects of this therapy on the centerpoint was quite profound. The
center of consciousness of which I was once so certain began to appear as

114

Fred J. Hanna

)eing no longer at the center of anything. This was quite a contrast compared
o the relative clarity that occurred at all levels of the Centered Stage. Still,
he benefits of reintegrating subpersonalities were considerable and at times
nonumental. I expected to become even more centered when in fact I was
)ecoming less so. The center itself now appeared to be somewhat disorga-
lized, as though there were a whirlpool there which had begun to swallow up
ny sense of "I." Indeed, 1 had already realized that subpersonalities contribute
o a sense of "1." At first I was puzzled by this disappearing center but eventu-
lly began to understand years later when I recognized the Decentered Stage.
'hus, the first substage consists of a breaking down of centeredness as a result
>f the decomposition of confining self structures such as subpersonalities. This
5 accompanied by a vague, mildly pleasant sense of disorganization at the
enter. My psyche was changing along with some bedrock beliefs about what
t means to be stable, sane, and normal.

'oding In and Fading Out

1 had long been interested in Buddhist mindfulness meditation having tried
t on more or less regular intervals since the mid 1970's. 1 became especially
nterested in this form of meditation in Sri Lanka in August of 1979, where I
>ecame acquainted with the writings of Mahasi Sayadaw (1976). This ap-
>roach to mindfulness was particularly inspiring to me. By 1989, as I was phas-
ng out of the Centered Stage (although I would not have recognized that at
he time), I became intrigued by mindfulness practice and intuitively recog-
lized it as being directly on my path to further development. I thus incorpo-
ated it into my array of active exercises. I studied a variety of sources and
xperimented with a number of applications of this powerful technique before
ettling on three specific approaches that seemed well suited to my particular
;rowth needs. Three areas of application were particularly fruitful; 1 ) mind-
ulness of the self, 2) mindfulness of the will, and 3) mindfulness of the field of
lody-mind. Each of these provided significant insights.

It was while practicing this technique on the self in 1990 that I was opened
o a new realm of experience. I had thought that I had come to understand the
lature of the self to a considerable degree. I was firmly convinced that I had
educed it to a skeletal construction of mind, loosely hung together as a more
)r less necessary or functional aspect of being-in-the-world and interacting
^'ith others. Put a little differently, I perceived the self as an apparatus for
)rganizing inner and outer perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and interactions
^^ith others. However, due to my experiences of the previous two decades, I
attributed nothing in the way of identity to this apparatus. I had no idea how
ncomplete was my understanding, even though I had shaved the self down to
ts bare boned structure and had extracted from it virtually all of its active life

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

energy. After continued meditation on it, I clearly saw that its foundation was
built on pain, insularity, and intolerance, and thus, that it was time for it to be
dismantled.

This process proved to be intensely revealing. By 1993 the self was appear-
ing to me no longer as something natural but more as a symptom of a serious
disorder or disease. I began to see the self as a great gaping wound in the fiber
of being, intimately bound up with pain and suffering. Mindfulness of it was a
painful enterprise of confronting deep anguish and suffering. As I continued,
I began to see the self as a global defense mechanism against the intolerable
threat of a vast, infinitely complex and impersonal cosmos. Having by this
time become fairly well read in a variety of Buddhist, Hindu, and Yogic sources,
it did not take me long to see where this line of exploration was headed. The
void, sunyata, lay at the end of this path. 1 was both excited and somewhat
shaken. 1 had not anticipated this.

As 1 continued, the notion of the self as a defense and as a wound loomed
ever larger until 1 began to see that it was at the source of psychopathology.
From the viewpoint of the self, the infinite is intolerable. Infinite existence is
something to struggle against, to divide and separate into dichotomous cat-
egories as fundamental as here/there, this/that, near/far, now/then, and self/
other. I saw that to maintain the self things must not be perceived as they
really are but must conform to desires, needs, and expectations inherent in
that self-structure. And amazingly, 1 saw that the fundamental nature of the
self is pain and that being without one was a natural consequence of
psychospiritual development.

1 utilized experiential techniques as part of the mindfulness of all that pain
and anguish seemed as though it had been exhausted or dissipated. Eventu-
ally, I reached a point where 1 would go for several days at a time with no
conscious awareness of a self at all. I experienced no subject/object differen-
tiations even in my environment and everyday interactions with people. It
was so remarkably natural that 1 hardly noticed that the self wasn't there any-
more. But I did notice. I had, of course, briefly experienced this many times in
meditation but never to this consistent degree in everyday functioning. After
a few weeks the self would return. Then when it returned 1 would again medi-
tate on it until a new realization would dissipate another chunk of it. I had
known for many years that these subtle manifestations of self were there. Now
I was seeing what 1 already knew but at a depth that I never knew was there.

This was the second substage of Decenteredness. The self fades in and out
for short periods of time leaving an awareness of no subject/object distinctions
in everyday life. During times when the self is faded out, there are great feel-
ings of empathy, compassion, perception, and spontaneity. A recognition grows
of a luminous pervasive awareness of the void as consummate and all-encom-

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Fred J. Hanna

passing. In fact, it might be better said that the void is all that there is, and
that awareness is ultimately the void as well. In any case, the self is clearly
seen as a defense against or a haven from voidness. Voidness, of course, is the
true nature of all existence without a self. When there is no self to alter, modify,
qualify, compromise, and inhibit perception, the world becomes as though
washed clean.

Once again, I found this same realization to occur after major experiences
at earlier stages but without the sheer, breathtaking, impersonal majesty that
manifested here. The incredible fact is that I was simply seeing the world as it
truly is, without any subtle needs for reconstructing or interpreting it. Perhaps
most remarkable is that what was doing the seeing was no longer any sense of
I-ness or me-ness. I realized that it is the self that manipulates the mind to
serve its purposes of defense and protection according to desires, fears, fanta-
sies, and cravings. The incredible irony is that with the deconstruction of the
self comes a greater sense of "security" and pure radiant joy than could ever be
Dossible with a self. It has to be experienced to be believed.

No More Center: Disengaging the Will

Once the self had begun to fade in and fade out I found myself contemplat-
ing more and more a phrase that many buddhist sources had mentioned con-
:erning the realization of nirvana (or nibbana in the Pali language). Sayadaw
(1976), for example, stated that nibbana is end of sankhara or mental forma-
tions especially volitions. More and more I became fascinated with the na-
ture of the will and whether or not it was of the nature of, in yogic language,
:onsciousness or mind. Finally, in November of 1994, I made the will the
'ocus of my mindfulness meditations watching every act of will from mov-
ing limbs of the body to making decisions. Eventually, I became adept at watch-
ing thoughts come into being and what's more watching the subtle aspects of
will that bring thoughts and images into being.

This was extremely fruitful and before long a remarkable thing happened
in March of 1995. I found that I had disengaged from the will. I was, once
again, astounded. I had, up to this time believed that the will was part of
consciousness but no more. After a few minutes of settling into meditation I
Degan to contemplate the will in operation as though I were the observer. I
Degan to understand that my true nature was without any kind of volition and
that, in fact, the will is the cradle of and mother to, the self. In other words, it
is not the self that does the willing; willing is what creates the self. Willing
itself is driven by desires and cravings, and these tendencies create surges in
the mind that produce mental currents and backwaters that eventually end up
forming the "Fred entity" that I spoke of at the Centered Stage. I saw it now.
The philosophers of Samkhya and Yoga were right the will is part ofprakriti

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

(material) and not of purusha (consciousness). Without a self, the mind is
streamlined and refined. Once again I saw that mind does not need a self in
order to function at optimum levels.

This was the third of the substages in the Decentered Stage. The insight
about the nature of will freed me with more revolutionary intensity than any
experience I had had to date. When 1 now looked for a center of awareness,
nothing was to be found. There was now an almost palpable chasm or gap
where once there was a self. Unlike fading in and fading out, this is a revolu-
tion at the centerpoint of awareness a metamorphosis. An essential core
aspect of the self had been removed and been joyously replaced by the void.
Ties and bonds to the self had been spontaneously cut. There was no more "1,"
and when I looked it was nowhere to be found. There was no more center
from which to orient the rest of the world and mind.

Perhaps most remarkable is that 1 discovered what it is to function without
willing. This is where spontaneous intuition guides one's actions without en-
gaging the will. I believe that this is the essence of the concept of wu-wei
found in the Taoist writings of Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. The phrase is usu-
ally translated as actionless action action that is free of motivation or in-
tent. My life could be characterized simply as the void perceiving and inter-
acting with itself. I realized that the infinite cosmos is always there, it is the
will that shifts the lenses providing various views. I want to wax philosophical
at this point, and go into a treatise on how will interacts with karma and
experience but this is beyond the scope of my purpose here.

This state lasted for approximately a year but even when it diminished
there was a new plateau that had been achieved. For the first time since I
began my quest, 1 did no sitting meditating during that year. My meditation
was now done spontaneously and in the moment as life presented itself. 1 had
no illusions, however, I knew that there was much more work to do. After the
glow wore off I found myself meditating again on the will and other new areas
that needed attention. But that center has not returned. As of this writing, 1
am still quite in the middle of the Decentered Stage. 1 have no center of
consciousness anymore and that feels quite natural and appropriate. It is hard
to remember what it was like to have one. To experience the lapse of a self
under healthy circumstances is, paradoxically, to understand what it means to
be a normal human being. Indeed the more the meditation and growth exer-
cises continue, the more normal and insignificant one becomes. It is quite
liberating to be rid of intrinsic significance.

Although not quite worthy of a substage unto itself, I should mention that
at some point it is important to treat the powerful experiences of the type
described in this article as a kind of trauma. In a convoluted sort of way, these
experience have a lasting effect on a person just as would moments of trauma.

118

Fred J. Hanna

Even though these are moments of pleasure and insight, they nevertheless
have a way of shaping beliefs and thoughts and personality patterns. I have
recently learned that these need to be treated in a psychotherapeutic fashion
so that they lose their influence in shaping the self. I will not venture to specu-
late on the remaining substages in the Decentered Stage or the further stages
that lie beyond. Before concluding however, it may be appropriate to give a
more elaborate description of the void, based on my limited acquaintance
with it.

The Nature of the Void

Before undertaking the more or less futile endeavor of describing the void,
[ should mention that I have only limited experience with it and only rarely
have I witnessed a remnant of its full splendor. I believe that those who are
truly advanced in their development have the honor of witnessing its grand
majesty. I can only speculate what that is like. Nevertheless, I will try to do
this justice, knowing the limits of language.

The void or sunyata, is an ancient Buddhist concept that is easily misun-
derstood. There are several key points to consider. The void is not nothing-
Qess. The world is still quite present. The void is what is left when the self is
completely absent (see Bhikku, 1994) having been deconstructed and de-
composed from within. Another important and related point is that the void
is what is apprehended by the highest intuitive knowledge where there are
no views, conceptions (Murti, 1960) or ideas (Hahn, 1992). The world is seen
as it is in its actuality and primordiality with no more filters, modifications,
interpretations, qualifications, or purposes to obscure its radiant existence. In
Dther words the world is seen as it is in itself. Without a self, all of life is seen
as interconnected, intersubjective, and sharing consciousness. The entire world
is brimming with aliveness in the organismic sense mentioned by the great
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1978).

There is a multiple loci of consciousness that is, a distinct sense that one
s seeing things from more than one spatial location simultaneously. There is a
similar sense of multiple foci, in which there is a simultaneous sense of being
iware of many objects of consciousness at one and the same time. The combi-
nation of multiple loci and foci may give some idea of why it is so difficult to
describe this intuition. Thinking is at a standstill and is replaced by an en-
:ompassing intuitive knowing which is dialectical rather than logical or ratio-
lal. Mental images are absent no longer a major aspect of mental activity
ind thus no longer serve as unconscious filters or templates for perceptions
and preconceptions of a world that now appears primordially cleansed. In the
^oid, the world brilliantly announces itself in its primeval actuality. Indeed,
3ne almost feels like one is in touch with the thoughts of the entire world.

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

Another salient aspect of what manifests in the absence of a self is a perva-
sive, global, intersubjective empathy. This is empathy from a decentered per-
spective and is amazingly intense when transcendence is experienced at this
stage. In everyday living, this manifests as a sense of all of beings and things in
touch with and interpenetrating all beings and things. Compassion, although
often well developed as a result of transcendent experiences, is greatly en-
hanced when a self is not there to render it ever so slightly alloyed or de-
graded.

This leads me to a point that has often been made. The void is not a noth-
ingness or a lack of anything. Paradoxically, the presence of a self is actually more
of a dearth or deficiency than one can imagine. A mind that is oriented around a
center is incapable of fully appreciating this. Whatever is lost through the
reduction and decomposition of the self is more than made up for by the dis-
covery of a cosmic joy of incredible magnitude that fills up anything which
could remotely be considered a nothingness. We humans call it joy. In the
intuition of the void, one realizes that this is really the primordial feeling of
the universe.

Conclusion

The various stages and substages of my spiritual quest have now been out-
lined. Although many details and techniques have been left out, it may be
clear by now that current theories of spiritual development do not take into
account the sequence or the content of the experiences described here. Like-
wise, the development that I have experienced may not be applicable to that
of others. In any case, I would like to make it clear that I have not progressed
far enough on the path of psychospiritual development to claim any status
such as being a guru, an arhant, a master, a saint, an adept, or jivanmukta. If I
could claim it I don't think I would want to. After 30 years of introspective
experience, I have come to be skeptical of the concept of enlightenment as
simplistic and impractical. True normal is my goal and I am still discovering
what that means. I am certain that there remains so much more for me to
know that I do not have time to learn it in the years that remain.

I Would like to close this article with a discussion of the Heart Sutra of
Buddhism. The Heart Sutra is named as such because it claims to have cap-
tured the heart of Buddhism: "Form is nothing other than Void. Void is noth-
ing other than form." Seeing this, one also concludes that there is nothing
other than the void. In conclusion, I would like to briefly summarize what I
have learned from 30 years of inquiry and practice based on emptying the
mind and self, and attempting to understand what is ultimately real. To tran-
scend name and form one must have the knowledge that names arise from
mind and form is a product of the senses. A transparent mind generates no

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Fred J. Hanna

names and adds nothing to perception in the way of compounding and solidi-
Fying forms. When one sees this, the self is emptied and the void shines in its
fullness.

Appendix
A Summary of the Stages and Substages

The Precentered Stage

One enters this stage when one discovers what it means to be centered.
Having an experience of being centered usually reveals that one has seldom
been centered prior. The Precentered Stage involves the insights which lead
to becoming centered and the struggle to stabilize it.

Substage 1: Precenteredness begins with a glimpse of a transcendent real-
ity beyond ordinary perception of the world and mundane cognitive processes,
rhe reality glimpsed is recognized as being beyond ordinary subject/object
distinctions.

Substage 2: Merging with that transcendental reality to the point of full
identification with it. Once again, this involves transcending the world of
phenomena and moving beyond subject/object distinctions.

rhe Centered Stage

At this stage a person intuitively understands the meaning of the term
'pure consciousness." Consciousness is understood as the center, focus, and
origin of reality. It is seen as separate from mind and self which serve only
alloy and debase its pure character and quality. Consciousness is established in
itself and ultimately tied to transcendental reality.

Substage 1: Consciousness is established as the center, largely free of mind
and reactions. This is not to say that reactions do not take place, only that
consciousness is ever observant and aware of the tides, flows, and eddies of
mental processes and emotions. Put a bit differently, it might be said that
consciousness exits or is released to some degree from the "shell" of one's per-
sonality.

Substage 2: Consciousness becomes integrated, settled, and established in
itself with no need for mental ideas or constructions as props and supports. It
is liberated from being chronically absorbed or lost in mental processes in-
cluding personality issues and structures. Consciousness is seen as separate
from mind, more primal than mind, and as absolute. It can also master and
change any construction of mind.

Substage 3: The center expands outward and stabilizes as an extended
beingness. Consciousness is no longer and never again experienced as a cen-
tral point confined to being within the skull. There is now a sense of size or
grand spaciousness that becomes a part of one's being.

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Revolution at Centerpoint: Divesting the Mind

The Decentered Stage

In the Decentered Stage the center begins to corrode or decompose as if
from within. The self begins to Uterally disappear not only in transcendent
experiences but in everyday life which begins to become more and more
transcendent.

Substage 1 : Centeredness begins to break down as a result of the decompo-
sition of confining self structures. This process results in a not unpleasant lack
of a sense of center which is now replaced by a sense of a mildly pleasant
disorganization.

Substage 2: The self is clearly seen as a defense against or a haven from the
stark reality of the void, and as a wound in the fiber of one's being. The self
fades in and out for short periods of time leaving a mild lack of subject/object
distinctions in everyday life. During times when the self is faded out, there is a
recognition of a luminous, pervasive awareness of the void as consummate
and absolute.

Substage 3: The center ceases to exist, along with a sense of self. There is
an almost palpable chasm or gap where once there was a self. Unlike fading in
and fading out, this is a revolution at the center of awareness a metamor-
phosis. An essential core of the self is removed and is joyously replaced by the
void.

Substage 4: This substage is as yet unrealized. It may be related to the un-
doing of the impact of powerful transcendent experiences which have them-
selves formed a kind of self-structure. Beyond this, I cannot speak, simply
because 1 do not know.

References

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of New York Press.

Assagioli, R. (1965). Psychosynthesis: A manual of principles and techniques. New
York: Penguin.

Buddhadasa, B. (1994). Heartwood of the bodhi tree. Boston: Wisdom Publications

Cross, S. J. (1959). Dark night of the soul. Garden City, NY: Image Books.

David-Neel, A., & Lon'gden, L. (1967). The secret oral teachings in Tibetan Buddhist
sects. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Deshpande, P. Y. (1978). The authentic Yoga: Patanjali's Yoga sutras. London: Rider.

Feuerstein, G. (1989). The Yoga-sutra ofPatanjali. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions
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Feuerstein, G. (1990). Holy madness. New York: Paragon House.

Govinda, A. G. (1960). Foundations of Tibetan mysticism. Bombay, India: B. 1.
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Hanh, T. N. (1992). The diamond that cuts through illusion: Commentaries on the
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Husserl, E. (1931). Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology . New York:
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Kornfield, J. (1993). Even the best meditators have old wounds to heal: Combining
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Loevinger, J. (1976). Ego development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Murti, T. R. V. (1960). The central philosophy of Buddhism. London: George Allen &
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Nikhilananda, S. (Trans.). (1963). The Upanishads. New York: Harper & Row.

Omstein, R. (1986). Multimirxd. A new way of looking at human behavior. London:
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Prabhavananda, S., Isherwood, C. (1970). Shankara's Crest ]ewel of Discrimination .
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Puhakka, K., & Hanna, F J. (1988). Opening the pod: A therapeutic application of
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Rowan, J. (1990). Subpersonalities: The people inside us. London: Routledge.

Sayadaw, M. (1976). Practical insight meditation: Basic and progressive stages. Kandy,
sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.

Smurthwaite, T J., & McDonald, R. D. (1987). Examining ecological concern
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Stace, W. T. (1960). The Teaching of the mystics. New York: New American Library.

Thera, N. (Ed.). (1964). The simile of the cloth and The discourse on Effacement: Two
iiscourses of the Buddha. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddist Publication Society: (Wheel Series
^o. 61/62).

Walsh, R., & Vaughan, F (1993). Problems on the path: Clinical concerns. In R.
OO'alsh & F. Vaughan (Eds.), Paths beyond ego: The transpersonal vision (pp. 131-137). Los
\ngeles, CA: Jeremy Tarcher/Perigee.

Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.

123

Transpersonal Psychotherapy:

The CUnical Importance of Beginner's Mind

and Compassion

Gregjemsek

Introduction

When a psychological therapist observes a client experiencing an altered
state of consciousness during a therapy session, he is most likely to respond by
categorizing it as some form of neurotic or psychotic behavior (Szasz, 1961).
However, many if not most altered states of consciousness are not patho-
logical. ^ Numerous voices within the profession and outside of it have been
raised to protest the overzealous use of mental health classification systems. ^
A common criticism has been that many of these diagnoses have pathologized
states of consciousness that are actually expanded states of awareness such
as mystical states of consciousness (Grof and Grof, 1986).^

By lumping virtually all altered states into pathological categories, the ver-
ity of such states as legitimate and valuable realities is dismissed. With-
out disavowing the necessity for acknowledging and treating states of con-
sciousness which threaten well being and/or the surrounding environment,
treating all altered states as pathological limits psychotherapy to the function
of managing clients into narrow bands of consciousness more or less matching
current professional definitions of normalcy. Therapy becomes synonymous
with directing client behaviour to conform to the parameters of those defini-
tions.

Transpersonal psychotherapy takes a different tack. While transpersonal
approaches are varied and can conflict with each other, they share in common
a recognition that altered states of consciousness are not only valid but central
to understanding human experience (Walsh and Vaughan, 1993). From a
transpersonal perspective altered states may or may not be dysfunctional, but
this does not absolve the therapist of his responsibility to examine and explore
these states in ways that do not habitually pathologize them. An ego-based
perspective is only one of the many realities that can be worked with in
transpersonal therapy (Walsh and Vaughan, 1993).

This orientation means that transpersonal therapists are constantly seek-
ing maps which chart the territory of the altered states their clients (and they
themselves) experience. Usually these maps are looked for in the non-funda-

Greg Jemsek

lentalist, mystical and/or visionary religious literature of Buddhism, Hindu-
m, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, and their various offshoots (Maslow, 1964).
: is here that transpersonal therapists find some of the states of consciousness
ley witness described, validated, and put into some kind of context.

But most religious literature was written well before modem psychotherapy
ven existed. As a result, the transpersonal therapist is left with problems of
anslation, interpretation, and modernization of what he discovers relative
) the clinical setting. He inevitably confronts questions such as these:

Is the dream the client brought to therapy one to be interpreted psycho-

dynamically? Or is the dream best considered in a transpersonal fashion

(as would be the case, for example, with precognitive dreams and/or

lucid dreaming)?

Is the dissociated state a sexually abused client accesses in a session

merely a defense mechanism, or can it be worked with in a way that

broadens the client's overall awareness?

How can the "kernel of truth" a therapist perceives in the "paranoid

fantasy" narrated by the client be addressed without exacerbating the

paranoia?

What this essay seeks to accomplish is an understanding of how two al-
ired states of consciousness cultivated by Eastern meditation practices
z^nner's mind and compassion can powerfully influence the depth of know-
ig and the rate of change in psychotherapy. This will be done by examining
) how such states are accessed, and 2) their impact in the clinical setting. It
1 proposed that intentionally altering consciousness to beginner's mind and
ompassion facilitates the spiritual knowing sought by transpersonal thera-
ists and their clients.

Overview

Beginner's mind and compassion are considered altered states because each
wolves a "qualitative shift in...(the)pattem of mental functioning" (Tart,
990). The qualitative shift involved in functioning from either beginner's
lind or compassion includes two of the three characteristics noted by Gifford-
lay and Thomson (1994) in their study of deep meditation: 1) transcen-
ence beyond the normal physical and mental boundaries of the self, and 2) a
ifferent sense of reality. When the therapist accesses these two altered states
f consciousness in a clinical setting he initiates a meditation process in which
le client can also participate. Both these altered states are in fact accessed by
meditation "trigger" known as witnessing in Hinduism and mindfulness in
uddhism. Witnessing is the term used in this essay.

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The Clinical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

When beginner's mind and compassion are experienced, the universe is
viewed non-dualistically (Suzuki, 1970). The person in these states of con-
sciousness is less identified with ego and the resulting broader perspective gained
can lead to insights of either a psychological nature or a spiritual nature
(Boorstein, 1994). When reality is experienced non-dualistically, potential
actions that can be taken to address whatever issues have been brought to the
therapy session are considered by the perceiver (the therapist, client, or both)
to be more authentic than those taken when consciousness is exclusively ego-
based; more in alignment with broader truths often described as spiritual in
nature (James, 1981 ). This essay proposes that when authentic action is taken
in therapy the insights gained are more thoroughly consolidated and a broader,
redefined ego state results.

Beginner's mind and compassion are beneficial not just to clinical practice
but to a person's overall development as well. These states of consciousness
are not, however, "ultimate end states" reflecting spiritual ascendancy in any
hierarchical sense. They are merely expansions of consciousness distinct from
but related to an individual's ego. An appropriate analogy would be to say
they function as different notes on a piano keyboard of consciousness which
also has a key devoted to the ego and other keys assigned to numerous othei
altered states of consciousness.

Beginner's mind, compassion and the authentic action that can follow are
conducive both to greater overall awareness and a greater sense of well-being.
The expanded awareness which results when consciousness is altered in the
ways described here allows for a broadening, deepening, and greater under-
standing of "the way things work". This generates insight, empathy, and, oc-
casionally, wisdom. It also serves to deconstruct calcified ego definitions of
the self, allowing for a redefinition that is more inclusive of a broader aware-
ness, and ultimately more functional. An example from a therapy session dem-
onstrates how this process can unfold:

A sexually-abused client, age 34, is in the process of recalling the
abusive episodes he experienced at age 5. In doing so he begins
to dissociate'' which, in previous sessions, he had identified doing
during the abuse. From the altered state of beginner's mind, the
therapist is prompted to retell the abuse narrative in the nurtur-
ing, supportive tone one would use with a child of 5 who was
frightened about something. The narrative is not a specific re-
counting of the event, but focuses instead on the characteristics
of the client he was acutely aware of before the abusive incident
(which had been related in prior sessions), things such as his cu-
riosity, physical enjoyment of the world, and gentle disposition.

126

Greg Jemsek

These qualities and the events of the abuse are noted by the thera-
pist in a general way, maintaining a reassuring tone and manner.
The client hears this and begins to respond in a child-like voice
about the incident, in the process discovering feelings of sorrow
and anger previously avoided. As such expression continues, the
dissociation stops and the client's consciousness reassumes its adult
characteristics, but with a presence of attention that had not been
evident in the therapy until that point.

This is not a unique therapeutic example. I have heard versions of this case
:udy expressed by a number of colleagues working with sexually-abused ch-
ats. The response when the client begins to dissociate, however, is much
lore likely to be flexible, relevant, and spontaneous if the therapist has changed
is consciousness to beginner's mind or compassion. In this instance, the au-
"lentic action prompted by beginner's mind was that of providing reassurance
\ a nurturing tone by telling a story as if to a five-year old. In other instances,
owever, an authentic response from the same state of consciousness may have
een quite different, perhaps just waiting, or encouraging the client not to
issociate, or working with physical sensations the client is experiencing dur-
\g the dissociation.

When the therapist responds from his normal, waking, ego-based conscious-
ess, however, he is much more likely to act automatically, usually by applying
technique employed successfully on a prior occasion. Acting automatically
oesn't mean that something useful can't be accomplished. It can be, but the
ptions available when doing so as well as the impact of the intervention are
iminished relative to what can happen when action stems from beginner's
lind and compassion.

Beginner's Mind

Beginner's mind is a term borrowed from Zen Buddhism. Shunyro Suzuki
1970), a Zen Buddhist Roshi (master) who was instrumental in bringing Zen
D the United States, spoke of beginner's mind as a unique state such that

In the beginner's mind there is no thought, "I have attained
something." All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind.
When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self,
we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something.
The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind
is compassionate, it is boundless, (p. 22)

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The Clinical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

From this quotation, it is clear that beginner's mind advocates an approach
quite different from usual western notions about living, particularly the ideas
of "no thought of achievement" and "no thought of self."

No thought of achievement

When a client comes in for a psychotherapy session, the purpose of the
therapist is usually to aichieve a solution to whatever problem the client brings.
This is unquestionably true from the viewpoint of the ego, which endeavors
to relate to the world by functioning more competently in it. Failure to do so
means failure to survive. But the world itself is in many ways dysfunctional.
Whether you consider the masses of starving people on the African subconti-
nent, the overkill nuclear arsenals of the United States, or the utilization of
slave labour in China for profit, countless examples of inhumane political,
economic and cultural practices abound throughout the world, and impact
the lives of all of us.

The purpose of psychotherapy, then, cannot be restricted merely to suc-
cessful adaptation to surrounding societal norms^. Doing so simply reinforces
social mechanisms which disregard the spontaneous, creative expressions oi
individuals and groups within mainstream society. When the focus of therapy
becomes transcendent of the personal, however, it can serve as a catalyst to
genuine self and community awareness the latter because of the
interconnectedness engendered by these experiences which has been consis-
tently noted as an outcome of transpersonal experiencing (Gifford-May and
Thompson, 1994). This broader awareness puts personal life in a larger (some
would say more spiritual) context. It means, however, dealing with more than
just the ego's perspective on the world.

Ironically, the ego is the necessary starting point for any transpersonal work.
Successful transpersonal therapy begins with a solid ego identity giving way to
a curiosity about and a reaching for broader awareness.

The fact that the ego, as a halfway house back to Spirit, is the
first structure intelligent enough to be aware of the already fallen
state of existence, makes it appear incorrectly that the ego causes
the disease itself, when in fact it is halfway through the cure.
(Wilber, 1982,p. 11)

Beginner's mind cultivates this awareness by creating opportunities in
therapy for an open-ended exploration of issues, without ever assuming that
this exploration will result in "solving the problem."^ Urgency to problem
solve moves a person's consciousness away from beginner's mind to "expert's
mind." This is movement from the transpersonal to the personal. Expert's mind
may indeed offer a legitimate solution to a situation, but if it is adopted too

128

Greg Jemsek

uickly creative alternatives, which may have even greater impact and broader
nplications, never emerge. The solutions that arise when beginner's mind is
iCcessfuUy employed emerge spontaneously, usually surprising the recipient,
leginner's mind prepares the way for this by making one ready to really learn
3mething.

This requires trusting that whatever information or process is needed will
Dontaneously emerge once an individual lets go of the idea of achievement,
b demonstrate this, let's examine more closely how the process unfolds.

The essential first step necessary to let go of the usual emphasis on achieve-
lent in a therapy session is to change the focus from problem solving to mak-
ig contact, first with yourself, and then with the client. This involves relax-
ig, focusing inward, quieting yourself down and concentrating on the inter-
al "landscape."

Making contact with yourself begins by taking a metaphoric half step back
om any and all forms of ego identification that are operating. Taking this
alf step back is known as witnessing (Ram Das, 1970), and serves to trigger
le meditation process.

This simple step is one few individuals take, however, because of entrenched
eliefs that the roles played in life are equivalent to self- identity. Teacher,
lother, sister, professional, or negotiator are just some of the roles an average
erson might play during the day. The question of what aspect of conscious-
ess is common to all these roles yet separate from each of them rarely gets
sked.6

Witnessing involves a conscious retreat from acting automatically. It is, in
way, a leap of faith requiring a person to relinquish identification with ego-
ased roles and simply observe them for a time. This disidentification process
reates immediate difficulty for most people because it fundamentally chal-
inges belief systems, behaviors, and many ideas an individual is likely to view
s foundational to daily living. Role disidentification, in fact, is often per-
eived, consciously or unconsciously, as a basic threat to existence.

It is understood this way because the ego performs the job of role identifi-
ation with tremendous conviction. As Freud (1915) noted, the ego constantly
ieks to negotiate a path through conflicting forces arising from a person's
Dcial conscience (superego societal injunctions regarding behavior) and
om instinctual urges (id impulses towards survival, pleasure, death). Neo
reudians and others have taken issue with many aspects of this model, but
lost agree with the basic notion that the ego manages conflicting forces as
est it can and serves to construct a functional identity for each of us (Frager
nd Fadiman, 1984). This identity is based on establishing various roles that
How us to survive in the world, to develop the skills we need to feed, clothe,

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The CUnical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

educate, and advance ourselves. And while this ongoing constniction is
taking place, the ego ascertains over and again that the roles we play are in
fact who we are.

A dilemma for an individual arises, however, when the ego is unable to
screen out awareness of other states of consciousness. Its ongoing juggling act
is both an effort to disavow the existence of such states, and an attempt to
avoid the knowledge that functioning from altered states such as beginner's
mind and compassion bring. As mentioned above, roles are constructed to
increase a person's ability to function in the world. Any disidentification with
roles is viewed by the ego as a form of self-destruction. The following example
demonstrates how this process is initiated for a client having an insight while
in beginner's mind:

A 53 year old female client currently living on a farm comes to
therapy because the isolation of rural living is contributing to
depressive episodes, which are exacerbated by an increasingly dis-
tant relationship with her spouse. Her grown children have left
the area, highlighting the deficiencies in her spousal relation-
ship, and her husband is unwilling to attend counselling. Matters
are made worse by the fact that she and her husband do not own
the farms they work but rather lease them for periods of time
sometimes as short as two years before moving on, making it
extremely difficult to establish roots and feel integrated into a
community.

The client is familiar with beginner's mind through a meditation
course taught by the therapist, and on the particular occasion of
this session both parties access this state o{ consciousness. After
doing so the client spontaneously recalls childhood memories of
her upbringing on a farm, remembering her mother's sadness at
never pursuing her chosen career but instead living as a farm wife
to appease her husband. This psychological parallel to her own
circumstances hits home for the client, and is followed by a dif-
ferent realization: if she chooses to leave her marriage, or to insist
on residing more permanently somewhere where her vocational
aspirations (she had been trained as a nurse) could be fulfilled,
her life as she knows it would "fall apart." She simultaneously
experiences excitement and trepidation at considering this pros-
pect.

Both the trepidation and excitement this client is experiencing are indica-
tive of ego role disidentification in process. It represents a critical stage in the

130

Greg Jemsek

herapy, because the way this cHent has known the world for many years, as a
arm wife, is being shaken by her insight while in beginner's mind. While the
nsight itself may seem straightforward enough, the broader implications of
he knowledge gained in beginner's mind, and thus its intensity, are more
ipparent while in the altered state (Gifford-May and Thompson, 1994). Will
he change in knowing that has occurred for the client in beginner's mind
esult in life change? The answer to that therapeutic question hinges on the
:lient's motivation to disidentify from her role as a farm wife enough to be
)pen to something else. That disidentification is enhanced the more that she
ind the therapist can continue to access and sustain beginner's mind.

^o thought of self

It is at this point that the second requirement necessary to access beginner's
nind no thought of self comes into play. Once again, witnessing is re-
[uired. As mentioned above, witnessing successfully requires role
lisidentification. Since the ego equates roles with the self, this is equivalent
o "dropping" one's perceived self- identity. It is one thing to let go of achieve-
nent, but to let go of the idea of self how is this possible?

The matter is further complicated by a common confusion which inevita-
)ly appears whenever anyone practices witnessing. This is the confusion cre-
ited by a devious counterpart to the witness within the ego, a dimension of
:go which tracks everything witnessed and quickly offers an opinion about it.
rhis aspect of ego is evaluative; its' purpose is to judge things. It constantly
veighs up whatever is being witnessed relative to whether or not these objects
)f attention support a person's current role definition.

For example, if an unemployed person used to dressing very casually sud-
lenly gets a job requiring him to wear a suit and tie, the evaluative aspect of
lis ego might make either a negative judgement; "Why can't I get better look-
ng ties like so-and-so wears?"; or a positive judgement, "I really look a lot
)etter dressed this way." Judgements of this kind occur constantly in the inner
lialogue generated by the ego. The important point about these judgements is
hat it doesn't matter whether they are positive or negative. What matters is
hat whenever something is being evaluated, it is no longer being witnessed.
\ll evaluations of this sort serve one purpose: to reinforce the ego's current self
lefinition. Evaluations are the way the ego talks to itself, confirms its own
existence, reinforces its sense of immutable self. Witnessing, on the other hand,
s the initial step in accessing beginner's mind and compassion. This often
esults in role disidentification and the ego having to relinquish its control to
:he uncertainties an altered state of consciousness brings.

The difficulty in distinguishing between the witness and the evaluative
ispect of ego begins as soon as a person turns his attention inward. To alter

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The Chnical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

one's consciousness and witness requires turning inward. Yet the first experi-
ence likely to occur in doing so is the above-mentioned inner dialogue, the
sheer volume of which inhibits other kinds of awareness and recreates the
usual self-system constantly. There are various ways of contending with this,
and methods for doing so are the subject of many systems of meditation and
spiritual practice (Baker, 1978; Eliade, 1970; Tulku, 1977; Suzuki, 1970; Ram
Das, 1990).

All these systems for dealing with the inner dialogue boil down to two
strategies. The first is to employ a concentration device to narrow attention
towards a chosen focus and away from the dialogue. The focus could be a
sound a mantra, a chant, or an affirmation; something visual a candle
flame, a visualisation; or anything else serving the purpose of narrowing at-
tention and pointing it away from inner dialogue. The primary criticism of
this method is that while awareness can indeed be redirected and a change in
consciousness result, to steer awareness in this way can result in an inner tug-
of-war between the chosen object of focus and the natural flow of awareness.
The tug-of-war itself can then totally consume one's attention. Proceeding in
this fashion requires a person to exercise his will in order to deny entry into
awareness of anything other than the desired object.

The witnessing approach to inner dialogue, however, simply notices the
dialogue itself. It also notices the judgements being made by the evaluative
aspect of the ego. In other words, it permits awareness to follow its natural
pathway, allowing the person doing the witnessing to eventually understand
the processes the mind engages in as opposed to exclusively focusing on the
content of the mind. To do this, considerable patience and practice is required.
If the mind is worried about an upcoming job interview, for instance, and the
person concerned sits down to meditate for an hour, it is quite conceivable
that he may spend that entire time rehearsing for the interview, worrying about
it, pondering the implications, etc. Nonetheless, witnessing is based on the
belief that simply noticing this dialogue whenever possible - without fighting
against it, identifying with it, or attempting to replace it - is the most effective
means of having it ultimately quiet down. When such quiet occurs, witness-
ing then makes the link to beginner's mind or "big mind," as it is alternately
referred to by Suzuki Roshi (1979) in this quote:

When you are practicing zazen, do not try to stop your thinking.
Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it
come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to
stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be
bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from out-
side your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind,

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Greg Jemsek

and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will be-
come calmer and calmer.... Usually we think of our mind as re-
ceiving impressions and experiences from outside, but that is not
a true understanding of our mind. The true understanding is that
the mind includes everything; when you think something comes
from outside it means only that something appears in your mind.
Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. ..If you leave your
mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind,
(pp. 34 -5)

No thought of achievement and no thought of self are thus entry points to
eginner's mind. Beginner's mind requires an openness to experiencing what-
^er may be happening in the moment in an original way, as though it were
appening for the first time. This may lead to a solution, but it may not. What
eginner's mind acknowledges is the paradoxical manner in which such solu-
ons occur, as well as the possibility that they might not occur. To genuinely
ractice beginner's mind means cultivating the ability to accept completely
lat a solution may not result, without giving up or becoming apathetic.

For the transpersonal therapist beginner's mind in therapy also means the
bility to be with a client unencumbered by prejudice, knowledge, and his-
)ry. This does not mean all these things will not exist they will. It does
lean, however, that priority is placed on altering consciousness as the pri-
lary task of the therapist, and using accumulated knowledge and training
icondary to this. The therapist in beginner's mind has a willingness to both
lay and drop professional roles, to utilise or disregard his expertise, depend-
ig on circumstances.

Compassion

The same flexibility is true for compassion, the second altered state of con-
:iousness facilitating transpersonal therapy. Compassion is usually viewed as
personal emotion, but is used here to indicate a transpersonal state of con-
:iousness that is impersonal, one that generates what Buddhist Chogyam
"rungpa (1973) refers to as "...pure and fearless openness without territorial
mirations... opening without demand" (p. 213). But to understand how com-
assion is distinct from a personal emotional response, it is necessary to exam-
le again how the ego frames experience.

Internal dialogue is not the only mechanism the ego has at its disposal to
Dlidify self- identity. Emotional expression serves the same purpose. Anger,
lelancholy, anxiety, happiness and other emotional responses to life events
re quite personal in nature. If a person flies into a rage because he has been
red from his job, it is his identification with the role and security the job
rovides that will largely determine the degree of his anger. If his daughter

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The CUnical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

receives an award for outstanding academic achievement, the happiness and
pride experienced similarly extends from identification with the role of par-
ent.

This means emotions become another item to be witnessed if role
disidentification is to occur. But whereas witnessing cognitive processes suc-
cessfully is more likely to result in consciousness altering to beginner's mind,
witnessing emotional processes successfully is more likely to lead to the al-
tered state of compassion. In this way, the two states of altered consciousness
encouraged by this approach are transpersonal parallels to the ego-based func-
tions of cognition and emotion. When the personal dimension of these func-
tions are transcended through witnessing, the transpersonal altered states which
follow show resemblances to them. Beginner's mind can look like thinking,
and compassion can feel like emotion, but each is fundamentally different in
the kind of knowing it engenders as compared to its parallel ego-state.

Empathy

Compassion does not solidify ego identity it expands beyond it, and differs
significantly from emotion in this respect. Brain research indicates that when
the limbic system of the brain is driving a person via a strong emotional reac-
tion, there is little or no empathy present.^ Compassion is transpersonal wit-
nessing predicated on empathy, and compassion does not happen unless em-
pathy happens first. This is because empathy (from the Greek empatheia, "feel-
ing into") begins the same way witnessing does by calming down, becom-
ing receptive, and noticing things non-judgementally, including the feeling
states of another person. To continue to empathize, the perceiver must
disidentify with his own ego, clearing the way to perceiving the world through
the other person's perspective. Contrary to defending the ego the way emo-
tions do, then, compassion transcends and operates separate from emotional
states. The world is experienced impersonally but with empathy and warmth.

The compassion that empathy leads to is impersonal because the perceiver
is noticing and understanding the experience of the other transpersonally, as
an aspect of the human condition. Such compassion often will impel the per-
ceiver to act altruistically towards the person being perceived, due to the aware-
ness of interconnectedness between them.^ Both beginner's mind and com-
passion are altered states in which interconnectedness becomes more appar-
ent. It is not surprising, therefore, that altruism would be one outcome of
being in these altered states.

Unfortunately, moments of compassion are usually quite brief before a per-
son moves back to ego and emotional responses. This is because we are unac^
customed to using as a point of reference any psychic structure other than the ego.
Since the ego wants to make sense of things and one way it does this is

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Greg Jemsek

:hrough feelings what begins as compassion can turn to a number of emo-
lional responses: affection, sympathy, pity, consolation. This means that the
Derceiver has personalized compassion rather than simply stayed with it.^*^

What this points out is how necessary it is to witness continually if one
A'ants to remain in the knowing of these altered states, even after conscious-
less has been initially altered. Skill in witnessing requires perseverance be-
:ause the ego does not relinquish its' viewpoint on life without a struggle. It is
i resourceful, survival-oriented psychic structure that cannot simply be pushed
iside.

Another characteristic which distinguishes compassion from emotion is
ts unconditional nature. "Unconditional positive regard," a term first intro-
iuced to the psychotherapeutic world through the client-centered approach
Df Carl Rogers (1951), is the closest psychological corollary in any current
:herapeutic system to the unconditional nature of compassion. "Unconditional"
is used here, however, does not require anything positive; the neutrality of the
vitness is essential. The significance of compassion being unconditional is
:hat unconditionality is synonymous with the suspension of judgement, which
ceeps the witness active and in the foreground.

To understand a bit more about the non emotional but therapeutic useful-
less of compassion, consider the following case study:

A couple in therapy for several months initially came to develop
conflict resolution skills. Their fights had been intensifying and,
although there had been no physical violence, there had been
several occasions where voices had been raised, objects thrown,
and doors slammed. Therapy to this point had focused on linking
communication patterns within the relationship to learned be-
havior in their respective families-of-origin. For example the wife
in the couple would often suggest indirectly that certain work
would be good to have completed, but rather than initiate the
development of a plan for doing so or beginning the work herself,
she would instead complain about the situation, occasionally in
a sarcastic way. The husband would usually respond to the com-
plaints by doing the work himself, but would inwardly seethe with
resentment. Both of them had learned their respective ways of
communicating from a parent in their family of origin, and both
were coming to see its contribution to their own difficulties.

In prior therapy sessions, the therapist had been reasonably suc-
cessful in sustaining beginner's mind and compassion when the
sessiorts became emotional, which had the effect, at first, of con-
fusing both of them. In the most recent session, the wife com-

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The Clinical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

plained that the therapist was "disinterested;" he responded calmly
and directly that this was not the case, that he considered the
lives of the two of them and their situation important and wor-
thy of serious consideration.

The wife then looked at her husband in a slightly bemused way,
saying something sarcastic to him in an effort to start a cycle of
argument. Rather than respond with anger, however, the hus-
band paid close attention, showing no visible emotion, but re-
maining clearly receptive to her. He made no negative judge-
ments but did not agree with her either. This caused her to feel
quite anxious, yet each time she gazed at either the therapist or
her husband both were paying close, considerate, unwavering
attention to her. At one point she seemed to really take this into
her awareness, and burst into tears.

She continued to cry under the attention of husband and thera-
pist, and when able to talk disclosed that she had realized that
her own fear of intimacy had been at the root of expressing things
she wanted indirectly; that she feared doing so would result in
rejection and minimization of her request. Instead, she had learned
to hint at things a technique she had learned from observing
her own mother because it often brought her what she de-
sired, though at the expense of establishing intimate relation-
ships. When the therapist and the husband both indicated through
their witnessing behavior acceptance of her and willingness to
empathize, the combined impact of that had caused her emo-
tions to come forward, and for her to have some insight as to how
these communication patterns were not helpful to her.

A simple example such as this may seem quite ordinary, yet it is indicative
of how therapy proceeds when consciousness is altered to compassion. Rather
than immediately focusing on solutions, the process is initiated through the
therapist making contact with this altered state through witnessing. The hus-
band in this example had clearly learned something of how to do this himself
and joined the therapist. This extra momentum had made the conflict-laden
communication patterns, which usually characterized the relationship, unsus-
tainable. All the changes that occurred were precipitated by the therapist
changing his consciousness. The husband then changed his as well, and then
the wife expressed herself emotionally before being able to employ her own
witness. Though each of them came to compassion in different ways, the con-
nection they made in doing so was outside of their traditional roles and ways

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Greg Jemsek

:>{ relating. Doing this enough over time allows for dysfunctional systems to
:ome to their own end.

The apparent simplicity of this is deceptive. In the above example, for in-
stance, if the husband had not genuinely changed his consciousness but was
nstead still invested either in anger, frustration, being heard, etc., it is likely
:he pattern would not have changed. He had to genuinely let go of role identi-
ication for a time in order for this step to be made. Many clients coming to
:herapy have no experience in doing this. If the therapist is able to do this,
lowever, it will usually stimulate the curiosity of the client. That curiosity is
:he first step in recognizing that something beyond the ego is possible for the
;lient to explore in the session. It is then up to the therapist to sustain his state
3f consciousness as best he can, and up to the client to decide if he wishes to
;hange his as well. When this occurs, both parties are functioning outside the
;onfines of role definitions and transpersonal exploration can occur.

Conclusion

Accessing and working from beginner's mind and compassion is encour-
aged for transpersonal therapists because doing so accomplishes two things:

It supports ego development when such development constitutes an
expansion of overall awareness.

It facilitates the ongoing deconstruction of various forms of ego self-
definition, permitting a reconstruction of the ego which incorporates
the broader awareness accessed in beginner's mind and compassion.

These two objectives may seem at odds with each other, but are not when
he overall intent of transpersonal therapy the ongoing expansion of aware-
less in the client is understood. The process of building a strong ego is one
equiring awareness. A point is eventually reached, however, where aware-
less can only expand if disidentification from ego-constructed roles takes place.
\ccessing beginner's mind and compassion creates optimal opportunity for
;ither edifying or deconstructing the ego as needed.

This is because beginner's mind and compassion act as a magnet to psycho-
ogical areas which are unavailable to a client's normal awareness. As the
;ontent of this material moves closer to the conscious awareness of the client,
he process is accelerated by the client's capacity to also witness. This is facili-
ated further if the client becomes curious about the state of consciousness of
he therapist, as is often the case when an altered state is present. This curios-
ty usually leads to active engagement by the client to endeavour to change
lis own consciousness; i.e., to join the therapist in this meditative process.

In situations where the expansion of awareness indicates a need to
trengthen ego functioning, the curiosity of the client initially focuses on the
:ontent of the psychological material witnessing has revealed. The revealed

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The Clinical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

content can be worked with in whatever ways the sustained deployment of
beginner's mind and compassion suggest. However, at certain points in the
therapy, which vary from person to person, the client's focus can shift from
specific content to noticing the workings of the mind itself. The therapeutic focus
then has the potential to also shift. Following this shift of awareness, rather
than sticking to the content, is encouraged. The therapist continues witness-
ing, which places the impetus for changing behavior with the client. The
client must find the motivation to do so but is clearly aware from the therapist's
attention that he is supported in that process.

This does not mean that the therapist remains passive, never taking initia-
tive, offering insights, etc. But these should occur after the therapist has al-
tered his own consciousness to beginner's mind and compassion. This tremen-
dously increases the likelihood that the therapist's actions will be authentic.
Authentic action as defined here means acting congruently with what one is
aware of in the altered states of beginner's mind and compassion, translating
the awareness accessed into action. Action initiated from beginner's mind
and compassion is not susceptible to the limitations ego-based action is sus-
ceptible to, such as attempting to impress or gain the approval of a client, or
functioning in ways that reinforce the roles of therapist and client.

Authentic action stems from witnessing the natural flow of awareness. The
altered states of beginner's mind and compassion at some point usually inspire
such action. When that action is taken, it serves as a powerful means of loos-
ening the ego's grip on behavior. This is because such authentic action con-
nects a person directly to the surrounding world. This direct connection, or
knowing, is in stark contrast to the ego's way of relating to the environment
through beliefs, concepts, roles, needs, etc. Authentic action slices through
the ego's conceptualized world with startling immediacy, and the contact made
in so doing is compelling. As mentioned earlier, witnessing is the means
whereby the therapist makes contact with the altered states of beginner's mind
and compassion. Authenticity strengthens this contact and consolidates any
insights gained by acting upon that awareness in the world. The resulting
aliveness is undoubtedly the ego's worst enemy and the most substantive in-
ternal confirmation a person gets for sustaining these altered states. It con-
tributes directly to the deconstruction of the ego.

Oftentimes, however, the anxiety associated with acting authentically over-
whelms the sense of responsibility generated by expanded awareness. The pros-
pect of acting authentically always produces such anxiety. Existential philoso-
phers have termed this "existential anxiety" because what is under threat ap-
pears to be the very existence of the self (Kierkegaard, 1944). If authentic
action proceeds despite such anxiety the role definitions of the ego are broken

138

Greg Jemsek

iown, and the insights gained in therapy from beginner's mind and compas-
iion are consolidated.

This is how transformation occurs in a cHent, it is an incremental process,
iiot an instantaneous one. It invariably requires numerous repetitions before
:hange genuinely takes hold. This is because the anxiety that the ego experi-
ences whenever someone acts authentically returns each time an opportunity
s presented to do so again. If anxiety is consistently prohibiting the
leconstruction of the ego in its current form, it is indicative of a particular ego
ole not yet being solid enough to be relinquished. Solid, uninflated ego de-
velopment is then indicated in the therapeutic process. This development is
lot an obstacle to the client ultimately accessing beginner's mind and com-
)assion: in fact, it sets the stage for doing so.

One factor which makes this process gradual even when beginner's mind
ind compassion are accessed is the ego's tremendous resiliency. When new
iwareness takes root, it does so in the ego, which simply extends its self-defi-
lition more broadly to incorporate the new information and develop a more
ophisticated role. A particular definition of a role may no longer exist, but
he ego itself does not "die." Transformation is the cycle of ongoing
leconstruction of partially-accurate, ego-generated self- identities which when
witnessed lead to insight, which potentially lead to authentic behavior. Should
Luthentic action consolidating the awareness gained in the altered states of
)eginner's mind and compassion occur, the ego then reconstructs a new self-
lefinition, which is itself eligible for deconstruction in the next cycle of trans-
ormation.

The moments of insight and authentic behavior in this cycle are moments
)f "enlightenment" available to everyone. These experiences, however, are
lot permanent as many spiritual and religious movements would have one
jelieve.^*^ What instead occurs after the ego reconstructs itself around the in-
ight is a slightly different, more aware, way of functioning in the world,
beginner's mind and compassion are thus not ultimate states but rather two
iltered states of consciousness contributing to expanded awareness and the
[radual development of a more spiritualized knowing. That knowing is what
nost clients seeking transpersonal therapy want, and it is what they are likely
o receive if their therapist accesses and utilizes beginner's mind and compas-
ion.

References

Baker, D. (1978). Superconsciousness throu^ meditation. New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Bellah, R., Madsen, R, Sullivan, W., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. (1985). Habits of the
eart: Individualism and commitment in American Life. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

139

Transpersonal Psychotherapy: The Clinical Importance of Beginner's Mind and Compassion

Boorstein, S. (1994). Insight: Some considerations regarding its potential and
limitations. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 26 (2), 95-105.

Bucke, R. M. (1969). Cosmic consciousness. New York: Dutton.

Eliade, M. (1969). Yoga: Immortality and freedom. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.

Frager, R., & Fadiman, J. (1984). Personality and personal growth. Cambridge:
Harper and Row.

Freud, S. (1916). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis . London: Hogart Press.

Coleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam.

Greyson, B. (1993). The physio-kundalini syndrome and mental illness. The
journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 25 (1), 43 - 58.

Gifford-May, D, & Thompson, N. (1994). "Deep states" of meditation: Phenom-
enological reports of experience. Thejoumal of Transpersorml Psychology, 26 (2), 117-
138.

Crof, C, & Grof, S. (1986). Spiritual emergency: The understanding and
treatment of transpersonal crises. ReVision, 8 (2) , I-IO.

James, W. (1981) The varieties of religious experience. Glasgow: Collins, Fount. _

Jemsek, G. (1982). Guru-centered cults in America: Are they an alternative?
Unpublished master's thesis. JFK University, Orinda, Ca.

Kierkegaard, S. (1944). The concept of dread. New Jersey: Princeton Press.

Kurtz, R. (1990). Body-centered psychotherapy: The Hakomi method. Mendocino:
Life Rhythm.

Laing, R. D. (1967). The politics of experience. New York: Ballantine.

Maslow, A. (1964). Reli^ons , values and peak experiences . Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.

Ossof, J. (1993). Reflections of shaktipat: Psychosis or the rise of kundalini? The
Journal of Transpersorml Psychology, 25(1), 29-42.

Ram Das, B. (1970) Be here now. San Cristobal, N.M.: Lama Foundation.

Ram Das, B. (1990). Journey of awakening: A meditator's guidebook (2nd ed.) . New
York: Bantam.

Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice , implications, arui
theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Suzuki, S. (1970). Zen mind, beginner's mind. New York: Weatherhill.

Szasz, T. ( 1961 ). The myth of mental illness. New York: Dell.

Tart, C. (1990). Altered states of consciousness. San Francisco: Harper.

Trungpa, C. (1973). Cutting through spiritual materialism. Berkeley: Shambhala.

Tulku, T. (1977). Gesture of balance. Emeryville, CA: Dharma press.

Walsh, R., &. Vaughan, F. (1993). On transpersonal definitions. The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, 25 (2), J 99 - 207.

Wilber, K. (1982). The pre/trans fallacy. Jouttui/ of Humanistic Psychology, 3 (2),
Spring, 5-43.

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Greg Jemsek
Zimmer, H. (1951). The philosophies of India. New York: Pantheon.

Notes

For a discussion of parallels and distinctions between mental illness and altered states of
onsciousness, see Ossofj(1993) and Greyson (1993).

^Two such voices from radical psychiatry are that of Thomas Szasz (1961) and Ronald
aing(1967).

^ Also see R. M. Bucke (1969) for a series of short descriptive vignettes on altered states
f consciousness, mystical in nature, experienced by well-known people.

''Bellah et al (1985) make the point in their sociological study of American life that
ontemporary practices of therapy extend the purely contractual structure of the economic
nd bureaucratic world into an ideological model for personal life. This is one way in
hich the therapeutic profession reinforces the status quo.

'Numerous schools of therapy particularly humanistic, existential, and transpersonal
pproaches employ an open-ended approach to clinical process. They do not, however,
irectly suggest that the therapist change his consciousness as a prerequisite to this explo-
ition (The exception to this is Hakomi therapy, which emphasizes the importance of
ngaging the client mindfully before proceeding. See Kurtz, 1990, p. 26 -28). The result is
lat altered states are utilized when stumbled into "accidentally", but emphasis is placed
ot on the state of consciousness itself but on techniques the therapist can use to guide the
xploration. Emphasis on technique increases the liklihood that the consciousness of the
tierapist will be ego-centered, and diminishes therapeutic possibilities.

^This is due in part to the fear that disidentification from various roles does not increase
ontact with self but lu fact disconnects from it. It is true that the contact that is made
uring the witnessing process is not not actually with "yourself in any of the ways the ego
'ould define it. Witnessing the flow of awareness loosens ego-based self- identity, this in
am allows direct contact with the altered state of beginner's mind itself . This is some-
imes interpreted as contact with one's "Higher Self by various religious and spiritual phi-
Dsophies but is seen here as simply becoming the awareness of beginner's mind itself.

' For a discussion of research examining the apparently mutually exclusive relationship
etween empathy and strong emotion see Goleman ( 1995, pp. 96 - 1 10).

^ Research on empathy shows that the more a person feels for another, the more apt that
arson is to intervene on behalf of the others.

' It is the author's belief that a significant percentage of current day therapeutic abuses
ranging from inappropriate socializing with clients to sexual involvement stem from
n initial compassionate response being personalized in this way.

' By adopting the belief system that enlightenment is permanent, spiritual and religious
ractitioners distance themselves from the human dimension of their teachers, turning
bem into icons. This idealization of teachers is part of a self-definition offered by the ego
/hich includes viewing one's life as inferior to that of the spiritual teacher. It also paves
Ke way for tremendous abuses of power on the part of such teachers (Jemsek, 1982).

141

spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy:
A Holistic Perspective

Gary F. Kelly

People bring to psychotherapy some fundamental questions and longings
that speak to the many different levels of the human experience. They ask:
Who am I? How can I reduce my suffering? How can I better connect to my-
self, to others, and to the community that surrounds me? They sense their
inner longings for transcendence and their aspirations for unification with
higher levels of the universe (Vaughan, 1991), what Wilber (1995) would
view as the hunger borne out of a frustrated ascent to those levels, or spiritus
interruptus . However, as Wilber has also pointed out, the holistic perspective
of human nature must rediscover a place for what he has called the descent,
because human beings also hunger for the path that will reunite them more
fully with their bodies. Judeo-Christian-Islamic wisdom traditions, the foun-
dations of which have dominated Western religions and psychologies, have
favored the ascending path, the leaving behind of the sensual and the soulful
in a striving toward disembodied rational and spiritual realms, a heavenly search
to be sure. For a long time, modem psychology was timid about descending
into the unconscious, conjuring up images of an archetypal cauldron of un-
healthy and unbridled desire, of unspeakable even unknowable motiva-
tions and intentions. However, the postmodern view of what it means to be
integrated and whole has enabled us to recollect the need for all levels of Self.
There is indeed a hierarchy of levels, but to move to a higher level does not at
all require the abandonment or rejection of the lower levels. In fact, each
level is founded on and embraces all of the levels that came before: each part
a whole, each whole transcending and being enriched by every part. The spiri-
tual dimensions of being can ultimately find a place in every aspect of the
human experience. The unconscious mind has now been set free from its im-
age of disreputable darkness, instead being recognized as a source of depth
learning and soul enrichment when invited to be so.

The Shared Experience of Spiritual Knowing

Spiritual knowing, then, may happen at many different levels within the
psychotherapy process, and is an experience that influences everyone involved.
This represents a reconfirmation of the fact that when psychotherapy is viewed
from a holistic and transpersonal perspective, it may become a vehicle for

Gary F. Kelly

rowth and awakening in both client and therapist (Wittine, 1993). Yet what
icilitates this transition from a more mundane manipulation of psyches by
mploying accepted therapeutic techniques to a higher order experience that
lay be considered spiritual?

It is at this point that the roles of psychotherapist and spiritual teacher
lay become somewhat blurred. In either role, one must function as both guide
id companion explorer, not exactly knowing the territory that will be en-
Duntered and navigated, but possessing the requisite general knowledge, per-
mal grounding, orienteering skills, and courage needed to take the journey
ith some sense of confidence. It is generally agreed that neither spiritual
iachers nor psychotherapists will be particularly helpful or effective if they
re venturing into areas beyond which they have personally progressed. If
ley do so, they may not necessarily do any harm although that is a poten-
al danger but the chances of facilitating any real transformation or spiri-
lal knowing are greatly diminished. The spiritual dimensions of therapy are
nlikely to emerge with any clarity unless the therapist has cultivated a level
f commitment to one of the forms of integrative practice described later in
lis chapter.

Like many psychotherapists working within transpersonal contexts as they
iem appropriate, I have found myself more consciously urging clients to rec-
gnize and work with their spiritual dimensions as part of their growth and
ealing. However, there is some inherent danger in such a commitment. Just
5 more traditional therapists have sometimes overemphasized the attention
iven to the rational or affective parts of the self, transpersonally-oriented
lerapists can overplay the spiritual aspirations of clients without providing
le kind of ego stability and personal balance they may first need. Every tradi-
on and practice is founded on certain principles and values that are both
efining and limiting. It is up to the therapist to know how to keep these
rinciples and values as any others from getting in the way of healing and
rowth.

Again, this is where the responsibility to be a well-prepared guide and com-
anion falls back to the psychotherapist. A therapist who has worked on per-
3nal integration and spiritual development, and intends to bring that dimen-
on to the therapy process, should have reached a stage where intuitive per-
eption has been well developed and where a compassionate sense of essential
ood will has been opened. This should prevent violations of trust or the ac-
epted ethical guidelines of therapy. It has been postulated that spiritual de-
elopment and exploitation of others are essentially incompatible (Tart &
^eikman, 1991).

Yet as Seymour Boorstein (1996) has reminded us, psychotherapy that
caches beyond the traditional grounds of the ego and the rational mind de-

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A HoUstic Perspective

mands a great deal from the therapist. Experiential knowing is to be validated
over opinion. Energy must be given to careful and focused attention instead of
preconception. Certainty is given credence over theory. All of these qualities
are part of spiritual knowing. Naturally, to the uninitiated or the lazy, this
might seem like the easiest path to follow: no training or certification neces-
sary. In fact, it is a direction that requires an even greater level of energy,
attentiveness, empathy, intuition, and skill on the part of the therapist, and
none of these qualities is developed without knowledge, work, practice, and
experience.

Spiritual knowing goes beyond insight or intuition on the part of therapist
and client, even though both of those qualities may be an aspect of the know-
ing. It grows instead out of a multidimensional context that is more whole and
connected to the individual Selves and the shared Self present in the thera-
peutic and spiritual experience. It is often an expression of the "witness con-
sciousness" that transcends the definitions necessary for language, rational
thought, and ordinary communication. There is no need for the doer or seer.
With self-conscious ego temporarily set aside, there is only the doing, the
seeing, the being. For the moment, personal selfhood is replaced by a sense of
identification with something larger and more encompassing. There is a height-
ened sense of integration and wholeness, a new level of emergent meaning,
and an awareness that transformation is happening. Some anecdotes from ac-
tual cases can help illustrate various levels of transformation:

The young woman seemed restless and ill-at-ease during her first
session with me, certainly not an unusual state for a therapist to
observe. Her chin was held high, even though her eyes betrayed
her sense of vulnerability; her legs were tensely crossed, and her
fingers fidgeted. Her breathing seemed shallow and forced. I lis-
tened for several minutes to her painful story of a recently ended
relationship, but paid close attention to her discomfort as well.
Eventually, I suggested that we focus on her present emotional
and physical reactions, and then offered some specific guidance
for her to re-position her body in a more balanced and relaxed
posture while making a conscious effort to slow and deepen her
breaths. I suggested that as we continued to talk, we both also
remain aware of the recurring tensions that would arise within
ourselves and keep striving to keep ourselves as balanced and
relaxed as possible, taking some slow deep breaths as needed. This
seemed to help the process along for both o{ us.

I was working with a couple who had been married for 22 years
when the wife found her husband in bed with another woman.

144

Gary F. Kelly

They had worked through much of the resulting crisis, and had
determined that they would remain together. The wife contin-
ued to feel that her husband's remorsefulness was somewhat shal-
low, and this made it difficult for her to reestablish a sense of trust
in him. He admitted that while he regretted the pain the extra-
marital activity had caused for his wife, his guilt was indeed lim-
ited. He instead tended to dwell on some of the underlying rela-
tional problems that he felt had led him to have sex with some-
one else, and could not understand why his wife needed to cling
so tightly to her ire. All of us agreed that the relational difficul-
ties were getting resolved in the therapy process. During one ses-
sion, the husband began talking about his father and eventually
began dealing with his lack of emotional response when his fa-
ther had died. 1 asked him to focus on some things he seemed to
be sensing in his chest, and before long he was sobbing rather
violently. Through this experience, he was also able to touch his
wife's grief and pain more clearly, and realized how cold he must
have seemed to her through their difficulties. He told her how
sorry he was for having hurt her and asked for her forgiveness.
This was a breakthrough that facilitated the most significant heal-
ing for their relationship.

A young man with whom 1 had been working on some funda-
mental existential issues asked if we might again try a guided
meditation that he had found useful in a previous session. 1 led
him through the introductory relaxation and breathing, as 1 re-
laxed myself, and began focusing on some inner imagery designed
to help him feel more integrated and open to his intuitive abili-
ties. During the meditation, I noticed him smile blissfully. When
the meditation ended, he seemed very relaxed and happy. He
described for me the sense of unity that he had experienced dur-
ing the meditation, and how energized and whole he now felt.

iach of these case vignettes illustrates some level of spiritual knowing that
vas experienced by both client and therapist. The young woman was able to
nove from the superficial nervousness of a first-time client in my office into
ler own body, experiencing her reactions with a greater degree of present
iwareness and finding the great power that lies in paying attention to what is
happening in the here and now. I was undergoing a parallel experience within
ny own body, and our shared individual experiences helped us connect more
effectively in the therapeutic process we were beginning together. The hus-
band in the second case was able to transcend some of the long-held traps of

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A Holistic Perspective

the ego that had prevented him from grieving over his own father's death and
from finding true compassion for his own and his wife's suffering. By paying
attention to the felt senses of my own heart and my own intuitive insights, I
had in a sense known his heart before he discovered it, and 1 was able to lead
him toward that discovery. In the third case, the young man's meditative jour-
ney had enabled him to have some sort of euphoric unitive experience, al-
though quite frankly my own intuition and heart led me to believe that his
experience might have sprung more from the urgency and suggestibility of his
own desires than it had from the higher levels of his consciousness or his path
of spiritual development.

Charactoristics Common to Psychotherapy and Spirituality

There are some fundamental characteristics that spiritual and psyche thera-
peutic pursuits have in common, several of which are represented in the case
illustrations above. These characteristics constitute some of the basic assump-
tions that provide the basis for the rest of the discussion in this paper.

Definitions and Qoals. Spirituality is an integrating and unifying dimen-
sion of the Self, manifested through a sense of interconnectedness with other
aspects of that Self and other beings; the discovery of a sense of worth, purpose,
and meaning; a striving toward greater wholeness; and occasional transcen-
dence of the limits of usual experience (Howden, 1992; MacDonald et al.,
1995). These characteristics are consistent with the goals of psychotherapy as
well, and both spirituality and psychotherapy have transformative potentials.

Building a Solid Identity. Psychotherapeutic and spiritual growth both must
work toward the development of a more solid foundation of ego strength and
integrity, an established sense of identity and self, so that they may ultimately
lead to greater personal freedom and power rather than disorientation or disin-
tegration. Insights from both may at times be disorienting and throw us off
balance (Sylvia Boorstein, 1996; Nelson, 1996). There seems to be sufficient
evidence to conclude that an individual's inner senses of weakness and imbal-
ance are often manifested through the body and its expressions. In the first
case example, I found it useful to focus the woman's attention on the ways in
which her body was speaking to us. As one of the most direct routes to inner
life and the mind, I often find that balancing the body and working toward
physical relaxation represent good techniques with which an individual may
establish a foundation of balance and stability from the ground up, as it were.

Awareness and Authenticity. These are essential elements of both psy-
chological and spiritual health and growth. Cultivating the ability to pay at-
tention to inner experience and sensory perception in the present moment,
sometimes while suspending judgment about them, is basic to spiritual prac-
tice and necessary as well in much of psychotherapy. This awareness can then

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Gary F. Kelly

)rm a basis for authenticity, or a commitment to being responsible and true
3 oneself. Authenticity allows us to live in harmony with our beliefs, and
ffers consistency to our thoughts, words, feelings, and behaviors (Baruss, 1996;
"art & Deikman, 1991; Vaughan, 1991). Again referring to the first case ex-
mple, it was important for both of us in the therapy process to be reminded to
ay attention. It is impossible to be authentic until we are aware of what is
oing on at any particular moment and then are free to understand and ex-
ress it.

Opening the Heart. Ending suffering has always been at the core of spiri-
jal and psychotherapeutic processes. Teachers from both traditions frequently
emonstrate that the opposite of love is fear. It is the fear of loss that makes
eople cling more tightly to things and relationships they have come to value
eeply. It is the fear of intimacy and its vulnerability that holds people back
om relating openly and authentically. One way or another, all of the world's
isdom traditions have concluded that we cause our own suffering through the
ttachments and absorptions of our egos. Spiritual searching and psychotherapy
lare the hope of allowing hearts to become more open. This means the facing
f fears and pain; the befriending of those parts of our inner being that we have
3me to judge as dark and negative so that we may de-energize and embrace
lem; the letting go of the past; forgiving and making peace with ourselves and
thers; and the eventual rediscovery of the compassion and love that the heart
olds. In the case example of the married couple, both partners were trapped
y issues of the heart. The wife's hurt and subsequent fears of vulnerability
'ere causing her to withhold her trust. The husband's old protective armor
mdered him incapable of being empathic and compassionate with his wife,
lis eventual heart-opening experience proved to be transformative in that it
elped him to free himself into greater awareness and authenticity.

Liberation. Ultimately, both spiritual and psychological growth can facili-
ite a liberation from egocentric focus and excessive self-concern. As their
xhniques help us to open our hearts and awaken new levels of inner aware-
ess and intuitive wisdom, we become freed from some of the constraints and
ttachments that can so often preoccupy our lives and divert our energies in
nhealthful ways.

Commitment to the Discipline. Growth of any kind takes some energy,
I'though the expenditure of that energy may be perceived as work or in a
lore playful spirit. Following through with a growth-producing practice re-
uires some level of commitment, even if it just the commitment to show up
t a particular time and give it a try. Strangely enough, simply the showing up
3 try takes more discipline than many people can muster. I expect that has a
reat deal to do with the perceptions of failure that are typically taken away
om people's efforts to effect change in their lives. It is difficult for them to

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A Holistic Perspective

fathom that just the showing up and entering into the process can be growthful
in itself. The actual amount of growth achieved either spiritually or psycho-
logically usually depends a great deal on the level of readiness of those in-
volved to be committed to the practices or techniques that are necessary to
progress. The earlier stages of spiritual development or psychotherapy may
have to focus on the fostering of this discipline, although it must also reaffirm
the individual's right to cease the process without having to be burdened with
further feelings of failure. In our quick-fix, goal-oriented culture, the tendency
to move too rapidly may become an obstacle to real growth because the disci-
pline required may seem too daunting. Commitments are often built slowly
and meticulously, entering into spiritual practice or therapeutic work in steps
that are easily assimilated and managed. The young man in the third case
example yearned deeply for unitive experience, and certainly had no lack of
energy or motivation for the commitment. He threw himself into every prac-
tice he could find, and always wanted more. However, he did lack focus and
direction; he was too easily distracted by the attachments of his ego and his
own future-oriented goals. He would eventually need to back up and work on
some simple grounding techniques that would help him conserve and chan-
nel his energy more effectively.

There is an interesting paradox in the commitment and discipline I am
describing here. On the one hand, they may represent a goal-oriented, limit-
ing work ethic in themselves that may actually get in the way of a humble,
spontaneous surrender to and receiving of whatever the universe has to offer.
The doing may at times block the allowing. Nevertheless, it seems essential to
me that some effort be given to the disciplines that will move us toward the
balance and stability which can eventually release us from egocentric control
and the commitment to product over process, salvation over grace-ful surren-
der. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that the most fundamental
discipline is simply to set aside the time for the therapeutic or spiritual prac-
tice, and then showing up to try it.

Increasing the Potentials of Spiritual
Knowing in Psychotherapy

While it comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following recent
trends in cultural values and movements, there is growing empirical evidence
that Western civilization has been seeing a revolutionary shifting of worldviews.
A recent survey of a representative sample showed that about one-quarter of
the U.S. population falls into a category that has been labeled "Cultural
Creatives." These are people who are moving beyond traditionalism and mod-
ernism in a creative synthesis of values that among other things upholds a
holistic view of human nature, recognizing the interconnectedness of body-

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Gary F. Kelly

heart-mind-spirit-community. They have been called the standard-bearers of
an emerging Integral Culture (Ray, 1996).

Any psychotherapists who wish or expect to enhance potentials for spiri-
tual knowing in the psychotherapeutic process will have to begin with their
own development. I am of a mind that at least a basic level of training in some
sort of integrative practice should be an expectation in the professional train-
ing of mental health professionals. We surely have moved beyond the point
where we can support the notion that uni-dimensional and homogenized talk-
ing therapies which remain purely with the rational or affective domains of
clients can offer a broad-based and holistic experience of healing and growth.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer more than a brief overview of
the types of integrative practice available for the personal and professional
development of psychotherapists. The consciousness practices include medi-
tation in its many forms, and more has been published in the professional
literature about the potential role of meditation in psychotherapy than any
other practice. There are also the meditation-in-motion practices such as yoga
and t'ai chi; the martial arts and sports; creative and artistic expression; and
various forms of integrative psychotherapies and body-energy or somatic prac-
tices. Indigenous shamanic healing practices have been receiving wider at-
tention of late, and there is a long history of ascetic spiritual practices that
strive toward mystical realization. Naturally, the choice of integrative prac-
tice must be right for the individual, offering a level of flexibility and adapt-
ability that will be appropriate. But there must also be a level of personal
discipline and responsibility required as the practitioner works toward height-
ened levels of balance, awareness, authenticity, and integration of all parts of
the Self. A commitment to personal integrative practice is essential if the
psychotherapist is to open opportunities for spiritual knowing in psychotherapy.

Beyond this prerequisite, I have proposed a model for bringing integrative,
meditative approaches into the psychotherapeutic process that may increase
the potentials for spiritual knowing on the part of the therapist and the client.
While the model has been discussed at length elsewhere (Kelly, 1996), I will
describe how its various elements are relevant to a holistic perspective of spiri-
tual knowing. Ultimately, the therapist must be freed from some constraints
of ego and "technique" in order to be fully present with the client and aware of
the spiritual dimensions that may present themselves in any part of the pro-
cess. The client may likewise be guided toward preparation for the insight,
healing, and growth that those spiritual domains may have to offer.

A Model for Enhancing Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy

The model I have developed is loosely based on the system of chakras that
has long been a part of yogic traditions in many Eastern cultures. The ancient

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A HoUstic Perspective

system proposes that there is a series of energy centers located along the hu-
man spine, representing a hierarchy of human needs and motivations that
must be brought into some level of balance and harmony. It has been mim-
icked in more contemporary psychological models of human motivation, in-
cluding Maslow's theory of human needs (Nelson, 1996). Whether one ac-
cepts the concept of energy chakras as "real" or as archetypal representations
seems irrelevant to me. The concept provides a workable perspective from
which we may meld body, mind, and spirit in a highly experiential manner.

Table 1

For the Therapist

For the Client

Level I : Establishing the Home Base

Suggestions for relaxing, sitting in a
balanced way, being aware of body
tensions, slow deep breathing, gathering
the thoughts as one speaks

Checking out messages from body align--
ment, symmetry, posture

Relaxing and becoming aware of the body
Focusing on smooth, unblocked breathing
Sitting comfortably straight and stable
Becoming aware of maintaining relaxation
and stability

Level!: Gaining the Freedom of Control
Using energy imagery or metaphor Asking for images and metaphors of inner

Working with inner controls energy (or some client-appropriate term)

Keeping your seat as awareness focuses inward Focusing on inner controls for the images
Taking your time with verbal responses and metaphors

Level 3 ; Discovering and Freeing the Heart

Sensing reactions in chest and abdomen
Breathing and unblocking
Talking about reactions, as appropriate
Allowing yourself to connect and empathize
Opening to your pain, and that of others

Asking where hurt is experienced

Imaging pain

Working toward "felt shifts," balancing, and

changing imagery
Finding the child inside and leaming how

to comfort her or him
Allowing emotional expression

Level 4: Reaching the Intuitive

Remaining objective and nonjudgemental

Being aware of how your own ego is being
served

Giving yourself permission to protect your
space and be free of entanglements

Affirming that you cannot heal anyone else;
you can only help them to find their own
healing mechanisms

Paying attention to possible intuitive
insights, but not acting on them prema-
turely

Getting a better sense of limits and

personal space
Allowing old perceptions and judgements

to slip away as they lose their usefulness
Accepting and leaming to trust intuitive

senses

reprinted from: Kelly (1996) p. 56

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Gary F. Kelly

The lower chakras have typically been associated with basic survival and safety
needs, sexual and sensual expression, power and competition, and the funda-
mental management of human energy. The chakra of the chest, or of the
"heart," has been seen as the seat of emotions, compassion, empathy, loving,
and other aspects of relating, while the chakra of the throat is connected with
all types of communication, or in the broadest sense "finding one's voice."
Obviously, these areas encompass some of the most typical concerns presented
to psychotherapists. The higher chakras are associated with inner stores of
intuitive wisdom, and greater spiritual attainment, which can now be recog-
nized as legitimate domains of therapeutic processes as well. Again, it should
be emphasized that as higher levels of intuition and spirituality are realized,
they encompass and embrace all of the other levels of the human experience.
Table 1 summarizes various suggestions for both the therapist and the cli-
ent that may be brought to the psychotherapeutic interaction in a somewhat
sequential approach for enhancing spiritual knowing. For convenience and
clarity, 1 have divided the sequence into four main stages or levels, reflecting a
growth and development "upward," as the lower levels are incorporated and
balanced. Each of these levels is now discussed, with case illustrations.

Level 1 : Establishing the Home Base

Many clients enter psychotherapy lacking even the most basic sense of
stability, balance, and safety for their lives. They feel distorted, upset, and
overwhelmed by life circumstances and their reactions to them. In the belief
that all things must be built from the ground up, 1 find it essential to offer
clients suggestions for bringing some fundamental physical stability to the
process. Until they are able to know that they are capable of relaxing, choos-
ing a relatively balanced posture, working with their breathing, and keeping
themselves firmly rooted to their ground, it seems highly unlikely to me that
they will be able to progress to other dimensions of healing and development.
Likewise, therapists will not be of much assistance in this regard unless they
are able to exercise the same kinds of basic skills.

Using some simple meditative techniques, psychotherapist and client can
in a sense "come home" within themselves, establishing a safe home base from
which further exploration may proceed. It is a place of greater comfort, from
which we may draw sustenance and courage for facing all that the inner and
outer facets of life have to offer. It is the place from which spiritual knowing
like the ancient energy of kundalini may arise.

Robert was a wiry and bright student who was referred to me
because of apparent confusion that he was experiencing over his
sexual identity. As it turned out, he was not so much confused as
he was afraid of facing the future. He had accepted that he was

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A Holistic Perspective

gay, and had begun coming out to a few friends and family mem-
bers. However, he was having difficulty reconciling his same-gen-
der sexual orientation with his own rather conventional plans
for marriage and career. He spoke in staccato rhythms, and sat
with his legs uncomfortably intertwined.

As I listened to Robert's story, I tried to work from my own home
base of relaxed balance and attentiveness. Paying attention to
my own breathing led me closer to the knowing of Robert's heart
in my own, and I found myself experiencing his sadness and sens-
ing a strong compassionate caring for his plight. Since I was able
to remain firmly grounded in my home base, I did not find these
experiences to be particularly upsetting for me, but Robert clearly
had a long way to go before he could embrace much of his own
inner pain and fearfulness. Even though I was quickly working
from the knowing that my heart offered me, other levels of know-
ing within myself made it clear that Robert needed to establish
his own home base before we could go on. Therefore, while we
continued to talk, I also asked Robert to pay close attention to
his bodily postures and movements, adjusting them as necessary
to provide a more relaxed and balanced way of sitting. Since his
breathing was shallow and halting, 1 asked him to pay particular
attention to lengthening his breaths, noticing when there were
"catches" in those breaths. 1 also encouraged him to relax his
major muscle groups.

Before long, Robert had settled himself a bit more comfortably,
and he was becoming more focused in his thoughts and words.
Like most clients with whom 1 use such techniques, he remarked
about how much better it felt to relax and stabilize his body. His
therapeutic homework was to practice these skills briefly each
day. As our work together progressed, Robert would always re-
turn to this home base he had learned how to establish. It is a
profound spiritual knowing to come home to that very body that
houses the spirit and all of its power.

I have come to believe that a solid personal identity, the healthy ego itself,
must have found a home in a well-balanced and stable body, although there
are many different ways of achieving that balance and stability. There is a
startling apparent paradox of spiritual development, stemming from the aware-
ness that in order to move to the higher levels of spiritual knowing, it is nec-
essary to find some degree of liberation from the ego and its attachments. The
seeming paradox lies in the fact that in order to move toward freedom from

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Gary F. Kelly

egocentric focus, one must first have developed an ego strong enough to allow
itself to be let go. As it is sometimes put: You have to be somebody before you
can be nobody. The sense of personal and individual identity must be rela-
tively whole and stable before it may be safely transcended. It is in the body
that this wholeness and stability first takes shape. That is where Robert and I
had to begin.

Level 2: Qaining the Freedom of Control

In many traditional integrative practices, the belly area is considered to be
the center of gravity and source of energy for the body and soul. While the
term "energy" itself is often more of a metaphor than it is substantive, it is one
to which most people can readily attach personal meaning. Therefore, it is a
term that can also wield very real power. This is particularly useful in psycho-
therapy, since so many clients are having difficulty managing their own en-
ergy resources, and since our culture places so many demands on human ener-
gies. One of the most profound aspects of spiritual knowing that 1 observe in
clients comes with their realization that they are indeed masters of their own
energy, capable of controlling its use and conservation as they see fit. There is
a tremendous degree of freedom that comes with acknowledging and exercis-
ing this control. I have found that mental imagery or visualization can be very
useful in gaining this freedom.

Jeanine told me that she was at her wits' end. The demands of
being wife, mother, and career professional had worn her out.
While she found great satisfaction in each of her roles, she also
had a perfectionistic streak that bordered on obsessive-compul-
siveness. She had no time to recharge her batteries, and often felt
fatigued and depressed. Her energy thermostat was perpetually
set on high, and her fuel was running out. She sought psycho-
therapy after having been offered a significant promotion. She
was excited about the prospect, but fearful about the consequences
of taking on even more energy-intensive activity in her life.

I began using a mental imagery exercise with Jeanine that has
proved useful to others. I lit a candle, and asked her to gaze at the
flame, noticing all of its nuances of color and light. (Note: simply
imagining a flame often works just as well as a real one.) After
suggesting that she relax and breathe deeply, I asked her to close
her eyes and take the image of the flame deep down into her
belly. I then suggested that she be playful with the flame there,
learning how to increase and decrease its light and heat at will.
When she brightened her inner flame, she allowed herself to feel
its energy streaming upward and outward to her periphery. I sug-

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A Holistic Perspective

gested that this was valuable when needed, but used up fuel very
quickly as well. When she decreased the flame's intensity, she
experienced a greater sense of calm and "coolness." I reminded
her that she could always conserve her inner energy when she
chose to do so, regardless of the activity in which she was en-
gaged. I asked Jeanine to practice this imagery and to make an
effort to bring it to her daily decision-making.

In one form or another, this "taming of the inner flame" is an essential
element of spiritual knowing. It is key to facing temptation, avoiding addic-
tion, channeling sexual desires appropriately, managing relationships, and fac-
ing the demands of varying responsibilities and tasks. To know that one is
indeed the master of one's own energy is a significant step in psychological
and spiritual development.

Level 3: Discovering and Freeing the Heart

When I first began my work as a therapist, and in a sense before I knew
what I was doing, I would frequently ask clients where they felt the pain they
were describing. Almost invariably, they would be able to identify a physical
location for that pain, and it was usually somewhere in the chest or upper
abdomen. I had nowhere to go with that knowledge in those earlier days, but
now it all fits with what I have learned about the subtle, or spiritual, heart.
Emotions are manifested by physiological reactions within the body, often
quite subtle ones. Poets, sages, and psychologists alike have known that these
"felt senses" are most often experienced in the general vicinity of the physical
heart. Meditative traditions have demonstrated that it is possible to access
and work with these sensations, eventually moving, balancing, or lightening
them in what has been called "felt shifts."

Psychotherapy frequently involves a confrontation with the unfinished
business of the heart: repressed emotions, anxieties and fears, and feelings and
desires that clients have come to judge as unacceptable or evil. Very often,
people fear that they will be overwhelmed and disabled by opening to the
pain that their hearts hold. This is where the significance o{ the sequential
nature of my model becomes particularly evident. It is indeed necessary for
clients to have established a firm and stable physical base from which to work,
and to have a sense of mastery over their own uses of energy, prior to the hard
work of exploring and befriending what they find in their hearts. As a thera-
pist, I can sometimes be overanxious to move to the heart, and must con-
stantly remind myself of the necessity of establishing the necessary ground-
work for doing so.

Lee sought my services because of his inability to maintain lov-
ing relationships beyond quite superficial levels. He was an ex-

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Gary F. Kelly

traverted sort, and attracted friends easily. Women found him
attractive, and he had no dearth of sexual activity. But at his
core, he was plagued with a sense of longing for something more
enduring and involving. He described it as a kind of loneliness or
emptiness.

After spending several sessions exploring his situation and doing
the requisite work with levels one and two, I asked Lee to begin
exploring the location of his pain. He was immediately able to
point to a location on the left side of his chest where his pain
resided. (Note: it is quite typical for emotional hurts to be expe-
rienced to the left of the center of the chest. Beyond an ancient
yogic explanation I once read, I have not uncovered any reason
for this.) I then suggested that he describe the feel of the pain for
me: its density, texture, size, and shape; and to visualize it in his
mind's eye: its color and relative brightness or darkness. He de-
scribed a place in his chest that was hard, cold, and dark blue. It
made him feel sad, as if he wanted to weep.

I suggested that we work toward lightening Lee's painful place,
and try balancing it by moving some of the pain to the right side
of his chest in order to achieve a better balance. He was able to
work with these suggestions, changing the color of his image to
light green. As is typical in such work, once he was able to make
the area less dense and balance it in the center of his chest, he
was able to experience a shift that yielded a sense of relief. He
sighed and seemed to relax. I then suggested that he do some
experimenting with the area, closing it back up and then reopen-
ing it, which he did several times.

Working with a client's heart is something that I find I must do from my
own heart. The spiritual knowing in this level comes from a connectedness of
hearts. I need to experience some of the client's pain and imagery, while know-
ing how to protect my own heart. I sometimes use skills from level four in
keeping myself from becoming too entangled with the client's hurtful felt senses.
In freeing the heart, I do not have the goal of eliminating what is there, for
that presumes that the pain represents something to be feared and expunged.
In fact, I am explicit in explaining to clients that freedom from the pain lies in
knowing how to open to it, using various skills to lighten and balance it, and
learning that it need not be overwhelming. In doing so, they also learn that
they can close their hearts again as they need to, so that they may protect
themselves as well.

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Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A Holistic Perspective

Felt shifts seem to signal that some degree of resolution is occurring at a
very visceral level, and in time the pain actually does dissipate completely for
many clients. Again, the knowing at this level is almost entirely experiential as
therapist and client work directly and with full awareness with the bodily
experience of emotion. There is no immediate need to process rational thoughts
about the felt senses, or to deal with the causes and implications of the feel-
ings, and yet some sense of personal mastery may be gained over reactions that
were previously perceived solely as unpleasant and uncontrollable. Freeing
the heart often does lead to "finding voice" for the emotions that are stored
there. They may move up to the throat and find their route to expression.
This expressiveness is less disconcerting to clients when they understand their
own abilities to hold their ground even in the face of what once seemed to be
overwhelming emotions.

In Lee's case, working with the heart was just one aspect of his work to-
ward freeing himself from the constraints that had inhibited him in his rela-
tionships. It did not mitigate the need for him to work in the real world of
human complexities and vulnerabilities, but it did provide him with some
tools for the inner knowing that was as much a part of his hunger for spiritual
development as it was a need for person-to-person intimacy. Finally, it permit-
ted him to begin expressing himself more deeply and effectively in his relating
to others.

Level 4: Reaching the Intuitive

This level is associated with the "third eye" chakra located between the
eyebrows. It can help therapist and client access a core of intuitive knowing
that is available to humans, and it seems to be the gateway to witness con^
sciousness, a state of mind that is unfettered by the need to be constantly judg-
ing. This frees the individual to pay attention to intuitive insights and guid-
ance from within. Personality tests of various sorts suggest that some people
find it easier to be in touch with their intuitive natures than do others. How-
ever, with practice anyone can learn to pay closer attention to this intuitive
wisdom. The spiritual wisdom traditions speak of the higher levels of con-
sciousness, self-transcendence, or the "inner guru" that will help to guide us
toward "right action."

Level four work can be of special importance to psychotherapists because
it can facilitate nonjudgmentalness and prevent entanglement or over-involve-
ment in clients' problems and concerns. At the same time, the intuitive know-
ing that is opened can play a significant role in the therapeutic process. By
maintaining a balance at all four levels of this model, therapists can keep their
own seats in the process, pay close attention to what is happening, open their
hearts compassionately, use all levels of intuitive and spiritual knowing, and

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Gary F. Kelly

yet retain a nonjudgmental stance that keeps clients free to find personalized
resolutions and approaches to healing for their concerns.

Kay had struggled through the early stages of a difficult divorce,
and had managed to resolve many of her initial feelings of be-
trayal, guilt, anger, and resentment. She had done a fair amount
of grieving over the ended relationship, and had developed good
skills for dealing with all that her heart seemed to hold. She felt
that she had done a good deal of spiritual growing too, and longed
to continue that part of her development.

As is typical when working with level four, I asked Kay to imag-
ine creating her own personal space around her, a private sanctu-
ary for her energies. She visualized a crystalline space that sur-
rounded her, and she affirmed within herself that she would de-
cide how much of others' energies she would allow to intrude
into this space, and how much of her own energies she would
release from it. I also suggested to her that as she relaxed within
her space, she allow some of her less reliable perceptions of the
world to slip away, listening carefully instead for the intuitive
knowing that could be accessed deep within. This came at a time
in the therapy when she was facing some difficult and confusing
decisions, and she found the level four work over three sessions
helpful to her in knowing at a very fundamental level which di-
rections to take.

It was once tempting for me to define level four breakthroughs with intui-
tive wisdom and witness consciousness as the "purer" forms of spiritual know-
ing. However, I have concluded instead that this is simply another egoistic
illusion. In fact, spiritual knowing filters through all levels of the psychothera-
peutic connection, just as the spiritual realms of human nature include and
embrace the physical, emotional, soulful, and rational aspects of being human.

Implicit in this model are the wider connections of individual therapist,
:lient, and shared process with the surrounding human community and envi-
ronment. Spiritual knowing has the potential for taking us beyond the bound-
aries of the body-encapsulated self, leading us toward compassionate service. I
strongly believe that therapists must find ways of transcending the condescen-
sion, implicit lack of trust, and relational inequality inherent in the concepts
3f "helping" or "fixing" others. In service, we bring our whole selves wounds
md limitations along with strengths and personal insights to the wholeness
Df others, a relationship between imperfect equals (Remen, 1996). It is this
kind of service that can find liberation from the limits and seductions of the
sgo-self.

157

Spiritual Knowing in Psychotherapy: A Holistic Perspective

Practical and Ethical Knowing in Psychotherapy

The most highly developed spiritual teachers and leaders have kept their bal-
ance in the practical realm of everyday mundanities. They know that the
spiritual is revealed as much in our daily tasks and tribulations, probably moreso,
than it is in the profound experiences of transcendence or euphoria that may
occasionally be encountered. Spiritual knowing is found in the awareness,
attention, authenticity, and open-heartedness that is brought to daily living.

To work, or better yet serve , holistically in psychotherapy does not excuse
therapists from respecting the ethical and practical expectations of their pro-
fessions. Some religious groups have been wary of meditative and imagery
techniques such as those described in this paper. These sensitivities must be
respected in clients. People have different levels of readiness for growth and
healing which therapists have a responsibility to discern. All of these require-
ments are best fulfilled through the kind of personal integrity that will allow
them to be expressed in wholesome ways (Sylvia Boorstein, 1996).

Clients do not always present with issues that lend themselves well to broad-
based healing, or with the requisite strength to open to the many different
levels of experience that a holistic perspective encompasses. Therapists should
be prepared to recognize those client characteristics that would indicate the
use of holistic approaches, and to foster the conditions that make their use
possible. Included are the following:

A client's expressed need for something beyond resolving basic
life adjustment issues or minor situational concerns.

An assessment to rule out psychotic states that might be exacer-
bated by unconventional modes of treatment, or other more com-
mon disorders, such as clinical depression, that might respond
better initially to medical treatment. This would not necessarily
mean that holistic approaches could not be pursued after suitable
progress is made with restoring the individual's chemical balances.

An ability to describe clearly to the client the holistic underpin-
nings and experiential exercises that are to be used, and confirm-
ing that the client is an interested and willing partner in using
such approaches.

An explicit understanding that experiential therapy is a very ac-
tive and involving process, in contrast to the passivity that some
of the more traditional talking therapies may seem to portray.

A foundation of personal experience and readiness on the part of
the therapist to use these techniques, or to refer clients on to
professionals who are prepared to use them.

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Gary F. Kelly

Conclusion

Spiritual knowing in psychotherapy can be opened from the wholly inte-
;rated Self, if that is appropriate, or it can be opened from any part of the
i^hole, depending on the circumstances and level of development. It may be
iresent even when it is not identified or defined as such. To bring spiritual
:nowing consciously to the service of a therapeutic relationship broadens the
lerspective and the growth potentials for therapist and client alike. It is a
elational experience to be honored and respected for all of the power that it
an yield.

References

Baruss, I. (1996). Authentic knowing: The convergence of science and spiritual aspira-
on. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Boorstein, Seymour (1996). Introduction. In S. Boorstein (Ed.), Transpersonal
sychotherapy (pp. 1-6). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Boorstein, Sylvia (1996). Potential and limitations of psychological and spiritual
:isight. In S. Boorstein (Ed.), Transpersonal psychotherapy (pp. 293-304). Albany: State
Jniversity of New York Press.

Howden, ]. W. (1992). Development and psychometric characteristics of the Spirituality
Assessment Scale. Doctoral Dissertation. Texas Women's University.

Kelly, G. F. (1996). Using meditative techniques in psychotherapy. Journal of
iumanistic Psychology, 36 (3), 49-66.

MacDonald, D. A., LeClair, L., Holland, C. ]., Alter, A., & Friedman, H. L. (1995).
^ survey of measures of transpersonal constructs, foumal of Transpersonal Psychology, 27
2), 171-235.

Nelson, J. E. (1996). Madness or transcendence? Looking to the ancient East for a
lodern transpersonal diagnostic system. In S. Boorstein (Ed.), Transpersonal psycho-
lerapy (pp. 305- 328). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ray, P. H. (1996). The rise of integral culture. Noetic Sciences Review, 37, 4-15.

Remen, N. (1996). In the service of life. Noetic Sciences Review, 37 , 24-25.

Tirt, C. T, & Deikman, A. J. (1991). Mindfulness, spiritual seeking and psycho-
lerapy. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 23 (1), 29-52.

Vaughan, F. (1991). Spiritual issues in psychotherapy. Journal of Transpersonal
sychology,23{2), 105-119.

Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, ecology, spirituality: The spirit of evolution. Boston:
hambhala Publications.

Wittine, B. (1993). Assumptions of transpersonal psychotherapy. In R. Walsh & F
aughan (Eds.), Paths beyond ego: The transpersonal vision (pp. 165-171). New York:
remy P. Tarcher/ Putnam Books.

159

Divination: Pathway to Intuition
Kenneth E. Fletcher

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines "divination" as the various
methods by which events are interpreted or explained, as prog-
nostication or prediction or intuition.... This brings into play all
kinds of considerations that do not necessarily leap to mind when
one first considers the idea of divination. For in addressing the
answers to questions concerning the future, it is not simply a mat-
ter of predicting what will come to pass, but also of divining the
truth. (Matthews, 1992, p. 6)

[I]ntuition, as 1 conceive it, is one of the basic functions of the
psyche, namely, perception of the possibilities inherent in a situation.
(Jung, 1971b, p. 26; emphasis in the original)

The purpose o{ divination is to give voice to intuitive knowledge. This is
easily seen once we note that divination provides us with information regard-
ing both the origins of events and their likely future development. This is, in
fact, Jung's (1968) definition of intuition, which he says tells us about where
things come from and where they are going. In my 25 years of divinatory
practice, it has been my experience that, when properly practiced, divination
can provide a reliable means of making nonconscious, seemingly irrational
knowledge available for conscious and rational use. One of the objectives of
this chapter is to describe the process that 1 believe makes this possible. An-
other objective is to encourage the reader to experiment with divination. Per-
haps because divination helps give voice to intuition, which is one of Jung's
irrational functions, it must be experienced to be truly understood.

Symbolic Inductive Divinatory Systems

Matthews (1992) divides divination into two broad types: ecstatic divina-
tion, wherein the diviner enters a trance and contacts spirits of the dead or
beings of the inner worlds; and inductive divination, wherein, meanings are
read into events according to traditional precepts (Matthews, 1992, p. 6). 1
believe that the basic process is similar in both kinds of divination: the con-
scious, rational mind makes contact with nonconscious, experiential infor-
mation and attempts to translate that information into a form that the con-
scious mind can understand. In the interests of both space and focus of discus-

Kenneth E. Fletcher

sion, this chapter will only discuss the following four systems of inductive
iivination: Tarot cards, the I Ching (also known as the Chinese Book of
I^hanges), the Runes, and astrology. These systems are representative of a sub-
set of inductive divination in that each interprets man-made symbols rather
:han natural occurrences such as cloud formations, the flight of birds, or cracks
n heated turtle shells. I therefore call this subset of systems, symbolic induc-
:ive divination.

Even the four symbolic inductive divinatory systems discussed in this chapter
iiffer from each other in obvious and significant ways. These systems do share
1 few important characteristics, however. These shared characteristics are
mportant because they describe what I consider to be the minimum require-
Tients of a symbolic, inductive divinatory system. I believe that to qualify as a
^[enuine divinatory system, any system must at least: 1 ) be based on a coherent
Tietaphoric world view, 2) express that world view in a set of vivid symbols
;hat describe and/or depict general life situations or psychological states that
represent prototypical human experiences, 3) provide a method of arranging
:hese symbols into patterns according to chance, and 4) provide a means of
:ranslating the resulting patterns of symbols into information that the querent
:an apply to his or her everyday life.

Well'Articulated Metaphoric World View

Each system of prototypical symbols articulates its model of reality in a
different manner. This is true not only across different systems, such as Tarot
ind astrology, but also within a particular system, where models of reality vary
icross interpretations. Thus, for example, Tarot cards have been interpreted
in terms of Jungian alchemical thinking (Roberts, 1979), Cabbalistic world
t^iews (Wang, 1983), and a feminist, goddess-centered perspective (Noble,
1983), among others. The articulation of a divinatory system's symbolic world
v'iew, or model of reality, has a direct impact on the quality of the intuitive
information accessed by the rational system during a divinatory reading. The
more symbolic elements, and the more methods of combining these elements,
that are available in a particular system, the better articulated is that system.
3reater symbolic articulation provides more detailed descriptions of proto-
typical situations, which in turn provides more material for evoking intuitive
processing and synthesis. These detailed descriptions also provide more mate-
rial to work with during the final process in divination, that of rational exege-
sis.

The articulation of a divinatory system is determined not only by the com-
plexity of the system but also by the internal consistency of the symbolism,
rhe reliability and validity of the rational system's exegesis of the experiential
nformation accessed in a divinatory reading depends, in part, on the internal

161

Divination: Pathway to Intuition

consistency of the particular divinatory system's world view. An internally
consistent world view guides the translation of the experiential knowledge
during exegesis, and reduces the possibility of self-delusional bias in the trans-
lation.

A compatible match between an individual's own personal world view and
the world view represented by a particular divinatory system can enhance the
potential for subjectively meaningful results when consulting that system. The
connotations and implications of a divinatory system's symbols and world view
should be considered when choosing a system for personal use. Not everyone
will feel a personal connection with a Tarot set based on Aztec imagery, for
example.

A long history and tradition can add depth to the exegesis of a divinatory
reading. However, a system does not need a long tradition to qualify as genu-
ine. New, genuine divinatory systems continue to be developed to this day
(Campbell, 1992).

Vivid Symbols of Prototypical Experiences

It is a requisite of symbolic inductive divinatory systems that they be com-
posed of a set of vivid symbols that represent prototypical situations or psy-
chological states. Examples of divinatory symbols include the pictures on Tarot
cards and the planets, signs, and houses of astrology. The 78 Tarot cards repre-
sent such prototypical situations as Justice, Lovers, and Judgment. The 64
hexagrams of the 1 Ching represent such prototypical experiences as Oppres-
sion (Exhaustion), Abundance, and Fellowship with Men.

The prototypical nature of divinatory symbols plays an important part in
the divinatory process. Prototypical symbols serve to summarize typical, uni-
versal human experiences that might happen to anyone in the course of a
lifetime. By their nature, prototypical symbols represent broad categories of
experiences that are all related to similar themes. The planet Venus in astrol-
ogy, for example, symbolizes situations or mental states related to a general
theme of social charm, artistry, love, fecundity, and artifice, among other re-
lated qualities. Many contemporary commentators have discussed divinatory
symbols in terms of Jungian archetypes (Roberts, 1975, 1979; Rudhyar, 1970).
I prefer to speak in terms of prototypes, however, primarily because it is not
necessary to assume that prototypes are inherited. Moreover, although proto-
types, like archetypes, sometimes may be considered to originate in the col-
lective unconscious, they more usually are assumed to represent generalized
personal experience.

Chance Arrangement of Symbols into Patterns

When a divinatory system is consulted, the symbols of the system are cho-
sen at random and fit together into a pattern according to prescribed rules.

162

Kenneth E. Fletcher

rhe Tarot cards are shuffled, for example, and a few of them are drawn and
aid out into any of a large variety of possible patterns. When consulting the I
];hing, coins are thrown or yarrow sticks are selected to create a column of six
traight or broken line hexagrams. A horoscope is drawn for a specific, but
datively "random," time and place in astrology.

Vieans of Translating Symbol Patterns

The placement of the symbols in a divinatory system's prescribed pattern is
;iven meaning by the system's method of interpretation or exegesis. The first
ard drawn in a Tarot reading might represent the person who is consulting
he cards, for instance. The fourth line in the 1 Ching represents, among other
hings, ministers and officials who serve the king or ruler, who, in turn, is
epresented by the fifth line. The seventh house in astrology represents close
elationships whether for good or for bad such as those with spouses,
nemies, and business partners.

By applying a system's method of exegesis, the practitioner attempts to
reate a narrative reading of the pattern of prototypical symbols. This inter-
retive reading of the pattern of symbols translates experiential information
nto rational terms through application of the system's method of exegesis,
nd this translation becomes the divinatory answer to the question. Most con-
emporary symbolic systems of inductive divination have one or more "recipe"
)ooks available that provide descriptions of the meaning of each symbol. The
Ching is itself such a book. No matter how detailed a "recipe" book might
)e, however, it can rarely provide an interpretation of all possible combina-
ions of symbols that might be formed in any particular divinatory reading,
iven when it is possible to describe every possibility, as is the case of drawing
ust one Rune stone (where there are only 41 possibilities to consider), a recipe
)Ook still is not able to explain how the general description of a symbolic
lattem as contained in the recipes might relate to the specific question asked
n a particular reading.

To summarize, I suggest that the minimal requirements of a genuine sym-
)olic inductive divinatory system are few: a well-articulated system of vivid
ymbols that represent prototypical situations or psychological states. The sym-
)ols must be capable of being formed into patterns whose experiential mean-
ng is translated into rational terms and applied to the question at hand by
ipplying the divinatory system's method of exegesis. These few requirements
illow a broad spectrum of candidates to qualify as genuine divinatory systems
Matthews, 1992). In fact, only one purported method of divination comes to
nind that clearly does not qualify as a genuine method: the Ouija board. The
3uija provides literal readings to questions by spelling them out letter by let-

163

Divination: Pathway to Intuition

ter. There is no system of symbolism or metaphor, and interpretation is gener-
ally unnecessary.

Rational versus Experiential Thinking

As I noted earlier, I believe that the goal of divination is to help make
nonconscious, seemingly irrational knowledge available for conscious and ra-
tional use. Jung noted, "The psychological 'transcendent function' arises from
the union of conscious and unconscious contents" (Jung, 1971c, p. 273). Oth-
ers, such as Assagioli (1976) have suggested that transcendence arises from a
union of the conscious mind with what he calls "the superconscious or 'higher
unconscious'" (pp. 195-196). This notion goes back many centuries. The goal
of philosophical alchemy was the mystical marriage of the sun (the conscious,
rational self) with the moon (the nonconscious, intuitive self), from which
union was bom the higher, more integrated Self (Roberts, 1979).

There are thus a variety of different descriptions of what it means to make
the contents of the "higher unconscious" available to consciousness. 1 prefer
to think of the process in terms of a contemporary theory of personality called
cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST; Epstein, 1993, 1994, in press). CEST
explains personality functioning in terms of two complementary but equally
important methods of processing information, one rational and one experien-
tial. CEST provides a neutral set of metaphors that do not carry unnecessary
associations, and Epstein (1994) also has made a good case that CEST is rep-
resentative of most contemporary theories of personality.

According to CEST, the rational information processing system is the seat
of consciousness, and the experiential system is the seat of nonconscious in-
formation. There are at least two general levels of nonconscious operation.

At its lower levels of operation, [the experiential system] is a crude
system that automatically, rapidly, effortlessly, and efficiently pro-
cesses information. At its higher reaches, and particularly in in-
teraction with the rational system, it is a source of intuitive wis-
dom and creativity. (Epstein, 1994, p. 715)

The two systems work in parallel, and the information they encode and store
is complementary and of equal value.

The rational system encodes and stores information analytically and delib-
erately. This method of information processing is characterized by logical, rea-
son-oriented processing that encodes reality in abstract symbols, words, and
numbers. Rational thinking is experienced actively and consciously "we
are in control of our thoughts" (Epstein, 1994, p. 711). Rational belief re-
quires justification via logic and evidence.

164

Kenneth E. Fletcher

Infonnation is processed in a much different manner by the experiential
system, which encodes and stores information about lived experience. Experi-
ential processing synthesizes information rather than analyzing it as in ratio-
nal processing, and the processing is quick and automatic rather than slow
and deliberate. Experiential processing is oriented toward immediate action
rather than delayed action. The experiential method of information process-
ing is characterized by holistic, affect-oriented processing that encodes reality
in concrete gestalts: images, metaphors, and narratives. A lived experience is
worth more than any number of words. Experiential processing is experienced
passively and preconsciously, outside of conscious awareness "we are seized
by our emotions" (Epstein, 1994, p. 711). The validity of its information is
self-evident "experiencing is believing" (Epstein, 1994, p. 711). As men-
tioned above, CEST considers the higher levels of experiential information
processing to be the source of creativity and intuitive wisdom (Epstein, 1994,
in press).

It is important to remember that experiential information processing is
context-dependent. That is to say, experiential memory deals with whole ex-
periences rather than parts. Experiential memory encodes experience by syn-
thesizing it into concrete, syncretic wholes. For this reason, the experiential
system is most readily engaged through sensory imagery and metaphor. Sto-
ries, too, engage the experiential system because they present events as they
are lived, with situation-specific imagery, and in an emotionally engaging
manner.

The experiential system is more reactive than active. Its function is to
respond quickly to events. For this reason, experiential memory is a more dy-
namic system than is rational memory. When a new event occurs, its salient
characteristics automatically call up events from the past that share similar
characteristics and associations. In this way, experiential information takes
on a continually emergent quality. It is constantly in flux, perpetually forming
and reforming, always reacting to the changing state of current events.

Because experiential processing synthesizes information, its focus is on the
associations among the elements of lived experience. New experiences are
laid over memories of past experiences that share similar elements and asso-
ciations, in order to form a higher level of information, one that reflects the
elements and associations shared by both the old and the new experiences.
Over time, as similar types of events accumulate in an individual's life, the
experiential system develops associational networks that reflect global trends
or themes in the individual's life. This higher level of experiential informa-
tion is therefore the source of intuitive wisdom because it contains informa-
tion relevant to an individual's personal development in the light of the larger
context of a lifetime of experience.

165

Divination: Pathway to Intuition

The Divinatory Process

The fundamental differences between the rational and experiential sys-
tems' methods of processing information make it difficult to translate infor-
mation from one system to the other. There are techniques, however, that can
enable the rational mind to deliberately access information encoded and stored
by the experiential mind. Therapists, for example, make use of techniques
such as dream interpretation and guided fantasy to establish communication
between the two information processing systems (Epstein, in press). Jung
(I97la) and Assagioli (1976) also have each described methods of evoking
intuitive knowledge.

Most methods of accessing experiential knowledge have several character-
istics in common. First, the rational system must come to accept and believe
that trustworthy and personally useful nonrational information can be ac-
cessed from the experiential system. This is often accomplished through the
agency of a trusted advisor or expert, such as a therapist. As a next step, the
rational system must learn a method of interpreting or translating experien-
tial information into rational information. That is, some form of rational ex-
egesis of experiential knowledge must be learned. Individuals who undergo
Freudian analysis learn to interpret their dreams one way; those in Jungian
analysis learn another method of exegesis of their dreams; and those in psy-
chosynthesis learn another. Similarly, each symbolic inductive divinatory sys-
tem has its own general method of exegesis. As a final step in the process, the
individual must actually find the interpretation of the personal experiential
material trustworthy and personally useful.

Divination is another method that allows the rational system to access
trustworthy and personally useful high-level experiential that is, intuitive
knowledge. Divinatory methods have been advocated as conduits of intui-
tive, holistic knowledge by several psychological thinkers in this century
(Campbell & Roberts, 1979; Jung, 1972; Rudhyar, 1970; von Franz, 1980;
Wanless & Arrien, 1992). Divination works according to principles that are
similar to those employed in dream analysis and guided fantasy.

Bypassing Rational Thinking

Jung (1971c) noted that the first step in encouraging the emergence of
unconscious material was to eliminate "critical attention" (p. 284). In a simi-
lar vein, Assagioli (1976), in his discussion of spiritual psychosynthesis, noted
that:

The first step is of a negative character the temporary check-
ing or elimination from the field of consciousness of other func-
tions which generally have a spontaneous and uninterrupted
activity.... All this obstructs, fills the field of consciousness, and

166

Kenneth E. Fletcher

makes either the entrance or the recognition of intuitions im-
possible or difficult. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out what
we might call a psychological cleansing of the field of conscious-
ness; metaphorically, to ensure that the projection screen is clear
and white, (p. 219)

In a similar way, the first step of the divinatory process is to intentionally
bypass the rational method of processing information while simultaneously
focusing attention on experiential processing. The rational system must be
bypassed in the initial phase of divination because the experiential system is
not analytically and linearly organized. The experiential system's synthesized,
holistic understanding of the individual's current life context is what is to be
accessed through divination. Thus, a nonrational approach is required. At the
same time, although the rational system is bypassed initially, it should never
be completely turned off. The success of the divinatory process depends on
simultaneous processing of information in both systems.

The very act of seeking answers to important questions by referring to chance
or random occurrences itself bypasses the rational system. In fact, inductive
divination assumes a nonrational, acausal association between the question
asked and any events that occur at the time the question is asked. Thus, in-
ductive divination is based on a synchronistic understanding of the meaning-
fulness of acausal associations among co-occurring events co-incidents.

Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning
between psychic and psychophysical events, which scientific
knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common prin-
ciple. The term explains nothing, it simply formulates the occur-
rence of meaningful coincidences which, in themselves, are
chance happenings, but are so improbable that we must assume
them to be based on some kind of principle, or on some property
of the empirical world. No reciprocal causal connection can be
shown to obtain between parallel events, which is just what gives
them their chance character. The old theory of correspondence
was based on the experience of such connections.... Synchronis-
tic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaning-
ful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes;
in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an ob-
server can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event,
without any causal connection. (Jung, 1971a, pp. 517-518)

A synchronistic understanding of co-occurring events is obviously well-suited
to experiential methods of processing information.

167

Divination: Pathway to Intuition

Priming Experiential Thinking

As the divinatory process bypasses the rational system, it simultaneously
primes the experiential system. As mentioned earlier, the experiential system
is reactive. Characteristics of ongoing experience automatically call up past
experiences that share similar characteristics. In divination, the experiential
system is activated by priming it, first with a question, and then with some
sort of image-rich metaphorical "answer" to the question. The experiential
system attempts to synthesize both the question and the symbolic answer. The
resultant synthesis is the intuitive knowledge that is available for access by
the rational system.

Translation from Experiential to Rational

Note that at this point in the process the intuitive knowledge is available
to, but not yet accessed by, the rational system. At this point in the process,
the rational system must interpret the divinatory answer so that it becomes
more compatible with rational understanding (Assagioli, 1976, p. 223). The
translation from experiential to rational knowledge is accomplished by apply-
ing the divinatory system's method of exegesis to the text of the divinatory
answer. This interpretative phase of the process is known as the divinatory
reading.

It is the diviner's task to synthesize the particular arrangement of symbols
in the light of the specific question asked. This task is aided only in part by the
divinatory system's method of exegesis. For a more complete synthesis of the
data, the diviner must depend upon intuitive insight. In other words, even
when applying accepted methods of interpretation to the reading, the ratio-
nal mind must still rely on experiential knowledge to fill in whatever is un-
clear. As the rational system attempts to interpret the prototypical forces at
play in regard to the question asked, it must frequently attempt to fill in the
gaps of the interpretative narrative of the divinatory reading by relying on
vague feelings, chance associations, hunches, leaps of faith, and other modes
of intuitive insight. In this way, experiential knowledge relevant to the ques-
tion at hand is made accessible to the rational system.

A Tarot Example

To make the discussion more concrete and therefore more available to
experiential processing excerpts from the transcript of an actual Tarot read-
ing (Roberts, 1971, pp. 18-31) will be presented with commentary. Roberts,
the diviner or reader, advocates what he calls a "free-association" approach.

Activated by the evocative imagery of the Tarot, verbalization of
the "thought/fantasies" is the free-association approach to Tarot
reading. One says what he feels. Do not allow the original im-

168

"' Kenneth E. Fletcher

pression to be restricted or modified by dictates of what one thinks
he should say about the card what he has read or heard others
say. Let the pure intuition shine forth unfettered by logic. (1970,
p. 8)

He thus suggests that success in divination depends upon suspending critical
judgment and bypassing the rational mind while relying solely on one's intui-
tions.

The symbolism of Tarot cards is the most striking of the four kinds of in-
ductive divinatory systems discussed in this chapter. The set of Tarot cards
used by Roberts in this reading uses vivid visual scenes to represent the mean-
ing of each of its 78. Roberts (1971; Campbell & Roberts, 1979) applies a
well-articulated Jungian world view to the exegesis of his Tarot readings. Thus,
the divinatory system used in the following transcribed Tarot reading meets
all of the basic requirements of a genuine divinatory system.

Unlike astrology, systems such as Tarot, the 1 Ching, and the Runes, re-
quire the querent to interact with the divinatory process in some way, such as
by shuffling cards, throwing coins, or reaching into a bag of stones. My own
experience suggests that this preparatory stage can influence the quality of the
reading. Roberts (1971) hypothesizes that some sort of unconscious influence
is placed upon the eventual arrangement of the symbols during the shuffling.
This implies that the symbols of the system are not only manipulated uncon-
sciously, but that the symbols are somehow understood unconsciously, even
by those who have never seen the symbols before, as is the case in the Tarot
reading we are about to discuss. Roberts believes that this is the case with
Tarot because he interprets the cards as archetypical symbols and therefore
capable of being directly understood on an unconscious level. However, it is
difficult to believe that this is the case with such abstract symbols as the six-
line hexagrams of the 1 Ching.

An alternate explanation might be that interacting with elements of the
divinatory system helps include them in the current lived space of the querent's
life, the current synchronistic "whole" of the querent's life at the moment of
the reading. This then allows the symbolic elements of the system to better
represent the current moment in the querent's life. That would explain why
natal astrology does not require direct interaction with the system a birth
chart directly reflects the lived space at the time of the newborn's birth.

At the very least, interacting with the symbol system can help both querent
and diviner enter into the mood of the reading, a mood wherein experiential
information is to be given more emphasis than rational information.

Intuition... can be activated, following the general law that at-
tention and interest foster [its] manifestation.... One could even

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Divination: Pathway to Intuition

say that [attention] has an evocative power, and attention really
implies appreciation and therefore valuation. (Assagioli, 1976,
pp. 218-219)

A receptive mood can be encouraged through a variety of means, but meth-
ods that encourage relaxation are particularly effective. Assagioli (1976) de-
scribes several preparatory exercises, including one for evoking serenity. Any
kind of ritual that is consistently performed before a divinatory reading can
help prepare the diviner for a change of focus from rational to experiential
thinking. Once a ritual, such as breathing exercises or prayer or candle burn-
ing, becomes associated with this change of focus in thinking, it is more likely
to contribute to future attempts to mute rational thinking in order to promote
experiential thinking, the first step in the divinatory process.

The randomization of symbolic elements in Tarot begins as the querent
shuffles the cards. Then the cards are laid out in a standardized pattern, or
spread, in preparation for exegesis. The spread used in our reading is the most
common spread used in Tarot readings, the Celtic Cross. This spread will be
described in more detail as the reading progresses. As an experiment for the
book in which this reading appears, the querent for this reading has been
recruited by friends of Roberts, the diviner. The querent does not know Rob-
erts, and, in fact, has never had a Tarot reading before.

This reading attempts to describe the querent's current situation, what lies
most heavily on his mind. This is the "question" for the reading. Early in the
reading, the querent asks to withhold his reactions to Roberts' interpretation
of the cards until the reading is finished.

The first card chosen in the Celtic Cross Tarot spread stands for the querent
and is called the significator. This card is not chosen at random in the current
reading, although it can be. Before the cards are shuffled by the querent, Rob-
erts chooses two cards according to the querent's age and the color of his hair
and eyes, and the querent chooses one of these cards to be his significator, the
King of Swords. The querent then shuffles the cards.

The top card of the shuffled pile is laid down over the significator card,
where it is said to cover the querent. According to the method of exegesis
associated with this spread, this card represents the current general life situa-
tion of the querent, both the psychological and the environmental. The first
card drawn after the significator in our reading is the Three of Rods, which
pictures a man with his back to the reader, framed by two tall rods on his right
and one on his left. Here is part of what Roberts (1971) has to say about this
card:

This is a man with his back to me. The three rods suggest a portal
or gateway of some kind. ...Maybe he has a new threshold to cross

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Kenneth E. Fletcher

in life. He hasn't gone through these portals yet. He is
hesitant... Oh, the thing that stands out about this card is the
completely blank sky.... It is as if the man in the card is facing a
blank wall...[I]t stands for.. .a sense of meaninglessness. This man
seems to be in a vacuum, (p. 21)

Although divinatory symbols do have general global or universal themes
associated with them, they must be interpreted anew for each reading. Each
time the Three of Rods is drawn in different readings in Roberts' book, for
example, he interprets it with a slightly different, although related, meaning.
In one reading, for example, when the Three of Rods is turned up in a position
associated with the querent's father, it suggests to Roberts "a classic case of the
'absent parent' syndrome" (p. 210) because the man on the card is facing away.
In another reading he describes this card as a time in the querent's life when
"there is a feeling of disillusionment coming from the card, dejection, a feel-
ing of being let down by life" (p. 264). In this way, the same card is given
different meanings depending upon the question asked, the spread used, the
position of the card in that spread, and the relationship of the card to the
other cards in the spread.

Thus far two cards have been dealt in the Celtic Cross spread. The first
card, the significator, was laid face up in the center. The second was placed
over that card, covering it. Now a third card is laid perpendicularly across the
first two cards, and so it signifies, according to the rules of exegesis for this
standard spread, that which crosses the querent. The card chosen is The Her-
mit, and Roberts suggests that it relates to what is causing the querent's sense
of meaninglessness.

I think this card... points out the fallacy of attempting to attribute
a rigid meaning to each card without considering it in the con-
text of the reading. In other words, for me symbols come to mean
in the context of a given situation. Usually The Hermit is a sym-
bol of wisdom, or the Jungian archetype of the wise old man, who
so often appears in dreams as a symbol of the Self, but I don't get
that feeling here at all. ...So let me free associate with the
card.... The thing about the man depicted in The Hermit is that
he doesn't seem to be giving off or giving out
anything.... Cloistered and secluded is the way I feel about him
emotionally that is.... Well, let's come back to this card later,
because I'm sure it's very important and will shed light on the
other cards. (Laughing.) I wasn't consciously making a pun, but
now I am aware that the figure carries a lantern, (pp. 21-22)

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Divination: Pathway to Intuition

Experiential information processing, by its very nature, defies rational de-
scription. However, Roberts' stream-of-consciousness approach to narrating
his reactions to the cards provides some insight into the process. Access to
experiential knowledge comes to him in feelings, "seemings," accidental com-
ments, slips of the tongue, and chance associations (such as the unintentional
pun). He takes note of elements of the symbols that catch his attention, as
when he remarks on the blank sky in the Three of Rods. Roberts does not
censor his thoughts but rather says whatever comes to mind as he attempts to
"make sense" of the card in its current position, given the question asked.

The fourth card in the spread after the significator is now drawn from the
top of the shuffled deck and laid down below the first three cards. A card in
this position is said to be at the foundation of the situation, which is to say it
represents events from the past that have led up to the current situation repre-
sented by the first cards. The fourth card drawn in our reading is the Eight of
Pentacles (or Coins). This shows a man in a work shop holding an upraised
hammer.

Here is a man who is happy in his work.... Ah, on his head he
wears a cap... covered with what appears to be coins. So it's as if
the Pentacles on the wall had continued right into his head. It's a
preoccupation, then, almost an obsession, that he has with work-
ing and making money. He sees only the mallet or hammer, not
the beautiful sky outside his window. Maybe that's why the sky
had become blank in the first card. (p. 23)

With this last comment, Roberts begins to weave the meaning of the cards
together into a coherent narrative by relating his interpretation of the sym-
bolic content of the cards one with another.

The fifth card drawn is laid to the left of the first three cards. The card in
this position is said to "be behind the querent" and thus represents events that
have just recently come to pass. The card drawn for this position in our read-
ing is the Five of Cups, upside down, or reversed.

lA]gain we have a figure with the face averted or hidden. I really
feel a sense of loss in connection with this card. Since the suit is
Cups, I think the loss is on the side of emotions. ...In this picture
there are three overturned cups, and I get the feeling of a disrup-
tive emotional outpouring involving not just yourself, but your
entire family.. ..O.K. I have a hunch now as to how all the cards
so far fit together what the story is. (pp. 23-24)

But before he explains what he means, Roberts wants to see the next card
in the spread, which is laid down above the first three cards. A card in this

172

Kenneth E. Fletcher

)Osition is said to represent what "crowns" the situation, the goal or personal
neaning of the situation for the querent. The card drawn is the Four of Cups,
vhich pictures a man seated under a tree, and a hand reaching down from
ibove holding a cup. Roberts associates the suit of cups with emotions, and so
uggests that this card indicates that the querent is being handed an opportu-
lity to develop his inferior function, the feeling function. The cards up to this
)oint suggest to Roberts that the querent does not know how to express his
imotions and that he uses his work to escape the emotional needs of his wife
ind family.

Let's go back to the first card again, the atmosphere around the
problem. Remember I said the man in the Three of Rods seemed
to be on a threshold which he was hesitant to cross, and ahead of
him was that blank sky that suggested meaninglessness. Ohhh, I
see something that really ties him to that businessman in the
third card who was working too hard. Look at his head-gear
he has the same cap of coins that the businessman has. It's really
easy now to associate the two figures. So let's say that the atmo-
sphere around him has left him doubting himself. All he believed
in is about to be left behind, and ahead is only a blank void. So I
would say he should not cross that threshold, but should go back
to his wife. The atmosphere seems to be one of impending di-
vorce. Now I've gone out on the limb so you talk for a while.

[Querent:] This is really amazing... My wife and I are separated
now. She has been asking for a divorce, but, as you say, I am
hesitant to take that step. I don't look forward to starting a new
life. (p. 26)

The next card is laid down to the right of the original three cards and is
aid to represent what is before the querent. Notice that this is actually the
irst time future events are discussed in the reading. The focus has thus far
:oncentrated on past and present events, but this focus has been necessary in
)rder to discuss the current life situation of the querent, and to set the stage
or discussing possible future directions based on past and present events. The
:ard drawn is the Three of Swords, reversed. The picture is of a large valentine
leart pierced through by three swords. This is a card of great pain, but because
t is reversed it represents psychic pain to Roberts. He also suggests that this
)ain will help the querent get in touch with his feelings and will ultimately
trengthen him.

The last four cards are laid down, one at a time, in a column to the right of
ill of the other cards, starting at the bottom and moving up to the top of the
:olumn. The first two cards in this reading indicate that, despite great pain,

173

Divination: Pathway to Intuition

the querent will heroically accept the challenge of his current troubles. The
second to the last card in this spread represents the hopes or fears of the querent.
The card drawn in this reading is the Two of Cups, which shows the heads and
shoulders of a man and woman facing each other in profile, holding cups and
staring into each other's eyes. Roberts notes that not only is this the first card
in the reading where the male is not facing away from the viewer, but it is also
the first with more than one figure in it. These facts suggest to him that the
querent hopes that there will be a reconciliation with his wife based on his
improved ability to express his emotions. The querent notes that the face of
the woman on the card reminds him of his wife. The final card chosen repre-
sents how things will turn out. The card chosen is the Knight of Cups, which
Roberts interprets as the establishment of a stronger feeling function for the
querent.

Roberts' interpretation weaves all of the cards and their positions into an
integrated narrative. Narration is an important method of integrating infor-
mation because the success of the interpretation depends on both rational
and experiential processes. Experiential processes synthesize all of the ele-
ments of the reading the card images, their positions, and the question
asked. At the same time, this synthesis emerges only as rational processes nar-
rate a verbal story of the associations, thoughts, fantasies, hunches, and feel-
ings that "come to mind" as the diviner tries to explain what the cards mean
in their positions in the spread.

Authentic Divination: Divinatory
Practice as Spiritual Discipline

As we have seen, the divinatory process is designed, in part, to help the
practitioner temporarily suspend the misgivings of the rational mind about
the nonrational content of experiential information. Critics of divination
charge that by setting aside our rational judgment, we only delude ourselves.
The critics are correct, too, up to a point. Self-delusion in the divinatory pro-
cess is always a possibility. After all, experiential information is communi-
cated in a form that is foreign to rational thinking. Rather than verbal thoughts,
experiential information is based on actual experiences feelings, sensations,
chance associations, hunches, and so forth. There is always the possibility
that these experiences are somehow "figments" of the practitioner's imagina-
tion, based on his or her expectations, hopes and fears, and that, in this case,
the interpretation of the divinatory message is not to be believed or trusted.

It is possible, however, to practice divination and not succumb to self-
delusion, although it requires discipline on the part of the practioner. When
the practitioner realizes that it requires effort and discipline to interpret the
divinatory message truthfully and therefore begins to make that disciplined

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Kenneth E. Fletcher

;ffort, that is when divinatory practice becomes a spiritual discipline. It is also
It this point that divination becomes authentic practice. My own experience
uggests the cultivation of a few basic attitudes can substantially improve the
juality of one's practice.

Cultivate Sincerity

At the heart of authentic divinatory practice lies the concept of sincerity.
?incerity is a technical term in traditional neo-Confucian philosophy. Sincer-
ty in this sense means being simultaneously true to one's own nature and to
he nature of things, actuality, or reality (Chan, 1963). The cultivation of
)ersonal sincerity during divination is the most effective means of correcting
or self-delusion in the process because authentic practice depends upon the
)ractitioner's intention to see and report things as they are rather than as one
night wish them or expect them to be. The goal of sincere practice is to try
)ne's best not to lie to oneself. Only through honesty with oneself can the
ational self of the practitioner come to know and trust the inner experiential
elf. The authentic practitioner makes an honest and disciplined attempt to
aithfully interpret the divinatory message according to the divinatory system's
nethod of exegesis, regardless of personal hopes and fears.

Successful cultivation of sincerity rests on a modest attitude. As some people
)egin to learn the rudiments of divination, they develop a grandiose sense of
)ersonal power. Such an attitude inevitably corrupts the interpretive process
n divination because egotism is a divisive attitude and interferes with the
:ommunication between rational and experiential systems. Dogmatism pre-
ents a related problem. In this case, the world view of a particular symbol
ystem is considered the only true method of divination. As discussed earlier,
his is just not the case; any genuine system can provide trustworthy and per-
onally useful information if practiced authentically.

\/iaintain an Aesthetic Distance

Perhaps because successful divination depends upon an exchange of infor-
nation between the experiential and the rational systems, it requires a bal-
mce between suspended disbelief and cautious skepticism. Complete disbelief
nay fully engage the rational system, but at the expense of gaining any useful
cnowledge from the experiential system. On the other hand, total suspension
)f disbelief ^ complete credulity disengages too much from rational infor-
nation processing, and thereby increases the chance of self-delusion.

What is required is a balanced attitude that can be likened to either de-
ached involvement or involved detachment. Such a stance is very much like
he attitude assumed by a drama critic when viewing a play, or like that as-
lumed by a literature critic when reading a novel. The critic must get in-
volved enough in the play or novel to engage the experiential system, yet

175

Divination: Pathway to Intuition

must simultaneously maintain a semi-detached and objective eye and thereby
engage the rational system. Assuming a stance of critical involvement like
this is known as maintaining an aesthetic distance. Divinatory exegesis is analo-
gous to literary criticism in many ways, and the assumption of a stance of
aesthetic distance when consulting a divinatory system plays just as critical a
part in the exegesis of a divinatory reading as it does in literary criticism. A
tempered skepticism keeps the rational system engaged while allowing a mea-
sured degree of immersion in experiential material to occur. The success of
divination depends upon the practitioner's ability to engage both systems si-
multaneously by assuming a stance of aesthetic distance during the reading.

Take a Balanced View

Successful divination depends upon the diviner's ability to balance experi-
ential and rational information processing. In fact, it depends upon balance in
several spheres. For example, because the symbolic images of inductive
divinatory systems consist of prototypical situations that are meant to apply to
a wide variety of related situations and psychological states, verbal descrip-
tions of these symbols are necessarily expressed in condensed and abstract
terms. These condensed descriptions of the symbols tend to encompass the
polar extremes of any prototypical situation that is symbolized. The challenge
for the authentic practitioner is to walk a middle path between the many
interpretive extremes that are available in the text. New practitioners tend to
place too much reliance on the hyperbole inherent in prototypical symbols.
More experienced practitioners realize that actual outcomes are likely to be
less extreme and more mundane than the symbolic description of the
prototypical situation might suggest.

Acknowledge and Encourage Choice and Free Will

Authentic practice is based on the understanding that nothing is fated to
happen. In the above Tarot reading, for example, Roberts never suggests that
future events are fated or destined only that if certain actions are taken
they are likely to lead to general kinds of outcomes. The prototypical nature
o{ divinatory symbolism precludes predictions of anything but general kinds
of situations or psychological states. Roberts does not make predictions about
specific future events. He says the querent will soon experience a great deal of
emotional pain, for example, but he does not say exactly what the painful
event or events will be. The whole divinatory reading is concerned with pre-
dicting the future only in so far as it helps illuminate the underlying processes
associated with the querent's current life situation. Roberts says the querent
can and will do whatever it takes to win back the love of his wife; he is likely

176

Kenneth E. Fletcher

o suffer deeply as a consequence; but he will learn how to feel from the suffer-
ng; and by learning to feel he may earn back his wife's love.

No predictions of the future are set in stone. This becomes clearer when
)ne realizes that all genuine divinatory predictions about the future are based
)n projections made by the experiential system. Forecasts of future events are
;onstantly being made by the means-ends schemata of the experiential system
is part of the process of attempting to fulfill the motivational purpose of these
chemata. The ability to make fairly accurate experiential forecasts about the
uture is similar to the ability of chess masters to intuitively know what an
)pponent's move will lead to later in the game. Even the chess champion of
he world can never be entirely sure about an opponent's future moves, how-
!ver. In the same way, although the predictions of the experiential system can
)e remarkably accurate, they are never inevitable. Outcomes can change as
he result of actions and events that occur before the predicted event.

Authentic divination is in the service of free will rather than predestina-
ion. In fact, the objective of a divinatory reading is not to predict the future,
lather, it is to put current events into perspective, taking into account their
)ast determinants and their potential future outcomes. Placing current events
n a larger context like this helps illuminate their personal meaning, such as
he querent's need in our reading to develop his feeling function. Once this
arger perspective is gained, the querent is able to make a better informed
choice of action regarding his or her current life situation. Thus, after hearing
loberts' Tarot reading regarding his current situation, the querent decided to
lo his best to win back his wife's love.

In summary, the authentic divinatory practitioner combats self-delusion
)y practicing with sincerity and modesty, by assuming a stance of aesthetic
listance, by emphasizing free will and individual choice, and by attempting to
ind a middle way when making a rational translation of the experiential in-
brmation contained in the text of the reading.

Concluding Remarks

The purpose of divination is to allow experiential processing fuller rein, so
hat its syncretic, metaphorical knowledge becomes more readily available for
ational processing. By acting as if it is possible to rationally communicate
lonverbal experiential information to the rational system, the diviner makes
t possible for experiential knowledge to emerge. However, the rational sys-
:em first must be persuaded to refrain from imposing its preconceptions and
expectations on the narrative. The diviner also must become attuned to her
)r his own personal repertoire of inner experiences the feelings, sensations,
:winges, chance associations, and hunches that provide the rational mind with
:lues about experiential information.

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Divination: Pathway to Intuition

Symbolic inductive divinatory systems provide practitioners with a con-
ceptual framework for recognizing and verbalizing knowledge that the ratio-
nal system would otherwise be likely to dismiss as irrational information. A
divinatory system's conceptual framework which consists of its world view
and its rules of exegesis is only a semi-rational framework, however. In the
final analysis, everything hinges on the rational mind's willingness to consider
nonrational information. Because divination relies so heavily on experiential
processing, it must be experienced to be appreciated, as the reader may verify
simply by attempting to practice it with an open, yet skeptical, mind.

References

Assagioli, R. (1976). Psychosynthesis. NY: Penguin Books.

Campbell, E. (1992). Modem restatements: An overview of contemporary systems.
In J. Matthews (Ed.), The world atlas of divination (pp. 209-215). Boston, MA: Little,
Brown, and Company.

Campbell, J., & Roberts, R. (1979). Tarot revelations . Author.

Chan, W. (1963). The source hook in chinese philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.

Epstein, E. (1993). Implications of cognitive-experiential self- theory for personality
and developmental psychology. In D. Funder, R. Parke, C. Tomlinson-Keasey, & K.
Widamen (Eds.), Studying lives through time: Personality and development (pp. 399-438).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Epstein, E. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic uncon-
scious. American Psychologist, 49, 709-724.

Epstein, E. (In press). Cognitive-experiential self-theory. In D. Barone, M. Hersen,
& V.B. VanHasselt (Eds.), Advanced Personality. NY: Plenum Press.

Jung, C. G. (1968). Analytical psychology : Its theory and practice. NY: Pantheon
Press.

Jung, C. G. (1971a). On synchronicity. In J. Campbell (Ed.), The portable Jung (pp.
505-518). New York: Viking Press.

Jung, C. G. (1971b). The structure of the psyche. In J. Campbell (Ed.), The
portable Jung (pp. 23-46). New York: Viking Press.

Jung, C. G. (1971c). The transcendent function. In J. Campbell (Ed.), The portable
Jung (pp. 273-300). New York: Viking Press.

Jung, C. G. (1972). Foreword. In R. Wilhelm (German Trans.) and C. F. Baynes
(English Trans.), The 1 Ching. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Matthews, J. (Ed.). (1992). The world atlas of divination. Boston, MA: Little,
Brown, and Company.

Noble, V. (1983). Motherpeace: A way to the goddess through myth, art, and Tarot.
San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers.

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Roberts, R. (1971). Tarot and you. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Morgan and Morgan,
nc. Publishers.

Rudhyar, D. (1970). The astrology of personality . Garden City, NY: Doubleday
'aperback.

von Franz, M. (1980). On divination and synchronicity : The psychology ofmeaningfid
hance. Toronto: Inner City Books.

Wang, R. (1983). Qabalistic Tarot. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Wanless, J. &. Arrien, A. (Eds.) (1992). Wheel of Tarot: A new revolution. Carmel,
A: Merrill-West Publishing.

179

Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

Joyce C. Gihh

Introduction

There is much written in this volume analyzing the basic process of Know
ing itself, exploring the philosophical and functional relationships between the
knower and the known. Here, I invite you to examine the very specific type of
Knowing to be found by asking an oracle, and to consider its inherent philo-
sophical attributes, particularly those relating to the phenomenon of
synchronicity and the concept of a self-chosen future. There is encouraging
theoretical validation for the oracular function from the savants of the New
Physics and the New Biology. Such theories as quantum inseparability,
negentropy, non-locality, holography, and morphic resonance appear to pro-
vide support for the unitary cosmology that is a necessary precondition to the
operation of an oracle. This material suggests that clinical practitioners have a
professional obligation to keep their personal cosmology congruent with the
best current information available from their colleagues in the natural sciences.

Oracles of many kinds have been a part of a broad tradition of spiritual
knowing and healing for thousands of years and in cultures all over the world.
Proceeding from the pre-rational to the postmodern, I will present the Runes
as an oracular method of choice and suggest some practical applications of
this ancient art of seership as it may be exercised in the pursuit of personal
growth today, be that done in the context of psychotherapy or simply by a
solitary seeker.

As a clinical model, Runecasting can be a unique and valuable device by
which the dyad of client and therapist may respectfully approach the uncon-
scious mind in a spirit of sacred play, seeking messages of direction and insight
much as they might in working with a dream. An important part of the model
is to teach the client to work with the Runes independently, reducing depen-
dence on the therapist. The model has the added merit of being available on
call, rather than waiting for a dream, which may be capricious about appear-
ing. The development of this model has come out of my own experience in
years of clinical practice, employing the Runes as a tool for reframing, defin-
ing issues, exploring possible options, and promoting insights.

Early training in statistics and the "hard sciences" has also played a role in
my respect for the Runes. On one occasion, skeptical of the answer 1 had been
given in a Runecast, I asked the same question on the following day and drew

Joyce C. Gibb

exactly the same three Runes. The statistical odds on doing so by chance
compute to 1:6,375,000 and after that occasion my rational mind joined my
intuition in taking the Runes very seriously.

Of course there are exceptions, but in many consulting rooms, a prepon-
derance of the information with which the clinician works is in the form of
verbal narrative that has its genesis in the client's conscious mind. The basic
epistemics are simple and straightforward. A sensitive therapist may also note
signals in the form of body-language or tone of voice, make assumptions about
unconscious material presenting itself through a pattern of verbal signifiers, or
be guided by an intuition. But by and large, the riches of wisdom and insight
about an individual that reside in the unconscious realms remain obscured
until an insight bubbles up spontaneously or a dream deigns to appear with its
symbolic imagery.

The percipient use of an oracular tool in a therapeutic context allows ac-
cess to the unconscious and provides a special Knowing that can be of great
value in facilitating the client's individuation. The concept of individuation,
which is native to the field of depth psychology, is one that 1 consider a useful
aim to hold in mind for the overall process of psychotherapy. It is defined
nicely by Edward C. Whitmont (1969):

There appears to be a compelling urge to adapt to what one is
meant to be to one's inner truth which may have little or
nothing to do with one's conscious ideas or purposes. Jung has
called this the individuation urge. (pp. 48-49)

Oracles, Synchronicity, and Healing

Throughout recorded history major cultures have had seats of wisdom,
oracles where people could go, believing they could access a higher source of
knowledge, gain perspective on the past, or find guidance for their life-choices
by glimpsing into the future. Similarly, pre-literate peoples consult their tribal
shaman, a person who has the capacity to bring information to the querent
from a universal source. (See Combs and Holland, 1990; Loewe, 1981 ; Hamer,
1980.) In our time and culture, the age-old heritage of the search for meaning
has often come to be contained in the work of psychotherapy, where the an-
cient roles of Guide and Pilgrim are labeled Therapist and Client. This is
especially true when the presenting problems are connected with a shift in
consciousness or some degree of psychic/spiritual emergence.

It is interesting to note that our own contemporary Western culture is the
only one in history that has no indigenous oracular tradition in commonly
accepted usage. This void in our cultural/institutional structure is consistent
with its predominantly rational-empirical epistemic; similarly, it follows that
such things as oracles are an epistemically consistent phenomenon in pre-

181

Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

rational cultures, where the average person may have experienced oracular
communication as a kind of undifferentiated fusion with the world. Our West-
ern Cartesian cosmology generates narrow epistemic limits; demanding, for
example, that a clinician must somehow produce apologetics to justify look-
ing beyond direct material causation and reductionism for the resolution of
life's difficulties and the healing of souls and bodies. Some of the material
presented in this chapter will suggest, hopefully, a non-regressive postmodern
epistemic position that transcends the old antipathy between the rational and
the pre-rational by integrating features of both.

Carl Jung was a great proponent of the judicious use of oracles. In his Fore-
word to Wilhelm's J Ching, (1950) he says, "For more than thirty years I have
interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the uncon-
scious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance" (p. xxii). He goes
on to observe that to the formulators of this oracle "the hexagram was the
exponent of the moment in which it was cast... (and was) an indicator of the
essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin," and then "This
assumption involves a certain curious principle that 1 have termed
synchronicity" (p. xxiv). 1 believe it is quite reasonable to consider any oracu-
lar event as a manifestation of synchronicity. Marie-Louise von Franz (1980)
writes that "The view of the world which Jung tried to bring back into focus,
and on which divination basically rests, is that of synchronicity" (p. 7).

In Jungian circles, synchronicity is often defined simply as meaningful co-
incidence. Von Franz (1978) and Robert Aziz (1990) both write at length
about synchronicity as a paralleling of inner and outer events which are not
causally related to each other in any rationally explicable manner, the result
of some acausal orderedness in nature that goes beyond ordinary time and
space. Applied to the oracular process, the inner event might be seen as the
nugget of inner wisdom, the already-known answer, lying submerged in the
unconscious mind. The outer event is the appearance of a particular hexagram,
Tarot card, or Rune that carries the message out of the labyrinth into the light
of day. I will address the concept of acausality later.

The operation of an oracle requires belief in the existence of a synchronis-
tic universe, a system in which linear causality and time-and-space as we think
of them appear to be transcended. In his major work on synchronicity, Jung
(1973) specifically contends that:

In man's original view of the world, as we find it among primi-
tives, space and time have a very precarious existence. They be-
come "fixed" concepts only in the course of his mental develop-
ment, thanks largely to the introduction of measurement. In them-
selves, space and time consist of nothing, (pp. 19-20)

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Joyce C. Gibb

To all those people who for millennia have lived in an oracular tradition,
the existence of such a synchronistic universe was and is simply assumed. Von
Franz points out that "Primitive man lived in a stream of inner and outer
experience which brought along a different cluster of coexisting events at ev-
ery moment, and thus constantly changed, quantitatively and qualitatively"
(1978, p. 5). She goes on to discuss the example found in the Hopi language
which even today has no concepts of past, present and future, or provision for
describing a continuing flow of time. These people would not speak in terms
of moving outside of ordinary time-and-space, for to them, being there was
ordinary. Physicist F. David Peat (1987) puts it that when we experience a
synchronicity, what we are really experiencing is:

. . .the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and
extending throughout society and nature, moving through or-
ders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and
matter into creativity itself, (p. 235)

It would seem that the oracular process, involving a formulated query and
a response in some more or less symbolic form, is indeed a form of synchronis-
tic event. Whether the response emerges from the querent's own personal
unconscious or some transcendent collective unconscious, wisdom and in-
sight comes to conscious level where they can become part of a conscious
healing process. Jean Shinoda Bolen (1979) regards such events as direct coun-
terparts of dreams, and with good reason. The emergent material appears to be
generated from the same source. An oracle may be one of many ways by which
the unconscious mind communicates with both the collective unconscious
and its own rational counterpart. It differs from a spontaneously appearing
dream or synchronistic sign in that it requires an intentional approach on the
part of the querent.

Many clinicians have noted that some degree of heightened spiritual or
emotional consciousness is often concurrent with the appearance of intensi-
fied dream activity. Bolen (1979) believes that both dreams and synchronicity
depend on the activity of the psyche, and states:

(for) a person in great inner turmoil quite often dream intensity
and. ..recall. ..rise. Synchronicity also seems to increase in some
dimension when there is intensity of feeling, whether that feel-
ing be due to falling in love, or being in a period of creative
struggle, or meeting a heightened state of emotional conflict, (p.
39)

All of these are life events and states of being in which people in therapy
are frequently found. Bolen goes on to observe, "With increased emotional

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Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

tension, synchronistic events seem to be more frequent, ESP incidents increase,
and using the I Ching, which rehes on synchronicity, often produces uncannily
precise readings" (p. 39). Laurens van der Post ( 1984) points out that to achieve
greater and greater consciousness involves "all sorts of non-rational forms of
perception and knowing, all the more precious because they are bridges be-
tween the inexhaustible wealth of, as yet, unrealized meaning in the collective
unconscious" (p. xiv). It would appear that the context of psychotherapy is
indeed a potentially rich site in which to employ an oracular tool.

Fate and Destiny

Working with an oracle raises many philosophical questions about the fixed
or malleable nature of the future, and these will be addressed at greater length
later in this work. Here, I wish simply to differentiate between the predictive
use of an oracle, in which answers are sought regarding future events, and the
retrodictive use of an oracle, in which the nature of an individual's intrapsychic
structure and process are probed.

Sallie Nichols (1984) makes a strong case against the use of an oracle as a
fortune-telling device. She points out that if, for example, the future activities
of the stock market were indeed preordained and information about it were
accessible through an oracle, then our individual actions with reference to the
stock market (and everything else) must be similarly preordained in which
case an oracular preview would be useless, since one would not possess the
necessary freedom of choice to act upon its advice.

There are always, however, parts of life which we seem powerless to change.
Those elements are sometimes referred to as one's fate or destiny, and usually
bear a negative, destructive, unpleasant flavor though certainly more positive
"fates" also exist; we just seldom speak about them. The historical evolution
of the concept o{ Fate is well-treated by Liz Greene (1984). James Hillman
(1996) has formulated a provocative "acorn theory" which proposes that each
life is formed by an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a
destiny. He offers a liberating vision of such themes as fate and fatalism, de-
sire, influences of personal history, personal freedom, and ultimately, one's
calling.

Fine discriminations need to be made in this area, and it is possible to
acknowledge the existence of a life-influence called fate or destiny without
falling into the pit of determinism. (The karmic paradigm offers another map
by which to traverse this territory, but one too complex to do justice to in this
limited space; I simply make "honorable mention" of it.)

H. A. Wilmer (1987) offers a sensitive observation about interpreting fate
as the "here and now" pointing out that:

184

Joyce C. Gibb

This moment is the only reaUty we will ever know. Fully lived it
is our whole life. We are not just carrying on for a better tomor-
row but are accepting fate as being this as it is given to us, hie et
nunc. Accepting fate in this sense is not being fatalistic. Quite
the contrary, it allows our only opportunity to influence our des-
tiny, which at each moment in the future will be our fate in the
here and now. (p. 129)

Exploration of inner reality is a valuable way to use an oracular tool
retrodictively, and acceptance and adaptation to one's inner reality is as im-
portant as adaptation to outer reality both being givens in the here and
now. It seems reasonable to posit that the fundamental elements of the un-
conscious set the limits within which conscious attitudes can develop. To the
extent that one can enter and interact with that unconscious, making it no
longer unconscious, there is the potential to amend those now-conscious atti-
tudes and so amend our fate.

Runes and the Oracular Process

In a report on a major Cambridge University symposium on the subject of
divination and oracles, Michael Loewe (1981) speaks of the attempt through
an oracle to elicit from some higher power the answers to questions beyond
the range of ordinary human understanding. These may be questions about
future events, past disasters whose causes are not evident, things hidden from
ordinary view or removed in space. They may be about right conduct in a
critical situation; the choice of persons for a particular task or relationship;
the time and mode of religious worship, a battle, or a planting. Queries are no
doubt basically similar today to those posed thousands of years ago. In times of
crisis or ambiguity, those who believe in a higher source of wisdom will seek
guidance there. In the metaphor of modern depth psychology, that higher
source of wisdom may be seen as residing in one's own psyche or soul, a theory
that parallels the belief of many religious mystics that the Deity, by whatever
name, is in fact immanent.

A thorough review of the oracular practices of various cultures throughout
the history of the world is given by Combs and Holland ( 1 99 1 ) . They speak of
the role of shamans in many cultures' divinatory practices, and the intrinsic
part divinatory interpretation plays in much shamanic healing ritual. It is of-
ten noted by those who have experienced these events that such a ritual is
invested with a great feeling of power or numinosity, as if one were touched
with divine authority. And the literal meaning of the word oracle is the place of
invocation, or the place of the sacred word.

185

Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

Murray Hope (1988) writes at length about The Intermediary, often a per-
son of shamanic nature who embodies qualities of both priest and prophet. He
points out that:

There have long been those individuals gifted with a profound
metaphysical awareness. This innate sensitivity may cause them
to undergo inner experiences of a transpersonal nature, or enable
them to effect a union with those subtle energies which appear
to influence our lives... The less gifted among us may, however, be
just as eager to contact our higher selves or have the will of the
gods made known to us, so we naturally turn to whoever can
provide the required service or teach us the know-how. (p. 25)

That intermediary or hierophant, in the context of psychotherapy, is the
therapist. It is also true that not all oracles require an intermediary, and one of
the qualities that is especially valuable about Runecasting is that it is a process
that can be fairly readily taught to any reasonably open and intuitive person.
Overdependence on the therapist is an ever-present hazard in clinical work,
and this is one way in which the clinician can begin the process of empower-
ing the client to work independently, by developing facility in the ancient
and honorable art of seership. One of the great gifts of the Runes is as a train-
ing a structured training in accessing and using our intuitive faculties. Or-
dinary modem Western education does not include any such discipline.

Number-based oracles, such as the I Ching operate on a generally less pro-
jective level than pattern-based oracles, such as the tarot. Both von Franz
(1980) and Robert S. McCully (1974) have worked on the correlation be-
tween projective images from oracles and those evoked by the Rorschach test.
Non-number-based oracles may involve purely chaotic patterns, such as are
found in scrying, bird-flights, tea-leaves, or entrails. Even the pattern of cracks
in sea turtle shells have been informative to South Sea Islanders. It is believed
that in such an oracle, the process that operates is similar to that of hypnosis.
By staring at a chaotic pattern, the complete disorder in the pattern confuses
the conscious mind and allows imagery to rise out of the unconscious much as
a dream would. Non-number-based oracles may also involve quite specific
imagery, as in the Tarot and the plethora of New Age oracles such as Sacred
Path Cards, Totem Animal Cards, Celtic Tree Cards, Gypsy Fortune Telling
Cards, and others.

The Runes fall somewhere between, in that while they present visual sym-
bols, those symbols are quite abstract and require that the historical meaning-
clusters that attach to them be learned, much as is true o{ the 1 Ching. There
is also incidence of individual projection, for as the querent studies those mean-
ing-clusters there is often a comment such as, "That sentence just lit up in

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Joyce C. Gibb

leon for me," or "It jumped right off the page." An experienced Runecaster
eventually gets the meanings so well integrated that there is no longer any
leed to refer to a book and still one or another aspect of the meaning will
present itself with a special numinosity.

Figure 1
The Runic Symbols

mm

Uruz Othila Ansuz Gebo Mannaz

Strength Separation Signals Partnership The Self

Algiz Eihwaz Inguz Nauthiz Perth

Protection Defense Fertility Constraint Initiation

S@@E(E

Teiwaz Kano Jera Wunio Fehu

Warrior Opening Harvest joy Possessions

Raido Hagalaz Laguz Ehwaz Berkana

Journey Disruption Flow Movement Growth

Odin Sowelu Isa Dagaz Thurisaz

The Wholeness Standstill Break- Gateway

Unkowable through

187

Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

It is wise, in this process, to explore the interpretations of more than one
writer on the Runes. Although the basic thrust of the definitions is similar in
all, each has a little different emphasis and it is well to offer as wide an array as
possible for the projection process to attach to. For example, Ralph Blum
(1982), who is responsible for much of the renaissance of interest in the Runes
in recent years, offers interpretations modeled for the modern spiritual seeker,
mediated in the linguistic style of transpersonal psychology. Edred Thorsson's
work (1984) holds close to classic Norse mythology and his terminology is
rather esoteric. Tony Willis (1986), a British writer, turns his runic lens to
more mundane aspects of everyday life such as family and business matters,
health issues, or human foibles. All are valid, and valuable, at one time or
another.

The Runes are a divinatory tool as deeply indigenous to the Northern Eu-
ropean world as the I Ching is to the Chinese. This fact recommends it, for we
are thus provided with a symbolic system that arose within the forms of West-
ern thought. James Peterson (1988) addresses the issue of cultural compatibil-
ity and points out that every symbolic system exists in the context of some
specific culture, just as every human being does. It is difficult to have real
success with the J Ching without learning to approach it from within a classic
Chinese philosophical perspective, just as students of the Kabbalah must steep
themselves in the world-view of medieval Judaism.

Of Germanic/Nordic origin, the Runes were fully developed by as early as
200 B.C.E. and migrated through all of Northern Europe, the Alps, the Brit-
ish Isles, and via the Normans, into France, Belgium and The Netherlands
(Peterson, 1988). To the extent that your personal heritage falls within that
cultural area, you are on home ground with the Runes, and it is to be expected
that on many subtle levels your usage of them will provide a more complete
understanding than "foreign" oracles.

The Runic symbols were actually letters in the Old Germanic alphabets
known as futharks (Thorsson, 1984). The word "rune" itself bears the primary
definition of "secret" or "mysterium" and in addition to their use in mundane
communication each glyph carried a unit of mystical lore. It is this form that
is inscribed as a symbol for a formless and timeless idea. They describe energy
flows and states as related to the self and its environment.

Runes used in divinatory practice, which was known as runemal, were some-
times carved into pieces of hardwood or metal, or cut into leather. Many were
flat pebbles with glyphs painted on one side, usually in red. The Runes were
sometimes cast, and sometimes drawn from a bag, to determine which were to
be read. Runes were also used as amulets, and were drawn or carved on drink-
ing cups, battle swords and shields, standing stones, over the lintels of doors,
and on the prows of ships (Blum, 1982).

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Joyce C. Gibb

In a modem adaptation of this practice, I once knew a woman who painted
liwaz, the Rune of the Spiritual Warrior, on her breastbone before attending a
edictably contentious confrontation with her soon-to-be-ex-husband in which
le most basic principles of her life were going to be tested and she was at risk
r being deeply heart-wounded. She stood her ground. A man taking his Gradu-
e Record Exam carved ]era, the Rune relating to harvest a year hence, and
nsuz, the Rune of communication, on his mandatory No. 2 pencil.

In olden times, a runic practitioner was usually also the village shaman and
fair number of them were women, as is consistent with the prominent place
various goddesses in the Norse pantheon (Freya Aswinn, 1990). It was cus-
imary for runemasters and runemistresses to wear red trousers or skirts.

By late medieval times, as the influences of Christianity continued to erode
e-Christian folk practices, runemal became less and less common and for
any centuries it existed in a sparse but unbroken fashion, often in isolated
llages or places where it did not draw the ire of the Church (Thorsson, 1987).
evival of interest in the Runes came in the 19th Century as part of a com-
on tendency at that time for sentimentalizing national heritage. A kernel of
nic folk-practice was transplanted to America with Pennsylvania Dutch and
:andinavian settlers. Modem scholarship in runelore began with the work of
erman mystic Guido von List early in this century (Thorsson, 1987). A
ladow-aspect of runic revival came when the Nazis tried, not very success-
Uy, to co-opt the spiritual power of the Runic tradition into their dark at-
mpt to promote a neo-Germanic heritage demonstrating Aryan superiority
ilum, 1982).

In postwar years, a small but growing number of Teutonic and Scandi-
ivian esoteric scholars have investigated the history, anthropology, and my-
Lology of the Runes. Some of this work has been in connection with the re-
nergence of Old Nordic religion, particularly a cult dedicated to the god
din, who coincides with the Mercury/Trickster archetype and is also the
ythological progenitor who brought the Runes to humankind. Thorsson
987) briefly recounts and interprets that legend:

Odhinn...hung for nine nights on the World Tree, Yggdrasill, in
a form of self-sacrifice. This constitutes the runic initiation of
the god Odhinn; he approaches and sinks into the realm of death
in which he receives the secrets, the mysteries of the multiverse
the runes themselves in a flash of inspiration. He is then
able to return from that realm, and it is now his function to teach
the runes to certain of his followers in order to bring wider con-
sciousness, wisdom, magic, poetry, and inspiration to all of the
worlds.. .The figure of Odhinn, like those of the rune-staves, stands
at the inner door of our conscious/unconscious borderland. Odhinn

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Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

is the communicator to the conscious of the contents of the un-
conscious and supra-conscious... We, as humans, are conscious be-
ings but have a deep need for communication and illumination
from the hidden sides of the worlds and ourselves, (p. 10)

He writes further of the Runes in an energetic context reminiscent of ho-
lographic theory, saying, "The runes... are the substance of the latent energy
contained in Gunningagap. The runes exist simultaneously in an undifferen-
tiated state throughout this void" (1984, pp. 72-73). (In Norse mythology,
Gunningagap is the Great Void that existed before all time and from which
Creation emerged.)

Runic scholar J. M. Peterson (1988) has theorized on the process of con-
necting meaning to symbols and notes a parallel between classic esoteric be-
liefs in this regard and Rupert Sheldrake's (1989) hypothesis regarding certain
non-local organizing principles, in particular morphic resonance. Peterson
contends that:

A given rune acquires its symbolic meaning through contiguity, -
by the arbitrary and repeated pairing of the letter-shape with the
idea which it has come to represent. Second, the symbolic values
of the runes are linked to events in the real world by virtue of the
similarity between the symbols and the reality... The runes have
power because they were long and widely used with defined and
relatively invariant meanings, (p. 57)

In a similar vein, Aswinn (1990) writes:

Through repeated use of these sigils the original concepts were
deepened and expanded. Their use by successive generations in-
vested the runes with special powers; consequently a large stor-
age memory bank was built up in the collective Northern uncon-
scious, (p. 109)

It is interesting to speculate on factors other than repetition within a cultural
container that may have had an influence on the genesis of the Runes. A Jun-
gian viewpoint would surely speak of the outpicturing of archetypes; a psychic
researcher would speak of transmissions at distance; and so forth. Perhaps these
are all different semantic descriptions of related phenomena for which Rupert
Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance provides a common denominator.
Sheldrake's work will be treated in greater detail further on in this chapter.

Philosophical Reflections

Some philosophical considerations, rooted in certain potentially conflict-
ing assumptions regarding cosmology and the nature of reality, ensue from the

190

Joyce C. Gibb

)ncepts of synchronicity and oracular process. It seems appropriate to touch

least briefly upon the most basic of them.

The relationship of Jung's "acausal orderedness" to our exploration dic-
tes that we mention the issues of chance and causality, for it would seem
lat the concept of acausality lies somewhere between them. Some consider
lat the concept of an acausal orderedness that results in the appearance of
nchronistic events is in effect an oxymoron. Perhaps the term"acausal" might
; likened to the proverbial Black Box. Jung (1973) could see what preceded
id followed a synchronistic event, but not how the event came into being
ithin the limits of a conventional concept of causality:

It is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP, or the
act of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy. This
makes and end of the causal (space) explanation as well, for "ef-
fect" cannot be understood as anything except a phenomenon of
energy. Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but
of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity, (p. 19)

And further.

The numinosity of a series of chance happenings grows in pro-
portion to the number of its terms. Unconscious probably ar-
chetypal contents are thereby constellated, which then give
rise to the impression that the series has been "caused" by those
contents. Since we cannot conceive how this could be possible
without recourse to positively magical categories, we generally
let it go at the bare impression, (p. 10, note)

More recently, Michael Talbot (1991) has speculated that Jung may have
ed the term acausal simply because at the time he coined it, the operative
)nnecting principles were as yet unknown to science.

Today, the input that comes from many postmodern natural science disci-
ines makes the connections between the inner and outer worlds no longer

mysterious. In recent years a number of writers have offered synthetic dis-
burses that are based on new findings in the natural sciences and that note
e mutually supportive aspects of science and mysticism. Among these are
avid Bohm( 1980), FritjofCapra( 1976 and 1982), Gary Zukav (1979), Dana
)har (1990) and Ken Wilber (1982 and 1985) to name but a few.

Concomitant to a discussion of causality and chance is the hoary conten-
)n between the doctrines of determinism and free will. This debate is per-
ips in fact a Zen koan that is truly unresolvable, but it has distinct philo-
phical implications for the operation of any oracular process. This factor
ars strongly on the appropriate manner of using an oracle in the therapeutic
ntext.

191

Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

A major paradox comes into view when considering the use of oracles ii
psychotherapy, for belief in an oracular process as a predictive device carries th
inference of the existence of a predictable and therefore deterministic future
Engaging in the practice of therapy, however, carries the inference of a free
will future that can be molded indirectly by the effects of therapy on the na
ture of the individual involved. The use of an oracle in a retrodictive mode, i.e
as a way of perceiving the nature of an individual's psyche, greatly reduces thi
particular conflict.

Predictive oracular communication is theoretically supported by the re
searches of quantum physics, holography, and chaos theory (as described b
the postmodern writers mentioned just above) but in my experience, I hav
found it of limited suitability for the psychotherapeutic process. Sallie Nichol
(1984) holds a similar opinion, saying, "I feel that a predictive interpretation
however true it may prove to be on the overt level, misses the inner truth wi
seek. ..and diverts our attention from true self-understanding" (p. 370).

The retrodictive mode of oracular communication, which I favor for psy
chotherapy, finds theoretical support in the seminal work of Stanford neuro
scientist Karl Pribram, which stands as a great bridge between the discipline
of neurobiology and holographic physics. He has accumulated evidence fo
many years showing that the brain's deep structure is essentially holographic
Writing on Pribram's work, Ferguson (1985) notes that "...the holographi(
supertheory says that our brains mathematically construct 'hard' reality b
interpreting frequencies from a dimension transcending time and space. Th
brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe" (p. 22).

Bob Samples (1985) explores the subject of holonomic knowing and point
out that "Pribram's work... provides us with the realization that experience i
patterned into the whole brain and is not localized in the reductive geogra
phies of the cortex that were previously favored" (p. 123). He goes on to sug
gest that this neuro-physiological liberation (promulgated by the holographi
paradigm) has important implications for the clinical practicum of the socic
sciences in that it

...encourages us in the educational and psychological professions
to give up our reductive practices. Behaviorism can be seen as a
treatment of symptoms and not causes. It can be seen as the en-
forcement o{ preselected macrons on mind while reducing the
options for self-selection, (p. 123)

Samples ( 1985) believes that another implication of Pribram's work is to pus
us beyond the parochialism of conventional ways of processing experience:

Holonomic knowing is holistic. It must honor the nonrational as
well as the rational. It is clear that the macronic holograms of

192

Joyce C. Gibb

Karl Pribram give us wider horizons, greater depths and higher
reaches. The lateraUzed brain gave us permission to acknowledge
and honor diversity in the modes of knowing. The holographic
brain insures the simultaneous legitimacy of the
interconnectedness of that knowing, (p. 124)

The holographic paradigm neatly removes any problems found in most
lysical systems of explanation as to how quickly information can travel from
)int A to Point B, for in the holographic view that information is already at
)int B. Oracles have long demonstrated the capacity to gamer information
)m the future, the past, or locations at distance, and for our purposes, the
aim of an individual's unconscious might well be regarded as a "location at
stance." This venue is absolutely appropriate to the work of psychotherapy,
id an oracle in retrodictive usage allows us to touch an extended mind, greatly
panding the epistemics of a therapeutic process.

Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist, has proposed a hypothesis that both
ifolds and goes beyond the tenets of quantum physics and holography, de-
ribing the nature of biological and physical reality in a way that has impor-
nt connections with Jung's concepts of a personal and collective uncon-
ious. These are in turn important to Jung's presumptions about synchronicity
id oracular function. Sheldrake's theory evolved out of his work in embryol-
;y and genetics about how life forms take shape, be it an oak tree from an
orn or an arm or a leg on a human fetus:

Each species has its own fields, and within each organism there are
fields within fields. Within each of us is the field of the whole body;
fields for arms and legs and fields for kidneys and livers; within are
fields for the different tissues inside these organs, then fields for the
cells... subcellular structures... and so on. ..The essence of the hypoth-
esis 1 am proposing is that these fields, which are already accepted
quite widely within biology, have a kind of in-built memory de-
rived from previous forms of a similar kind. (1987, p. 16)

Sheldrake (1989) defines morphic fields as being "...like the known fields
physics, ...non-material regions of influence extending in space and con-

luing in time. They are localized within and around the systems they orga-

ze" (p. xviii). He goes on to state that:

The process by which the past becomes present within morphic
fields is called morphic resonance. Morphic resonance involves
the transmission of formative causal influences through both space
and time. The memory within the morphic fields is cumulative,
and that is why all sorts of things become increasingly habitual
through repetition, (p. xix)

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Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

It is interesting to speculate that oracular symbols of long usage, such as ar(
found in the Tarot and the Runes, may carry strong morphic fields that inforn
their messages and affect their usage. If this is so, those morphic fields may, ii
a kind of tuning-fork phenomenon, actually resonate with the already-knowi
answer within and guide the hand of the querent to turn a particular card ii
the deck or pick up a particular Rune in the bag. A frequently heard commen
in Runecasting is, "The stone just jumped into my hand," or "It stuck to nv
fingers."

The recent discovery by Dr. Joseph Kirschvink at The California Institut(
of Technology of minute magnetic crystals in human brains as reported h
Sandra Blakeslee (1992) becomes especially provocative when viewed in con
nection with the portion of Sheldrake's hypothesis dealing with the non-spe
cific locality of memory. Sheldrake (1987) likens the brain to a TV tuner tha
picks up images transmitted from "out there" and converts them to visibl(
pictures, saying:

The key concept of morphic resonance is that similar things in-
fluence similar things across both space and time. ..If this hypoth- '
esis is correct, it is not necessary to assume that memories are
stored inside the brain. ..we (commonly) use the word brain inter-
changeably with mind or memory. 1 am suggesting that the brain
is more like a tuning system than a memory storage device, (pp.
21-22)

Carolyn Keutzer (1982) writes extensively on the applications and impli
cations of Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation in the realm of th(
psyche. Addressing the subject of conceptualizing a synchronistic event a
occurring within a morphogenic field, she says, "...we could translate fron
Jung's terms. ..to Sheldrake's terms, of tapping into a morphic resonance t(
organize and coordinate intermediate processes which are widely separated ii
time and space" (p. 260).

Developments in physics have long since shown that a strict Newtoniai
position dissolves finally into theoretical paradox. Natural scientists, in th
main, have come to agree with humanists as to the predominantly indetermi
nate nature of scientific "fact," but psychologists as a body have tended t(
view science as deterministic in nature. Robert Davis (1974) has commentet
strongly on psychology's lack of ability to keep pace so long as it is only ai
imitator of the "mature" sciences. The profession as a whole would do well t
become better informed of the post-modern tenets of the very sciences the
seek to emulate, for those tenets make it increasingly clear that adhering strictl
to a mechanistic cosmology is no longer a viable stance. As a practical matte
however, most of science rejects post-modernism as a reductio ad absurdw

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Joyce C. Gibb

lativism. The scientists such as Capra and Sheldrake, who expound such
)sitions, are regarded as having left the "true" scientific fold.

Using The Runes in Psychotherapy

A major factor in working with the Runic oracle is the manner in which
le approaches it. It is critical that this be done with respect, a meditative
ate of mind, a clearly thought out query, and perhaps some ritual or prayer of
vocation before reaching into the bag to draw out stones, which may be
aced on a special cloth kept for that purpose alone. This is sacred play, and is
)t to be treated frivolously. By embedding it in ritual, the experience may be
ansformed from the level of a secular paranormal event to a truly mystical
xasion of Spiritual Knowing. Another benefit from developing some regu-
r ritual for conducting a Runecasting is that this reduces the amount of con-
ntration required of the conscious mind, enabling it to slip into "neutral"
id make way for the unconscious to rise up and seek contact with the Di-
ne.

Just as it is critical to follow the dream text very exactly in interpreting a
earn, it is critical to hold in mind the exact form of the query put to the
acle, for this sets a definite limit to the interpretation of the answer. The
rmation of the query itself is perhaps the greatest single skill required for
ccessful Runecasting. The question should never be stated in such way as to
'oke a simple "yes" or "no" answer, but rather in terms of issues, impacts and
fluences. For example, one would not ask "Should I leave this relationship?"
It rather ask the stones to speak to the question of what impact the relation-
tip is having on one's well-being, or to the issue of the place relationships
)ld in one's life. It is sometimes valid to use a limited predictive question in
rvice to the clarification of options, for example, to ask "NX^at will be the
cely effect on my life if I leave this relationship?" and "What will be the
cely effect on my life if I stay in this relationship?"

It is essential to approach the oracle with the proper expectations. This is
lite a different matter than simply having your fortune told. You should not
:pect the oracle to tell you what to do, or predict specific future events. It
in and will bring to your attention the intrapsychic dynamics that inform
)ur motivations and behavior and thus mold your future by their presence,
cognized or not. The beauty of the oracle is that it allows these elements to
)me to consciousness where you can work with them embrace them as
Ley are, amend them, or reject them, and so alter the future that would have
;en had you not so intervened. Any oracle offers its most effective help when
)proached less in search of advice as to outer choices, and more with the idea
broadening and enriching the base of self-knowledge from which we make
LOse choices.

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Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

Fortune-telling is often pursued by individuals who want to be absolved oi
the responsibility for their future. Mindful consultation with an oracle, rather,
brings to your attention the inner choices that outpicture as your future anc
inform its configuration. Such a process is often extremely helpful to an indi-
vidual at a life-turning-point, whether that person is making the passage in
company with a therapist or going it alone.

Osborne and Longland (1982) suggest a wide array of Runic games for
sacred play and also speak to the issue of a self-chosen future.

In a creative way oracles, by their use of analogy and symbol,
paradox and ambiguity, stimulate the individual's imagination in
new directions so that he can, if he is able, perceive his relation-
ship with the outside world in a different way and so change his
future. The point that we should like to stress... is that the ability
to determine the future lies not in the oracle but in the indi-
vidual, not in the symbols but in the mind that uses them. (p. 97)

There are many innovative ways to use Runes and entrain with their pow-
ers. Some people wear a particular Rune as a pendant or carry it in a medicine
bag or a pocket, choosing their amulet to meet some perceived need of the
moment. Runes are messengers from the same world as dreams, and can be
used to focus or stimulate your dreaming. Draw a single Rune at bedtime,
asking for guidance on some aspect of your life that requires attention or heal-
ing, put that Rune under your pillow, and ask for a dream to come in the
night. If you have a question about a certain person, you can put your Rune-
bag on their picture or a letter in their handwriting, and ask. You can follow
the same procedure if you have a question about the impact of a letter you are
going to send. An always appropriate open-ended query recommended by Ralph
Blum is "Show me what I need to know for my life now" (1982, p. 83).

Andreas Mavromantis' (1991) scholarly analysis of hypnagogia, a unique
state between sleep and waking, describes that state as being often concomi-
tant with dreaming, meditative, hypnotic, mystical or paranormal activities,
and a frequent vehicle for message-carrying images. As such, it would seem to
be a particularly fertile time to perform runemal, perhaps by keeping one's
Rune-bag conveniently at hand next to the bed.

A Therapeutic Model For Runemal

One purpose of this examination of the nature of synchronicity, oracular
process, and developments in the postmodern scientific world that tend to
validate those concepts, is to connect them constructively with a sensitive
and responsible practice model for the psychotherapeutic arts. That the model
may also be useful to an individual without the mediation of a therapist is an

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Joyce C. Gibb

dded bonus, and while we will speak here in terms of a clinical setting, keep
1 mind that empowering the client to work independently is always a goal.

Clearly, working with oracular process in the consulting room is not suit-
ble for every client or every practitioner. And, even given an auspicious com-
ination of participants, it is not suitable for every issue. This is true of any
lerapeutic style, and Laurie Nadel (1990) counts more than 300 different
/pes of psychotherapy available in the United States today. Any given ap-
roach will work for some and not for others; even for the same individual it
lay at one time spark new growth and at another time generate only mean-
ering introspection.

It seems reasonable to assume that a client for whom Runecasting would
e a suitable therapeutic activity is one who exhibits a degree of openness to
letaphysical/spiritual matters, and may indeed be in some state of spiritual
mergence-crisis. A model client might also be expected to be ready for the
lea of looking to his or her own unconscious for guidance and wisdom, and
ven ready to begin to learn a technique for doing that which would ulti-
mately reduce dependence on the therapist.

The model therapist would be one who was similarly open, and is comfort-
ble with a relativistic view of psychological reality. Experience with dream
iterpretation is a directly transferable and appropriate skill. An appreciation
f the parallels between transpersonal psychotherapy and shamanistic prac-
ces would be a useful qualification, for the Runemaster or Runemistress of
Iden times was indeed a shaman. Conducting a rune-reading in a consulting
3om is not to be confused with the modem-day phenomenon known as
lamanic journeying in any sense. However, our act of sacred play in a sacred
3ace is in the tradition of the ancient art of the seers who have served as
lamans to their cultures throughout history and all around the world. It is
'ell to be attuned to their way-of-being, to the extent that we can be, even if
ur practice is shaped by and adapted to our culture.

Appropriate issues have been described by Blum (1982) as "anything that
ilates to timeliness and right action" (p. 37). In the use of the Runes as a
itrodictive tool, any question designed to give clearer insight into the
idividual's inner psychic process would be suitable.

Appropriate interpretation is a great art, and relies heavily on the prin-
iple we have spoken of at length already: that any expansion of self-aware-
ess will have profound implications for that individual's future. It is therefore
nportant to couch an interpretation in language that reflects concern for
'If-awareness. Generally speaking, a metaphoric or symbolic style of inter-
retation will serve that principle far better than a very literal one. Exactly
ecause a symbolic reading does not predict a given future, it offers us oppor-
inities to participate in the creation of a new and unpredictable future. This

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Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

kind of experience can be very reinforcing to the client's self-esteem and sense
of power. Furthermore, after any illuminating encounter with the unconscious,
we are literally not the same person we were before that event.

A therapist's skill in interpretation grows with experience, and that expe-
rience can well be gained by reading for yourself. By regular work on your own
queries and issues, you begin to build a matrix of meanings, a sense of how the
oracle responds. Tutelage with an adept runecaster will speed this process, but
is not entirely necessary. A sensitivity to the special numinous quality of some
phrase, written or spoken, is a great gift in this work. This is a purely intuitive
function; it cannot be taught directly, but often emerges in time. It can be
encouraged by adopting a mental attitude of mindfulness when engaged in
the work.

As to the practical matter of introducing the concept of oracular work to a
client, 1 simply mention my own interest when an opportunity arises, and
then leave it to the client to ask me to pursue it if they wish, for the client's
interest and initiative for engaging in such an activity definitely promotes its
success. It has been my experience that when a "runic relationship" does de-
velop in this way, it appears to facilitate openness and strengthens rapport
between therapist and client.

Runecasting can offer a paradoxically matter-of-fact way to work with cli-
ents in a transpersonal state. Because it involves simply stepping into the
transpersonal arena with the client in an accepting and non- judgmental way,
it helps to normalize that person's experience, allaying fears of an altered state
and promoting regrounding.

There are definite cautions and precautions to be observed in work of this
sort. An important discernment must be made between the client who is in a
transpersonal state and one who is actually in a psychotic state. For the latter,
oracular work would be quite contraindicated, for it is important that a querent
be well-grounded and not inclined to over- fantasize or over-concretize. As-
sessment of the client's ego-functions should be an ongoing task for the thera-
pist working in this arena.

The client's perception of the oracular images must also be monitored. If
the image is taken "for real" the result can be actions and relationships in the
outer world that are based on a fantasy or a projection rather than on reality.
This aberration could be likened to mistaking the map for the territory.

While acknowledging that working judiciously with synchronistic events
or oracles often enhances the therapeutic process, Keutzer ( 1984) speaks about
instances in which those procedures do not work well.

In certain cases the development of a larger conscious awareness
and perspective does not come about; instead, the ego identifies

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Joyce C. Gibb

directly with impersonal psychic material. In such instances "ego-
inflation" occurs. The possibility of psychosis or paranoia arises
when a primitive ego structure copes with its fear of annihilation
by identifying directly with archetypal material in a grandiose
way. (p. 379)

Some clients simply become obsessed with the transpersonal events in their
Ives, especially if these are new to them. Such a preoccupation may some-
imes be a defensive maneuver of the ego a strategy to avoid becoming
ware of an unwillingness to assume responsibility for daily living a kind of
louble-denial as it were. None of this is good therapy. Sometimes it is neces-
ary to slow down the pace of passages of transpersonal work, and it is helpful

0 develop boundaries for the process. One such countermove is to suggest
hat a regular daily time be scheduled to devote to the client's emerging
ranspersonal process. This gambit sends the implicit message that ordinary
ife can and must go on, and has a beneficial normalizing effect. It has been my
ibservation that providing a container for transpersonal activity does some-
low seem to satisfy its need to be recognized and there is less "spillage"over
nto everyday life and time. Regularly scheduled Runic meditations can well
erve in this role.

Summary and Conclusions

To the extent that the ability to access the unconscious at will is of value

1 the pursuit of personal growth, we can affirm a useful place for Runecasting
1 either the consulting room or one's private study. It is important to dis-
riminate clearly between the predictive and retrodictive modes of oracular
ractice, for though both find theoretical validation in the disciplines of
ostmodem natural science, the predictive mode lacks validation in terms of
s suitability for therapeutic use. It is equally important to couch a Runecasting
1 terms of self-knowledge that informs and enriches our choices for the fu-
ire. Used in this way, the art of Rune-casting can open the way for invaluable
piritual Knowing to illuminate the path that each of us walks.

What we have learned here about the tenets of postmodern natural sci-
nces bears implications on a broader front than just the validation of oracu-
ir processes. Charles Ponce (1991) has observed that

Up until recently... the ability to transmit information from one
individual to another without employing any of the known means
of communication, was considered some type of intellectual mad-
ness, a spot on the white gown of science, (p. 55)

The recent Fourth Edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Di-
?nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994) (DSM), which

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Runic Knowing: Revisioning the Oracle

sets the tone for much of therapeutic practice by virtue of its required use for
managed care and insurance payors, still reflects that notion of intellectua
madness. The function known as Magical Thinking, for example, is deemed
evidence of pathology, and is defined as "The erroneous belief that one's
thoughts, words, or actions will cause or prevent a specific outcome in some
way that defies commonly understood laws of cause and effect" (p. 768). Clearly,
interpretation of the term "commonly understood laws of cause and effect" is
the key to what this medical model defines as sickness or wellness.

Benjamin Beit-Hallihmi's words (1974) are still pertinent and eloquent
regarding the part the professional psychologist plays in drawing the line
with reference to the matter of what constitutes pathology and what is accept-
able as normalcy. He points out that to a large extent therapists foster socia
conformity and social control, rather than self- actualization. This is especially
true when the Self being actualized is moving in realms outside the therapist's
personal experience or the limiting parameters of a cosmology that is unlikely
to have been consciously adopted, honed by critical thinking, or expanded by
the addition of up-to-date scientific information.

It appears that the rationalist writers of the DSM have not differentiated
between the kind of pre-rational, fusion-world Magical Thinking in which an
individual might believe that the clouds are moving because they are follow-
ing him, and the kind of manifestation documented so well by Larry Dossey
(1989) and others that prayer actually has some empirically verifiable impact
on physical health. In the former there is a cognitive regression or immaturity;
the latter evidences the influence of non-local factors that follow laws of cause
and effect that are apparently not "commonly understood" at least not by
those who have not yet familiarized themselves with the recondite hypotheses
of contemporary physical and life-science which provide plausible explana-
tory mechanisms for many varieties of human experience.

James Hillman (1996) writes of ghosts in our tradition, speaking of what 1
would term the fusion-world form of Magical Thinking, and says:

...that permeability existed long ago in another kingdom of con-
sciousness. Since then, the retraction of our interest from what
rational consciousness calls magical, mystical, and mythical
merges all the imaginal bodies indiscriminately into the
monsterous. Result: the invisible becomes "alien. "...What I can't
see, I can't know; what I can't know, I fear; what 1 fear, I hate;
what I hate, I want destroyed. So the rationalized mind prefers
the chasm to the bridge; it likes the cut that separates the realms.
From inside its concrete debunker, all invisibles appear the same
bad. (p. 109)

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Joyce C. Gibb

It is to be hoped that by fostering a greater awareness among social scien-
ists of conceptually liberating developments in the natural sciences perhaps
^e can make safe a bridge that would heal the adversarial relationship be-
ween the rational and the postmodern. Perhaps then the ghosts of the pre-
ational may respectfully be laid to rest. Perhaps then transcendent under-
tandings of such notions as Magical Thinking can restore the world of Mysti-
ism to validity in our culture and bring the concept of Spiritual Knowing to
nore common acceptance. Recalling the ancient myth of Odhinn, perhaps it
3 now our function "to teach the runes to certain of our followers in order to
)ring wider consciousness, wisdom, magic, poetry, and inspiration to all of the
rarlds."

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1 Know the Heather Song
Exploring a GaeUc Epistemic

Jessica Syme

Introduction

The borderland between anthropology, medicine and psychology is fasci-
nating territory. When we step into the arena of "spiritual knowing" we enter
this matrix of disciplines. How people learn to know spiritually and about
matters of spirit and how they express what they know spiritually is interwo-
ven with cultural identity. This complexity of "inner" knowing and cutural
expression forms the platform upon which we stand to deal with matters of
life, death, health and illness and relatedness to other people. In this sense
"spiritual knowing" becomes intricately connected to our sense of well-being
and psychological health. It is most easily seen reflected in a community's
medical and healing systems.

In this chapter I explore "Spiritual Knowing" within the context of Scot-
tish Gaelic culture. It is my immediate culture and so as a writer and a medical
anthropologist I am not going to attempt to assume a position outside of its
worldview or modes of expression to explain it in an analytical way. After all,
this is the very nature of the problem being discussed, i.e. how we know in
non-rational modes and how we express and communicate these knowledges.
I cannot tell you in a linear way what to know something in my heart means
to me anymore than I could tell you why the ocean stirs my soul or Italian
arias make me weep. What I can do though, is to attempt to give you as the
reader, an experience of my way of knowing, whilst pointing to some of the
implications that this way of knowing has as it intersects with Western or
"Cosmopolitan" knowledges (Jansen, 1978, p. xiii).

Scottish Gaelic is a language of Celtic origin (Romaine and Dorian, 1981'
However, when I use the term I am referring to a culture that has been built up
in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as a result of several cultures merg-
ing together over a long period of history (Chadwick 1971, pp. 66-7, 89-95). I
am using the term "Gaelic" as a description of a culture and a particular world-
view rather than to define a language. In linguistic terms the Pictish people
inhabiting Scotland before the Celts quickly adopted Gaelic as their own lan-
guage. Why this happened and why the linguistic changes in Scotland hap-
pened so rapidly remains relatively unexplained (Romaine and Dorian, 1981 ).

Jessica Syme

"he culture as we know it today, has integrated not only the pre-Celtic, Celtic
nd Roman influences but also Norse and French intrusions and interactions.

With regards to medical cosmology the changes in Scotland have also been
ipid over the last 200 years. The cultural plurality has often presented a very
ncomfortable dynamic for the Highland people as they have been forced by
O'estem cultural dominance to take their old healing practices and spiritual
eliefs underground or behind closed doors (Hamilton, 1982).

Attempting to isolate these beliefs and practices completely from
eighbouring traditions and cultural mores or from influences of colonizing
ultures is an unrealistic task. Yet we can map out a domain, a cartography of
nowing, and say that this epistemic is based on a specific way o{ viewing the
'orld and that this cosmology is particular to Gaelic Scotland. It is apparent
lat a continuum of "spiritual knowledge" has existed in Gaelic Scotland, for
lany hundreds of years. It can be dated by written records as far back as the
600's (Gilles, 1911). However, if we consider contemporary archaeological
iterpretations it is conceivable that this cosmology has existed for a much
)nger period of time (Gimbutus, 1989, p. 158).

We are focusing on cultural and healing practices that are based on an
nderstanding of the universe that includes a definite spiritual reality i.e. a
)irit world with ancestors, entities and purpose that interacts and is part of
\e physical world (Stewart, 1990, pp. 82-92).

Cultural beliefs and traditions are difficult to isolate in most cultures be-
luse of their dynamic and pluralistic nature always in change and always
ith subcultures which are often connected to older ways of knowing (Helman,
990, p. 67).

This pluralism is seen most evidently in developing nations such as Africa
id India where cultural change is rapid and culture becomes layered, with
le introduced or adopted Western traditions being underpinned by more tra-
Ltional habits (Jansen, 1978, p. 223). It is apparent in Thailand and the sub-
.sian continent where medical practices have become an eclectic mixture of
X^estem" and "Thai" methodology supported by a complex cosmology modi-
ing aspects of both approaches (Kleinman, 1980).

Scotland is a less contemporary example, yet it has relevance to contem-
3rary change because it provides us with insight into a medical cosmology
lat has influenced much of Western "alternative" medicine. It opens a door-
ay into understanding the origin of notions and practices such as emotional
itharsis in contemporary psychotherapy, herbal and homeopathic remedies,
liropracting and physical manipulation for stress related disease and the grow-
ig trend for "spiritual crisis" interpretations and rebirthing solutions to some
jychiatric and psychotic conditions (Comrie, 1932).

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I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic

Many cultures honour what we are calling "an alternative epistemic". Yet
I would ask the question.. "Alternative to what?" I read into this choice o
terminology a value judgement, a bias and a split. It is implying that a "ratio
nal, linear, scientific, intellectual" approach is the primary mode of knowing
and that other ways of knowing are secondary. This is true in Western/cosmo-
politan cultures and medical systems but it is not true for many other cultures
In defining "different" ways of knowing as "alternative" we carry all the preju-
dice of Western culture that implies correct, good, and fair to what is logical
proveable and acceptable as evidence, into the text.

It is important to consider these stances in professional agenda at the out-
set of approaching patient care or medical/psychological evaluation. Western
medical cosmology is, in and of itself, a culturally determined system with iti
own built-in symbols and cues for appropriate expression of pain and its treat-
ment (Helman, 1990, p. 13, 195). It has its own underlying assumptions e.g.
it is physician centered, specialist centered, credentials oriented, memory based
single-case centered and biological process oriented (Pfifferling, 1980, p. 222)
This is a "different" system to communities in which diagnosis and patient
care are family based and community oriented, relying on social and spiritua
causality as a primary orientation.

Scottish Gaelic cultural understanding is only "alternative" when consid-
ered in relation to a particular scientific world-view which has dominatec
Western thought for the past 200 years (Zohar, 1991, pp. 1-7) This world-vie^^
is proving inadequate in many arenas as a "wholistic" cosmology on which tc
base cultural and medical practice. It has led to the development of what we
are now terming Western diseases. It includes such culture-bound disorders as
stress related illnesses, chronic fatigue syndromes and post-traumatic stres!
conditions and the ever growing problem of how to deal with, understand anc
accomodate mental illness within our society (Helman, 1990, p. 236).

In Gaelic speaking cultures, in particular Scottish/Irish Gaelic speaking
cultures, there has existed for thousands of years an understanding of the spiri-
tual world. This understanding or knowledge is not based on the transference
of written knowledge nor is it based on intellectual ways of knowing, measur-
ing or testing the spiritual world. These knowings. are grounded in the con-
tinual valuing and honouring of "bodily" knowledges i.e. what one know;
within the person, what one feels in one's body, the psychic mediumship o
particular individuals within the community and the oral tradition regarding
synchronicities, signs and happenings that illustrate the way in which the
spiritual world supports the physical world.

This sort of "knowing" has been explored in depth by C. G. Jung who call;
it "self-knowledge" when referring to knowledges found in non-linear way;

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nside" the person through access to feelings, dreams, meditative states and
sychic perceptions (Jung, 1960a, 1960b).

In Scottish Gaelic culture the process of trusting what one knows "inside
le self begins before birth and can be best illustrated within the understand-
ig of the concept of destiny. Destiny is honoured in Gaelic traditions. Indi-
idual lives have purpose and meaning that extends beyond that individual
fe and the here and now, beyond the time in which the life is to be lived and
ell beyond the dynamics of personal relationships that surround an indi-
idual life. Individuals often have "self-knowledge" or "internal" understand-
igs of their destiny based in feelings, dreams, inklings and deep corporeal
nderstandings.

Corporeal understandings or "bodily" knowings begin in the womb and
in be layed down in body memories and sensations from conception through
mbryonic stages and fetal development. Jean Leidloff gives an excellent ac-
Dunt of how this happens in her research with South American Indian cul-
ires (Leidloff, 1986).

On a cultural level in "the Gaelic world" destiny is understood within the
Dmmunity by the translating of signs and symbols before or surrounding the
aby's birth and within the expection of the needs of the community with
igards to the historic restoration of certain happenings (Helman, 1990, p.
2).

In the Gaelic tradition a cultural openness to these signs and synchronicities
nd their interpretation enables the spiritual world imbuing the community
) work in a manner to assist the birth and the outliving of destiny.

This openness of the community to believing what one knows in the soul
id heart and bones, and to honouring what one "sees" spiritually sets the
age for the honouring of bodily or "inside" knowledges for an individual
fetime and for the transferring of these knowledges from one generation to
le next.

Participation in this cosmology and its vibrations into cultural practice
"ovides a place for matters of life, death and illness to be discussed. The
jestions surrounding major life decisions, the meaning of life and death, the
irpose of individual lives and community transitions all have a context in
hich they can be explored. A backdrop for mental health is provided within
le cosmology of the culture because spiritual experience has a place in life.

In outlining this connection between mental health and spiritual knowing
am inferring that trusting one's inner knowledge, one's perception of a life
ith or a destiny, one's own feelings and bodily knowings, and the import of
le's spiritual experiences provides a platform for staying "connected" or in
uch with one's Self. This in turn contributes to a sense of psychological
tegrity and wholeness which contibutes to mental well-being. Spiritual sen-

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I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic

sation or knowing is not ridiculed. This emotional expression and bodil
knowledges are listened to, respected and integrated into community life.

Many examples of this honouring of destiny and spiritual knowledge exis
in Scottish and Irish folklore and mythology. On a more personal level, ii
most traditional families there is a knowledge of lands lost, heritages trans
ferred to undeserving recipients, wrongs to be righted, unresolved issues o
grievances at death, all of which are accompanied by expectations of fulfill
ment within the lives of future generations. It is in the outliving of this des
tiny or fulfillment that people anticipate, synchronize with and use to confirn
the interaction of entities in the spiritual world. In accompaniment to this
the understanding of illnesses or tradgedies is coloured and contextualized ii
the understanding of underlying spiritual causes.

Once these other ways of knowing become interwoven into a culture th
world one sees is comprehensive. It always includes the spiritual realm and S(
daily events are always understood and interpreted through such dimensions
Stories, decisions, life events, turns and twists in fate, complexities of emotioi
and history all become understood and related to others within the context o
how the spiritual world sees things and interacts with the physical descen
dants (Bennett, 1992).

The connection between the individual psyche, individual intuition, de
sire and the unfolding of individual purpose and destiny is securely fastened t(
the living ancestors in the spiritual world, to the history of the communit
and the land, to the pre-desired outcome of resolution of events within th
spiritual realms and to the timeless and spaceless dimensions of spirit and sou

"Internal" knowledge, then, is an understanding within oneself that on
has a place within the realm of happenings, that one has a purpose and des
tiny and that one knows what to do in the unfolding of that purpose. Along
side this, one may internally know many other things e.g., past histories
connections to other people, who is around spiritually at a given time, what
certain sign might mean or the significance of a natural event in relation ti
history and the spiritual realm. In this way internal knowledge is deeply con
nected to physicality, to the earth, to the particular history of the land it
wars, political struggles, and community changes. .

It is natural to interpret signs and synchronistic events in the physical worl
because one understands the interwoven nature of spirit and matter. In Gaeli
cultures the perception of oneness of all things, which includes the spirituc
world and ancestors, enables this sort of reading.

When internal knowledges are valued within a community certain peopl
who can extend their internal knowledges to include other members of th
community and the spiritual world become valued as psychics or mediums c
healers. In communities where psychics are valued, non-rational ways of know

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Jessica Syme

ig become part of life. No juncture, decision, crisis, birth, death or illness is
assed by without appropriate consultation. A wholistic sense of knowing be-
omes a way of life. One would never depend solely on here and now
nowledges to make decisions or understand events that cross time and space
r involve destiny.

Regarding signs and synchronicity and subtletlies it becomes the art of the
ommunity to interpret in this manner. It is an alternative way of knowing to
cademic knowledges and to Western medicinal diagnosis and treatment plans.
i.s a healing artform it aims at understanding spiritual causes of disease and
Iness. As a cultural artform it binds people together. For death three knocks,
or birth dreams of beauty that convey baby names. For weddings two spoons
n the saucer. For some apparitions with foretellings. For others the birds fly-
ig on an empty sky, a heavy rain in an off-season, a visit from a stranger,
very thing has meaning and purpose and so we know.

So, within the limits o{ this mode of expression and its context of reading
will now attempt to take you into the "Knowing" so as to convey an experi-
ice of Scottish Gaelic cosmology.

To Enter The Knowing

Most cultures have a way to move their community members from their
rofane or day-to-day states o{ being to more sacred spaces.

Several years ago, whilst on holidays in Bali I had the privilege of attend-
ig a ritual for a woman who was 7 months pregnant. This was a blessing ritual
) sacrilize the final period of the pregnancy, to prepare the consciousness of
le mother and father for the birth of a new child. It involved a washing
tual, a ritual between father and mother, a ceremony of prayers and blessings
/ the local priest and a special meal. All these stages of the ritual prepared
le parents in consciousness for the sacred process of birth that was about to
ivelope them. At least, that is how 1 interpreted the ritual I had been invited
) as a friend of the prospective uncle.

In Scottish Gaelic culture this process of entering into "the knowing" or
itering a spiritual consciousness is not as obvious a transition as described in
le particular ritual above. Nor, I think is it a marked delineation in Balinese
ilture where altars and shrines and offerings and blessings are abundant in
'eryday activities and life. Yet, a gentle change in consciousness does occur
^ performing such activities. In Scottish Gaelic culture the entering of sa-
ed space is facilitated by entering a rhythm or a beat. This beat connects one
the earth and whether it be a dancing beat, a beat for cooking porridge or
aking cloth, a rhythm for labour, a song beat for the migrant soul, or a footbeat
r the soldiers that synchronizes with their pipe tones, it is the entering of
lis rhythm that makes daily life sacred.

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I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaehc Epistemic

As I said, it is not something to be explained intellectually. The intellect is
limited to understand such levels of consciousness.

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishbads teach their
selected pupils is the inadequacy of the the intellect. How can
this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to un-
derstand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a
fragment? (Durant 1935, p. 412)

Yet, it is important to understand as a health practitioner how you enter
and exit varying states of consciousness and also have some understanding oi
the many ways other people might make this transition. One interesting view
of psychological practice in the West is that psychotherapy or psychology in
and of itself, is a vehicle whereby people can enter sacred space.

Western culture is based heavily on the intellect and secular way of life.
Most changes in consciousness from secular to sacred are contained within
Sunday church practices or church rituals for christenings, marriages and deaths.
People's need to express their spiritual knowings, their emotional states oi
consciousness or enter sacred states of consciousness is not accomodated in
their day to day life. To enter the office of a health practitioner with all its
accompanying ritualistic paraphenalia, such as white coats, closed doors, con-
fidential files and legal access to consciousness changing drugs can be seen tc
give people permission to cross that threshold into other ways of knowing
(Helman, 1990).

Another interesting view of the Western practice of including in health
care, psychotherapy and psychological treatment, is provided by Anne Wil-
son Schaef who sees psychological practice as an enabler to Western culture
as a co-dependent person is to an alcoholic (1992). The process of keeping
our emotional expressions and spiritual knowings behind the closed doors oi
psychotherapists and psychologists can be seen to enable the society to con-
tinue pretending that these states of consciousness are "abnormal" or outside
the practices "normal" daily life.

So, having said this, 1 now invite you now to leave your shoes at the dooi
of this chapter, to take off the cloak of the analytical and the skeptical anc
place it on the hook and walk in here for the duration o{ these pages, sit dowr
with a "different" epistemic and see if it touches your heart.

Into the Knowing

And so we know the birds sing and I know what music is, it rains and
know wetness. 1 am held and I know comfort. Wind blows my papers off m^
desk and across the floor and I know movement. I am rocked in my mother':
arms as a baby and 1 know rhythm. I am left and I know abandonment. 1 en

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Jessica Syme

id I know release. I see flowers and I know beauty. I see mountains and I
now soul. I see water and I know peace.

I see water and am told of death and I know loss. I see mountains and am
)ld of journeys and I know hardship. I see fire and I know passion. I see fire
id am told of destruction and I know pain. I link pain with passion. Cultural
lowing builds within me.

And so I begin to know stories. I hear stories and I know heroes and hero-
ics. I know the heroic in myself. I hear tales and I know the inventor in me,
le pretender, the lier, the exaggerator, the conspirator. I hear legends and I
low timelessness. I know of destiny. I hear epics and I am destined to know
bts and outcomes. I know the plotter in myself. I know the traveller in me
id the expansiveness and interwovenness of life and lives. History begins
id my sense of knowing is intimately woven into a tapestry of other people's
ves.

And so we know. And so we know. And so we know. Three times for every-
ling we know and then we know. Once for the self, once for the culture,
ice for the world. Once for the wind, once for the forests and once for the
[tie people. Once for myself, once for my mother and once for her mother.
>nce for myself, once for my daughter and once for her daughter. And so we
low. Once for the land, once for the ocean, once for the sky. Once for the
ist, once for the present, once for the future. And so in the repetition we
now time.

And so in the repetition we know time. We know time because we know
mings and seasons and cycles. We know life and death, birthing and celebra-
on, winter and passings. We know when to collect seaweed, when to fish,
hen to rest, when to prepare for winter. Over many hundreds of generations
f these practices of daily life we have come to read signs and understand
^nchronicities. Little things like births and deaths and the understanding of
2stiny become easy to predict as they are part of the rhythm of a much larger
hole.

We know history as a function and an embodiment of soul, as a quality of
ml. Soul is a shared medium with others past and present across time and
ith the land, ocean and spiritual realm. Soul is located in the marrow of the
Dnes, which become buried back in the earth and are recycled across time
irrying history with them. Rebirth is physical drawing spirit with it into time
id so physicality becomes spiritual or connected into the spiritual world and
) we honour and value what we know in our bones above any other epistemic.

Ah, Ha! Here is the answer I was looking for, the little window of light, the
loment of knowing, the click, the "ah, ha." I know. I've been looking for the
ay out of that problem for days. Thinking was getting me nowhere, so I
lought I'd go fishing, dance up a solution, make a cake, put my mind on

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something else, and there it was as if the answer was waiting for me all the
time. Popped out of thin air, as if by magic, I had a clear knowing, a split
second of instinct.. I knew in my bones what to do. ..How do you know?

1 know in my bones. I know in my guts. 1 know in my heart. 1 know in my
essence. I'm sure in my soul about it. 1 know it down to the "souls" of my feet.
My body knows. How did your body learn to know? How did my body learn to
know?

My mother held me. I heard the music. And so we know. "How can 1 tell
you what I know? I want so much for you to know what I know" my mother
said to me. "I'm listening." I said, and so she began to dig in her garden. "She's
not telling me what she knows." 1 thought, but she kept digging, with me tied
tightly around her waist in a bundle, on her back, dangling off her side, in her
arms, at her breast, in her lap, she keeps digging to some ancient rhythm. "I
know" my heart said. She's speaking to me... voice of baking bread, voice of
heartbeat, voice of early morning gardener, voice of rocking arms, tapping
feet, voice of stirring pots of food to the left, to the right, turn the teapot three
times, once for your self, once for the culture, once for the world. My body
finally knows my mother's voice. No words. Not one word between us.

And so we know. In my mother's arms I come to know the heather song,
even if as a migrant I have never seen the heather, in this holding and rocking
and singing to babies, in this continuum of physical nearness, touch, connect-
edness, and movement... history, cultural understanding, and spiritual knowl-
edge is transported across the generations. Not a little distance did we come
from Samarkand to the Celtic fringe but thousands of miles and years across
European pre-history I have travelled in my mother's arms.

When I was little my grandmother said to me in answer to one of my clever
replies: "You've been here before." "I know." I replied. When I told my teacher
that I knew this, she said "How do you know?" "I know." I said "But how?"
she'd repeat in an emphatic tone to me. "I don't know." I'd replied, but I did
know how I knew, I just didn't know how to tell her how 1 knew what 1 knew.

When I was a big girl, my professor said to me "What do you know?" "Lots."
I said.. "Well, tell it to me ?" she said. "I can't." I replied. "Why not?" she asked
"Because I don't know how to tell you what I know I know." I replied.. "Then,"
she said, "I'll assume you don't know." "Ah, but 1 do know." I cried. "Then
write it in words" she said. "Assume I don't know." I answered. "My mother
didn't speak English." "Then write it in Gaelic." she replied, "I can't." I re-
plied, "1 don't speak Gaelic." "Then how do you know what your mother knew?"
she asked.

"I heard the birds sing and she pointed them out to me, hidden in a small
bush. 1 knew she knew music. I saw the wind blow the papers off her desk and
she smiled as she gathered them up. 1 knew she knew movement. I felt her

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Jessica Syme

irms hold me tight in the night. I saw her cry. I knew she knew pain. I saw her
louch my father's arm. I knew she knew love. I watched her nurse the dying,
Tiidwife babies, cradle other's children, sing out her sorrows and joy, respond
;o her gut feelings and premonitions. "How can you ask me how I know what
Tiy mother knew? Assume I know nothing."

And so we know..

"Once my aunt was transported." I said to the same professor who replied:
'You mean, she thought she was transported?" "Oh no." 1 replied, "She knows
she was transported."

It happened on a day like this, in the evening around 5 o'clock when the
veil between the world's is thin, she was walking home from work across the
^len and walking down the old glen road. Seconds later she was 5 kilometers
iway in a field. She was a little frightened but thought to herself that she must
lave been transported. She scrambled out of the field having to walk a long
ivay to find a gate. She walked home and sure enough the following week
jomeone in the village died and his body was carried along that road. She had
3een transported out of the way of a funeral procession as tradition knows
aften happens to someone walking on a road which will carry the dead
(Carmichael, 1954, p. 339).

And so we know but we learn as a culture not to tell what we know. For
this way of knowing millions of people were killed in Scotland. Homes were
Dumt and people were put off the land and forced to immigrate. It is a cultural
Durging that Western history is still hiding (Grigor, 1979).

Of course, roads know who will be carried on them, anyone with breath
vould expect a road to know its dead. Dust to dust. No... living earth to living
iarth. The basis of matter is knowledge, even the stones know this. And how
loes matter know. Matter is imbued with spirit. How could it be that 1 would
enow, 1, matter with blood and flesh of 40 years old, when a mountain of
5,000 years would not know who walked on it, who climbed it, who died on its
lopes, who lived in its valleys, depended on its waters, bathed in its pools,
3irthed in its rivers. How would the earth not know and similarly a small road
hrough the glen of 5,000 years not know its village and its dead, would not
lave a spiritual world surrounding it, engaging it, imbuing it. How could it
lot move the body of one frail woman 5 kilometers.

Why do I try to tell you what I know? Why would you want to know what
know, how I know ?

We are not dealing with one concept here, but two. Firstly, the innate
ibility of matter to contain and exhibit consciousness and secondly, the re-
ated ability of matter to hold memory, the layered consciousness of time,
listory and the stories of a people. And matter we are, within matter we breathe.

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I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic

we love, we are born and die, we are well or sick, we marry and pass on
tradition. All within matter are we.

Everything in Scottish Gaelic culture is connected to everything else. We
are never alone and always, always part of a breathing universe. The kettle
whistles its own song. The mountain calls you for a walk in the evening. The
fireside longs for your stories. The step you sit on knows when you are jour-
neying and yearns for your return. A letter knows it sender and its receiver
and could be expected to curl up the corners of its pages with grief at the news
it carries, or fold itself in two with laughter at the tale it is to tell (Wesson
1989).

Every little thing matters. Nothing is silent unless it has to be. Water sings
or bleeds its way down the hillsides, gurgles in its pools remembering the play-
ing of children's feet. Lie flat with your ears across the stones of the sections of
the Roman wall scattered over the Scottish hillsides and you will hear history's
footfalls. You will see in your mind's eye who has walked in this country before
you. You will understand time. A quality of soul is to remember across time.

Tap, tap, tap. 1 put the flat palm of my right hand across your soul and^tap
a beat. Where is your soul? 1 put the flat palm of my hand between your throat
and your heart. Ahh, my soul, tap, tap, tap. A beat.. and again tap, tap, tap. In
Balinese dance if you want to learn the dance I, the teacher must physically
move your body. I turn your hand up, your foot out, your head to the left until
you know. In the Gaelic, tap, tap, tap; stir, stir, stir; beat, beat beat; cakes,
babies, fishing nets, pounding cloth, think rhythm; think, feel, touch rhythm;
repeat.. same movement, heartbeat, generation after generation, men, women
babies, children, dance, spirits, clothmaking, crops, songs, stories, beat, beat,
beat, until you know.

And so we know. We align. To enter the rhythm one enters a holographic
knowing. To participate in the physicality of Scottish Gaelic culture is to par-
ticipate in its knowledges. In other words, to be alive and "with body", i.e. a
physical human being is a sacred act. In this manner every physical activity
from digging graves to making babies is sacred. No candles needed, 1 alone
with my breath and my sensuality of being imbue the living breathing uni-
verse.

A small tune wants to play itself through the holes of a horizontally held
fife. Yes, this is the way a small tune must travel, or across a keyborad, or
through strings like a river of tiny winds. Can I separate the tune, from the
fife, or the fife from the player, or the player from the tune. Not in the Gaelic.
I can say "I know all is one" but saying it does not enable you to know it. Only
a night, one night, one particular night when you, the tune, the fife, the player
and the magic are one will you know what 1 mean when 1 say "we are all one."

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Jessica Syme

Some knowledge is only experiential. Some knowledge will never be able
3 be translated into English. Some knowledge will never leave the oneness of
he experiential world. Like the song of the morning bird to the strings of my
leart, my life is woven on a tapestry of the lives of those who have gone before
le, and will come after me.

And so I come to know who 1 am and so destiny comes to meet me.

One day a man met himself leaving his home. ...He asked of himself, "Where
lave you been?"

"I've been out looking for you." His journeying self replied. "I've been here!"
le answered matter of factly.

"I know." he said to himself. "That's why I came back."

Destiny is like this. It is the fulfilling of a search for oneself within the
ontext of time, community and history. The historical self of ancestory and
ulture meets the searching self of the moment and in that meeting, in that
loment, life finds its meaning, its purpose and its potential to fulfill its des-
iny.

When 1 picture my heart I see inside the cavity of my chest a fresh water
ool. It has a curved obsidian wall that forms the backdrop to a waterfall flow-
ig down over the black stone into the pool. To know destiny one looks inside
neself. Yet there is a connection between the physicality of knowledge sur-
ounding destiny, i.e., the knowing of one's purpose in the marrow of one's
ones or in the reflection of the heartpool, and consciousness, being the aware-
less of that knowledge of one's own destiny in this life. The connection is
lemory. Yet we cannot speak of this aspect of memory as if it is singular and
inear like remembering what 1 bought at the shop yesterday. Here, in this
ense, where memory is related to historical time, to landscape memory, to
ncestoral memory or karmic considerations we are talking of holographic
[lemory, distributed memory (Grof, 1985).

In traditions that have carried history orally through methods such as sto-
ies and dance, song and spoken word such as the Celts did for thousands of
ears historical and ancestoral memory becomes a highly developed aspect of
ulture. We remember who did what, when and why. We remember what lies
mdone still and what needs done.

In this remembering comes consciousness. Perhaps we remember first
hrough a physical sensation and then we remember as the years go on through
Ireams, inklings, visions, insights and then finally something in the world
lecomes reflected in the heart pool and knowing becomes conscious. You
remember" destiny.

One might think to remember destiny one would have to at some point
ave known destiny before and have forgotten it but this is a Western epistemic.
c implies that memory belongs to an individual and that destiny also belongs

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I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic

to an individual. Only part of this is true in a Gaelic understanding. Because 1
am destined to be a writer or a painter or a doctor does not mean this activity
is my destiny. Destiny is what happens when I as a writer or a painter or a
doctor meet the reason I have become such a person. So that in a moment I
might fulfill that destiny, I might remember not myself but another or a time
or a place, or a death or a birth and I might act within destiny. A weaving
takes place around me that becomes my destiny.

And so we know. We know that life is not linear, that time is not func-
tional, that space is not contained in any occasional dimension but that all
these elements interweave to create a moving medium of events, happenings,
occurrences, synchronicities, alignments, and choices that provide destiny with
opportunity to occur and fulfill itself.

And so we know also that in honouring an alternative epistemic to the
rational and linear we ourselves become more. We become people of racial
memory, of cultural history, of spiritual heritage, of ancestory, of connected-
ness with the land, with landscape memory and with the outliving of destinies
and the formulating of future destinies. We become people of choice because
as we know through our bodies and our cultural memories that history is liv-
ing, so too we come to know that it was created by people who made choices.
Choice and action become integral factors of destiny, history and culture.

And so we know interaction, interweaving, interlacing, waters moving one
way, then the other, flowing into each other to form a heartpool that becomes
more than one individual life. We come to know that we are part of, that we
belong. This is the ground upon which the Gaelic epistemic is understood.
Onto the earth, beat, beat, beat, under our feet a heartbeat to which we all
belong. And so we know collectively. And so we know.

And so we know collectively.

I'm wondering if you are still with me, still curled up by the fire in someone's
lap or if you are saying "Fine! So this is how they know but what is it they
know? 1 still hear nothing." Perhaps the lullaby from the embers has put you
to sleep, as is only rightly so. Well, now I will tell you what 1 know. I know the
Heather Song.

If you have ever seen heather you would remember, or if you haven't you
might imagine that millions of tiny purple plants act as one on the hillsides of
Scotland. They move with the small breezes across the hillside in waves, this
way, then that way, and give the appearance of something moving in the moun-
tains, something breathing, flowing like little rivers across the landscape. You
could go a step further and see the movement as a song which indeed it is, for
those who are listening.

In the Gaelic we have a saying which translated reads "Potatoes without
salt is like kissing a man without a beard." I would venture to translate the

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Jessica Syme

deeper meaning as "Life without spirit is like loving only half the man," or
further still and into the paradox... knowledge of spiritual phenomena without
understanding it's physical context is like making love with a man who does
not know himself, because he has lost his connection to the earth and sadly,
but further still. . .1 would ask if a people without their land can possibly be the
same people?

When people die in the Hebridean Islands there is a lovely tradition of
people sitting up with the dead for three days. People tell stories about the
person's life, sing songs, they sew and embroider a cover for the body, they see
the dead over, help them make the crossing, make the parting easier.

When I asked my aunt why this tradition was no longer being observed in
recent years she explained it had originated because o{ the rats. Now that
there are aeroplanes that fly in and out of the Islands and the undertaker can
fly in there is no need to sit with the body for three days waiting for the boat-
man.

To remove spiritual knowledges out of the context of culture and physical-
ity not only loses the roots of understanding these knowledges but it is a dan-
gerous Western practice. Psychic understandings, ancestoral and karmic memo-
ries, the premonition or sending, the comprehension of purpose and destiny
are part of a whole. That "whole", meaning a cultural context, a deep ecologi-
cal existence, a geographical experience, a historical background provides a
cushion for spiritual knowledges. Here they belong in the safety of time, not
to be isolated out as "phenomena" or played with as "the occult".

To know collectively means to participate in a cultural knowledge and to
share physicality with many as the heather does, as fish do when they live in a
shoal as coral does and clouds do. Many people have tried to explain this
phenomena from Jung to Wilber, to explain why women's menstruations syn-
chronize when they live together, what the meaning of collective dreaming is,
why one group of people can act together to commit atrocities on another
group, or collectively genocide. I cannot attempt to explain this. My under-
standing is in the heather song. When I listen with ears tuned to the whole
universe I hear voices, I hear music. I hear a song. In Scotland it sings in and
out its dead and living. It sings in and out the changes and history of the land.
It is not a single voice but a chorus of whispers, shouts, harmonies, screams,
bellows, fifes, pipes and children's voices. It tells us what we know.

And so we know. We know how to heal as individuals and as a culture. We
enter the beat. We enter ourselves and we find the healer, the potion, the
knowledge. We all know "inside" ourselves how to heal and so we carry the
knowledge across the threshold to consciousness, and then we know.

217

I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic

Closing the "Knowing" door.

In the West we close the "knowing" door by charging a fee, perhaps at the
office desk. We, in fact, say to the patient "Take 5 minutes and pull yourself
together." Many patients have driven their cars home from therapy centers in
very difficult states because o( a lack of understanding of this need for more
ritual than paying a fee and making the next appointment to close the know-
ing door. Even where understanding does exist the structural framework of
Western psychotherapy often prevents its practitioners from adequately deal-
ing with this aspect of care, an expression of the healer and the patient placed
outside the community and often outside "the healing wisdom" itself.

In Scottish Gaelic culture we do not close the "knowing" door slam shut. It
is always partially open so we can walk in and out of sacred consciousness
when we need to. We can cry when we tell sad stories, we can laugh when we
need to, we can pray in our cooking hours, meditate during our evening walks,
sing in our workplace, dance in the middle of our conversations in the living
room. We can include the spiritual knowings of our dreams in our conversa-
tions with our neighbours at the fence. We can act on our intuition and pre-
monitions with conviction. We can include the needs of our ancestors in our
decisions about property sales. We can respect our spiritual understandings in
our day to day life.

Close the door gently on your spiritual consciousness, but like a lotus flower
in the heart, close it in a way where it can open and close, pulse to the heart-
beat of the universe.

Finale

The first act of patient care in Western medical tradition is to take a patient's
history. "Did your mother have cancer? Did anyone in your family have tuber-
culosis? What surgery have you personally undergone?"

What Western medicine and most psychological practices do not ask is:
"What is the nature of your family's spiritual history? Who died in your family
with unresolved resentments? Whose spiritual burdens do you carry ? Was your
mother grieving another child's death when she bore you? Do you feel you
have a destiny to fulfill? Have you been here before What karmic memories
could you be carrying? Is it your physical legs that are sore or your spiritual
legs? Are you tired from your culture's journeying or from your own?"

In Scottish Gaelic culture we know a wholistic universe, a universe with
physical and spiritual dimensions. We honour our physical and spiritual his-
tory, our ancestoral and racial memory and our personal life as one. We honour
the inkling and premonition, the foretelling and sending not because they are
amazing phenomena but because they are a small part of a much greater whole.

218

Jessica Syme

They are a "taken for granted" aspect of the physical reality of life, culture and
history.

In medical anthropology we seek to draw out of a culture its rationales and
underpinning assumptions about life and death, health and illness and human
relatedness in order to feed back to the health practitioners of that culture an
understanding, not necessarily intellectual, of their own and their patients
medical cosmology. We also seek to feed back to the participants or patients of
health care systems an understanding of their own and their health practitio-
ners underlying assumptions and adopted role in the community. By under-
standing that we all function within cultures and communities that define for
us what health and illness and happiness are we become empowered to accept
or reject these definitions.

As psychologists and healers we can question the limits of our power if we
understand that our world-view is one of many. As patients we can under-
stand our own power in the healing process if we comprehend the limits of our
intellect and that o{ our health practitioners, when compared to the power of
our spiritual knowing and intuition. When we combine our intellectual knowl-
edge with our intuitions, our bodily knowings, our emotional expressions and
our spiritual knowings we become medicine. We enter the realm of healing,
and so we know how to heal.

Seventh daughter of the seventh daughter. Seventh son of the seventh
son. From the warm grasseslands of old Bohemia to the footsoldiers of Gaul
and on and on to lona, we breathe, we heal as one.

References

Bennett, M. (1992). Scottish customs from the cradle to the grave. London: Polygon.

Carmichael, A. (1972). Carmina Gardelica. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Chadwick, N. (1971). The Celts. London: Penguin Books.

Comrie, J. D. (1932). History of Scottish medicine. Vol. 1&2. London: The
Wellcome Historical Medical Museum.

Frazer Grigor, I. (1979). Mightier than a lord. The Isle of Lewis, Scotland: Acair
Limited.

Gimbutus, M. (1989). The Language of the goddess. New York: Harper Collins.

Grof, S. (1993). The holotropic mind. San Francisco: Harper.

Hall, E. T (1983). The dance of fife. New York: Anchor Press.

Hamilton, D. (1981). The healers. Edinburgh: Canongate Press.

Janov, A. (1989). Imprints. New York: Coward-McCann.

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I Know the Heather Song. Exploring a Gaelic Epistemic

Jung, C. G. (1960a). On the nature of the psyche. Collected works, Vol. 8. BoUingen
Series XX. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1960b). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. Collected
Works, vol. 8. BoUingen Series XX. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Leidloff, J. (1986). The continuum concept. UK: Penguin.

McKay, (1904). Ancient gaelic medical manuscripts. California Medical Journal, 6,
34-45.

Moore, Thomas (1992). Care of the soul. London: Piatkus.

Romaine, S. and Dorian, N. (1981). Scotland as a linguistic Area. Scottish Literary
Journal, Supplement 14, 1-13.

Schaef, A. (1992). Beyond therapy, beyond science. San Francisco: Harper.
Stewart, R. J. (1990). Walker between worlds. London: Element Books.
Wesson, R. (1989). Cosmos and metacosmos . Illinois: Open Court.
Zohar, D. (1990). The quantum self. London: Flamingo Press.

220

Contributors

Tobin Hart is an assistant professor and member of the graduate faculty in
the University of West Georgia's Humanistic/ Transpersonal psychology pro-
gram. His has a master's degree in counseling and development from St.
Lawrence University and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from The Univer-
sity of Massachusetts. His graduate teaching includes courses in transpersonal
psychology, psychotherapy and interdisciplinary combinations such as Music
and Consciousness. A current research project involves examining what en-
livens and deadens spirit in secular education. His background includes work
as a university administrator, psychotherapist and teacher.

Address correspondence to: Tobin Hart, Ph.D., Department of Psychol-
ogy, University of West Georgia, CarroUton, GA 30118 email:
thart@peachnet.campus.mci.net

Peter L. Nelson began his formal study of consciousness after graduating
from both San Francisco State University with a degree in psychology in 1968
and the Haight-Ashbury in 1969. This interest led to participation in re-
search in neuroscience in America, England and Denmark. Finally realizing
that the study of the brain may offer little to our understanding of conscious-
ness, he became a psycho-phenomenologist and went on to study people's
religious and altered state experiences in Australia where he gained his Ph.D.
at the University of Queensland. He has worked as a research consultant, a
psychology professor, an Australian Research Council Research Fellow and a
Senior Research Officer at the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission.
Currently, he is exploring the future of technology at the recently formed
social science think tank at Texas Instruments Corporation in Dallas, Texas.

Address correspondence to: Peter L. Nelson, Ph.D., P.O. Box 836794,
Richardson, TX 75083-6794 email: 100033.3310@compuserve.com

Kaisa Puhakka is an associate professor of psychology at the University of
West Georgia where she teaches and practices psychotherapy, Eastern thought,
and meditation. She currently studies Rinzai Zen with Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
She holds M. A. degrees in philosophy and psychology, a Ph.D. in experimen-
tal psychology from University of Toledo, and a postdoctoral diploma in clini-
cal psychology from Adelphi University. She has written in comparative phi-
losophy, epistemology, transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy.

221

Address correspondence to: Kaisa Puhakka, Ph.D., Department of Psychol-
ogy, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA 30118 email:
kpuhakka@westga.edu

Kenneth E. Fletcher is a Personality and Social Psychologist who serves as
an assistant professor of psychiatry and Director of the Behavioral Sciences
Research Core at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worces-
ter, Massachusetts. His research interests are in childhood Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder and medical outcomes research. His Ph.D. is from the University of
Massachusetts. He has practiced the I Ching, Tarot, and astrology for 25 years.

Address correspondence to: Kenneth E. Fletcher, Ph.D. Department of
Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester, MA 01655
email: Kenneth.Fletcher@banyan.ummed.edu

Joyce Gibb holds degrees in psychology from Pomona College, in educa-
tion from Stanford University, and in counseling psychology from Pacifica
Graduate Institute. She has been a technical editor in the aircraft industry, a
real estate broker, a bank director, a massage therapist, and proprietor of a
medicinal herb store. She lives with her dog, Sophia, in a small college town
in Central Washington where she practices as a Registered Counselor. She is
an interactive grandmother, a published poet, a rosarian, and bibliophile. She
admits a passionate addiction to good mystery stories and anything to do with
Medieval Britain.

Address correspondence to: Joyce Gibb, 208 North Sprague St., EUensburg,
WA 98926 email:jgcrone@ellensburg.com

Fred Hanna received his Ph.D. in Counseling in 1992 from the University
of Toledo. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Coun-
seling and Human Services at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
He has published many articles in professional journals on topics ranging from
phenomenology and meditation to the understanding of psychotherapeutic
change. He has studied and practiced various forms of meditation for nearly
30 years and considers it the dominant factor in his life.

Address correspondence to: Fred Hanna, Ph.D., 105 Whitehead Hall, Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 email: fhanna@jhu.edu

Greg Jemsk is a transpersonal psychotherapist living with his wife and two
sons in Christchurch, New Zealand. His interest in consciousness studies be-
gan with his involvement in a Hindu-based spiritual cult twenty years ago.
After departing the cult and engaging in a process of "self-deprogramming",

222

tie undertook a fifteen month sojourn through Asia to study Buddhism, Tao-
ism, and other Eastern approaches to self-knowledge. Upon his return, he
:ompleted a Masters Degree in Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy
University and has since worked as a university lecturer, educational consult-
ant, child care administrator/teacher, corporate training manager, leadership
:onsultant for the American Leadership Forum, and in private practice as a
psychotherapist. His primary passion throughout this period has remained
[he exploration and articulation of pathways to self-knowledge which do not
engage the misuse/abuse of personal and organizational power.

Address correspondence to: Greg Jemsk 268 Riverlaw Terrace, St. Mar-
tins, Christchurch 8002, New Zealand email: gjemsek@chch.planet.co.nz

Gary F. Kelly has been a psychotherapist for over 25 years, and for about
^alf that time has been interested in the integration of spiritual practices with
:ontemporary therapeutic approaches. He is Associate Dean of Students and
Headmaster of the Clarkson School at Clarkson University, in Potsdam, N. Y.
He is known for his books in the field of human sexuality, including his widely-
ised college text Sexuality Today, presently in its fifth edition. He is also an
adjunct faculty member in the counseling and human development graduate
program at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches courses in sexuality and
transpersonal counseling. Gary also leads meditation classes and retreats.

Address correspondence to: Gary F. Kelly, Clarkson University, P. O. Box
5650, Potsdam, N.Y. 13699-5650 email: KellyG@agent.clarkson.edu

Donald Rothberg is on the faculty of the Saybrook Institute in San Fran-
:isco and has taught philosophy at Kenyon College and the University of
Kentucky. He is coeditor of Re Vision, a journal of consciousness and transfor-
mation. He has written on socially engaged spirituality (particularly socially
engaged Buddhism), critical social theory, transpersonal psychology, and epis-
temology and mysticism. He has served on the board of the Buddhist Peace
Fellowship and has led groups and workshops on spirituality and everyday life.

Address correspondence to: Donald Rothberg, Ph.D., Saybrook Institute,
450 Pacific, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94133-4640 email:
drothberg@igc.apc.org

Jessica Syme writes and lives in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. She has
recently written a semi-autobiographical book on Scottish Gaelic healing and
spiritual traditions. Her undergraduate studies major in Women's Studies and
Women's Health whilst her post-graduate studies are in Medical Anthropol-
ogy. As an artist and a writer her work focuses on process, journey and expe-

223

rience reflecting years of travel in Africa, America and Europe and a little
gypsy blood.

Address correspondence to: Jessica Syme, The Department of Anthropol-
ogy, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia email:
s862548@student.uq.edu.au

Gary Lichtenstein studied Oriental philosophy and religion at Syracuse Uni-
versity and received BFA and MFA degrees from the San Francisco Art Insti-
tute. Since the opening of his own printmaking studio in 1978, he has been
recognized as one of the most gifted printmakers in the world. His unique
painting style brought forth the new term Color Expressionist. His work re-
flects a pure love of color and spiritual radiance.

Address correspondence to: Gary Lichtenstein, SOMA Fine Art Press, 665
Third Street, Suite 225, San Francisco, CA 94107 Fax 415-495-4196.

224

STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

35-

''**>ii'#>

i(D^f

1637 1998 35 1998 35

Relevancy of the Social Sciences
in the Next Millennium

Volume XXXV April 1 998

Barbara L. Neuby, Editor

Relevancy of the Social Sciences

in the

Next Millennium

Design

Barbara L. Neuby, v%> ^^ ' ^
Editor & Cover <%%% '^ .

\

The State University of West Georgia
STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Volume XXXV
April 1998
ISBN: 1-883199-08-5
\11 rights reserved. Permission to reproduce these works may be obtained by writing the
ditor. Professional citations excluded. A double-blind review process was carried out for
irticles contained herein.

Contents

rage
Acknowledgements/ Contributors iv

Foreword... On the Role of the Social Sciences vii

Paul Simon, former United States Senator, Director of the Public Policy Institute,
Southern Illinois University

Introduction viii

Barbara Neuby, Editor

Articles:

A Post Modem Critique

Relevant Social Science: Making Sense of the Story 1

Mary Elizabeth Kochan, Director, Center for Cult Awareness

Political Science in the 21st Century: Problems and

Challenges for Social Science :. 1 1

Stanley M. Caress, The State University of West Georgia

The Disciplines

Myths of Teaching College Freshmen: Unintended Consequences and

Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium 21

Charles E. Snare. Middle Georgia College

Keeping Political Science Relevant in the Next Millennium 37

James G. Leibert, Dickinson State University

The Designated Mourner: The Future of Public Administration 's Past 45

Louis E. Howe, The State University of West Georgia

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative of the 21st Century 59

Patricia J. Campbell and Paul E. Masters, The State University of West Georgia

Policy Making

Of Nuclear Energy and Acceptable Risk: The Relevance of Social

Science to Societal Technology Choices 71

M.V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long, University of Oklahoma

Healthcare Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective 85

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney, Auburn University

Geographic Information Systems in Social Policy Formation 1 04

Ronald Keith Gaddie, University of Oklahoma

Russell Keith Johnson, Director, Environmental Management

Solutions, Inc. & Tulane University
John K. Wildgen, University of New Orleans

Acknowledgements

The Editor, contribtpors and the PoHtical Science Department would hke to
thank the Deans and The President of the State University of West Georgia for
their support of this volume.

About the Contributors

Patricia J. Campbell is currently Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics
at the State University of West Georgia. Her current work is as the editor of
Democratization and the Protection of Human Rights: Challenges and Con-
tradictions, Greenwood Publishing Group, forthcoming. Other publications
include chapters in Racism and the Underclass in America: Discrimination
Against Minorities and State Policy; Refugee Empowerment Organization
Change: A Systems Perspective; and Applied Field Methods: A Manual of Prac-
tice and articles in Africa Today. For several years she was editor of the Africa
Rights Monitor. Her current research focuses on democratization processes in
Africa and gender and ethnicity in International Relations.

Stanley M. Caress is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the State
University of West Georgia. He is also the southeastern regional director of the
Center for Future Democracy - a non-profit research organization that focuses
on issues of public participation in government. He has written articles on
legislative term limits, legislative behavior and environmental illness policy.
His PhD is from the University of California, Riverside.

Cal Clark is a Professor of Political Science at Auburn University. He re-
:eived his PhD from the University of Illinois and previously taught at New
Mexico State University and the University of Wyoming. His primary teach-
ing and research interests include political economy, comparative public policy
md research methods. Recent publications include Comparing Development
Patterns in Asia, Rienner, 1997 and Beyond the Developmental State,
Vlacmillan, 1997.

Ronald Keith Gaddie is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Uni-
k^ersity of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. He is coauthor of The Economic
'Realities of Political Reform: Elections and the U.S. Senate, David Duke and
"he Politics of Race in the South, The Almanac of Oklahoma Politics 1997-

1998, and Regulating Wetlands Protection: Environmental Federalism and the
States, forthcoming. From 1993 to 1996 he served on the faculty of Tulane
University School of Public Health.

M. V. Rajeev Gowda is Research Fellow in the Science and Public Policy
Program and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Okla-
homa. A native of India, he obtained a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management
from the Whailon School, University of Pennsylvania. His theoretical inter-
ests focus on how people and societies make decisions under and about risk.
His applied research is in environmental policy, risk regulation, behavioral
decision theory, and cross-cultural aspects of risk management, particularly in
Native American contexts. He is co-editor, with Howard Kunreuther, of Inte-
grating Insurance and Risk Management for Hazardous Wastes.

Louis E. Howe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the State Uni-
versity of West Georgia where he teaches political theory and administrative
law. His cuirent research focuses on the eighteenth century evangelist Jonathan
Edwards to explore how technologies of the body and technologies of the spirit
work both to inscribe people in webs of govemmentality and to provide counter-
strategies to those same inscriptions. His work has appeared in New Political
Science.

Russell Keith Johnson is Director of Environmental Management, Innova-
tive Solutions, Inc. in Slidell, Louisiana. He is the author or coauthor of several
papers on environmental risk; and, in 1997, received his ScD. in Environmen-
tal Health Sciences from Tulane University School of Public Health where he
also serves as an adjunct professor.

Mary Elizabeth Kochan researches and writes about cults. Recent publica-
tions include a series of magazine articles and the book. Twisted Scriptures, to
which she was a contributing editor. She has spoken and taught at conferences
and conventions and been featured on local and network radio talk shows. In
1995, her outline of a new model for understanding controlling groups was
presented to the top American experts on this phenomenon. She maintains a
telephone help-line for one-on-one and family consultation for those concerned
by the involvement of a family member in a questionable group or to pastors,
physicians and attorneys.

James G. Leibert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson
State University in Dickinson, North Dakota. His teaching interests include
innovative methods in undergraduate political science and computer applica-
tions for same. His research interests include artificial intelligence and fuzzy
logic as analytical tools for political science. He is involved in local govern-
ment, state campaigns and is currently assisting the Bureau of Land Manage-
ment in North Dakota.

Paul E. Masters is Professor of Political Science at the State University of
West Georgia where he teaches courses on international relations and com-
parative politics. Much of his previous research has dealt with the process of
international political socialization. At present he is at work on a project at the
Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta. He has published in International Social
Science Review, International Studies Notes, Journal of Social Studies Re-
search, Southeastern Latin Americanist and Southeastern Political Review,
among others.

Rene McEldowney is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Auburn
University. She received her PhD from Virginia Tech. Her primary teaching
and research interests include comparative public policy, health administra-
tion and research methods. Her work has appeared in journals such as Admin-
istration and Society and the International Journal of Management and Medi-
cine. She has also served as a consultant for the Center for Disease Control
and the Alabama Department of Public Health.

Barbara L. Neuby is Assistant Professor of Political Science/Public Admin-
istration at the State University of West Georgia where she teaches public fi-
nance; health, technology and hazardous waste policy courses and American
government. Research on health policy and state and local government finan-
cial issues has appeared in Public Administration Quarterly, Southeastern
Political Review and the Encyclopedia of Women in American Politics. Her
academic career follows an 18-year career in engineering.

Paula Owsley Long is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University
of Oklahoma. She has an M.S. in Rural Sociology from the University of Mis-
souri-Columbia. Her reseaich interests include development and implementa-
tion of environmental policies and programs with particular interest in the
incorporation of local knowledge into the process.

Charles E. Snare is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Middle Geor-
gia College. His research interests include leadership, decision making, for-
eign policy, the Middle East and teaching. Comments on his article are wel-
come at: csnare@warrior.mgc.peachnet.edu.

John K. Wildgen is Freeport-McMoRan Professor, College of Urban and Public
Affairs, the University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a na-
tionally recognized expert in the field of voting rights and the author of The
Louisiana Political Atlas and numerous articles, book chapters and technical
reports on issues in urban planning, race relations and electoral systems.

Foreword

Until now, I have never written a foreword to a book without first seeing the
manuscript. That will continue to be my policy, but, at the request of the editor,
[ am making an exception in this case because it is so clear that the social
sciences must play a larger role if humanity is to be humane. I do not have to
look at manuscripts to know that.

Where social science leadership is sensitive and compassionate and practi-
cal, it can make a huge contribution. Where it is only an intellectual exercise
removed from the realities that people confront, then it approaches meaning-

lessness.

As I write these words, I have returned two weeks ago from Croatia where
[ headed an intemafional team of 104 people from 25 nations monitoring the
presidential election in that nation. And, in a week, I will travel to Liberia to
join former President Jimmy Carter in doing the same in a nation also recover-
ing from a civil war. In the former Yugoslavia, which includes Croatia, more
than 1 0,000 people have been killed and many times that number displaced. In
Liberia, more than 200,000 have been killed, and many times that number
displaced.

How can human beings do that to each other? How can we build under-
standing between people-not in the Balkans and Liberia but in the United
states and everywhere on this small globe? How can we get human beings to
become genuinely interested in helping one another?

The answer to that last question to a great degree depends on leadership.
And I trust that this volume will issue a trumpet call to the social science com-
munity to help provide that leadership.

Paul Simon, June, 1997.
Formerly, United States Senate.
Currently, Director, Public Policy Institute
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, Illinois

Vll

Introduction

"What you do when you don 't have to determines what
you will be when you can no longer help it."

Rudyard Kipling

"That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation
often becomes the height of wisdom in the next."

John Stuart Mill

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

Walter Lippmann

As this century closes, society and education face new and myriad chal-
lenges. Concerns over the disintegration of the sense of community, percep-
tions of the decline in morality, the loss of personal responsibility, issues of
globalism and our inability to harness and properly use rapid technological
advancements to our advantage are but a few issues thrust into the forefront of
social discourse. Educators' need for insight is at its peak. Policy makers' need
for information is matched by the need to use that information wisely. As sev-
eral articles show, this poses numerous challenges. How do we define these
challenges so that the social sciences effectively serve society in meeting the
needs of the twenty-first century? The articles contained herein face some of
these dilemmas and offer suggestions.

Relevant Social Science:
Making Sense of the Story

Mary^ Elizabeth Kochan
Director, Center for Cult Awareness

Social science's inadequate predictive competence is illustrated by
the growth of religious fundamentalism, by the collapse of the Commu-
nist system and by societal distress since the sexual revolution. Such glar-
ing failures of the application of positivist scientific methodology to the
hum.an realm call into question claims of relevance and progress. A social
scientist's work becomes relevant and progressive to the extent that the
enterprise of social science itself becomes relevant within the larger cul-
ture by regaining the narrative framework spumed by positivist meth-
odology. Loss of relevance for social science represents failure to sustain
a narrative; regaining relevance must involve picking up, again, the thread
of that narrative.

When Alice Walker found what she thought was the grave of the shame-
fully ignored black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston, she made the marker
identify Hurston as both "Novelist" and "Anthropologist." Walker thereby res-
urrected - from obscurity into relevance - the important work of a social scien-
tist who was also a most gifted teller of stories, rich and bittersweet (Walker
1975). While it is not generally as story-tellers that social scientists aspired to
be known when the 20th century dawned, it may yet be only by story-telling
that social scientists can raise their own work out of the dust of irrelevance as
dusk falls upon this century.

What social scientists wanted early in this century was not only not to tell
stories, but also not to know stories. Not only not to know stories, but also only
to deny stories, belie stories, explain away and demystify stories. But stories
have a way of coming back to life and social scientists have a way of ending up
dead and forgotten.

The question of the relevance of social science in the next century cannot
be apprehended from within the social sciences for relevance implies a con-
nection to something larger, something without? On what basis is it that the
work of social scientists is determined to be relevant? As someone with an

Relevant Social Science: Making Sense of the Story

abiding interest in extreme religious phenomena, I encounter the work of so-
cial scientists in a number of ways: through textbook distillations of their work,
in that fascinating space where what we believe is expressed by what we do or
by what we recommend others do and as the average person does as well
from a sound-bite "expert" comment on the evening news to Publishers Weekly
popularizers to experiential empathy with Norman Rockwell's illustrative
mother, poised to apply the advice of a child-rearing expert to the seat of the
problem. For the social sciences to be "relevant," must mean relevant to people
like me. Likewise, then, for the social sciences to be "irrelevant" must mean
irrelevant to them as well. The very question of relevance implies that some-
thing has happened to make us disaffected.

Dismissing tlie Story

Perhaps nothing has so provoked us nor seems so flawed in retrospect
as the cavalier dismissal by social scientists of the story of faith a dismissal
that has compromised our access to our own past, our own story. Warren H.
Carroll, of Christendom College, even while insisting that "[hlistorians must
apply all genuine critical standards of scholarship" decries "the arbitrary a
priori assumption that . . . historical events never transcend the natural order"
and denies this assumption validity as a critical standard (Can"oll 1996, 79).
According to Leo Strauss, attempts to apply this assumption as a critical stan-
dard make coherent future continuation of our shared narrative highly prob-
lematic: [T]he new political or social science . . . uses sociological or psycho-
logical theories regarding religion which exclude, without considering, the

possibility that religion rests ultimately on God's revealing Himself to man

It is hardly necessary to add that the dogmatic exclusion of religious aware-
ness proper renders questionable all long range predictions concerning the fu-
ture of societies" (Strauss 1962, 322; 326).
The predictions of the death of religion - in particular Christianity and most
especially fundamentalist Christianity - so loudly trumpeted a few decades
ago excite barely a bleat today. Rather, the splintering of fundamentalist sects
into smaller and smaller concentrations of fanaticism has resurrected the im-
portance of religion as many will testify and testify some more in the
lives of individuals and families. We have here, not merely the failure of social
scientists to predict the spectacular growth of religiosity, but the emergence of
phenomena quite in opposition to their best predictions. Religious fundamen-
talism is on the rise, with its manifestations growing ever more bizarre, so that
the century which opened expecting the end of religion is closing in perplexity
over destructive religious cultism.

To apprehend the crises of relevance facing social science, and the credibil-
ity gap between expectations and events, this predictive failure must be placed

Mary Elizabeth Kochan

alongside of two others: the failure of the social science community to predict
the collapse of the Communist system in eastern Europe and also to foresee
the consequences the sexual revolution: "As late as the beginning of the year
the Communist collapse began, 1989, not a single authority on the Soviet Union
. . . ever thought that this system would fall so quickly and with so little loss of
life" (Carroll 1996, 78). Meanwhile an epidemic of distressed and sundered
families belies the promised glorious satisfaction the liberated lifestyle was
supposed to provide. The pill has not secured the virtual elimination of un-
planned pregnancy. Trial cohabitation has not produced better marriages. The
career gratification that would justify children being raised by strangers re-
mains elusive and ephemeral. Dreams of a society graced by wanted children
abounding in self-esteem and good nature have dissolved into nightmares of
mayhem and murder as conscienceless young thugs terrorize our cities. If so-
cial scientists have been so seemingly hit-or-miss when it comes to addressing
the state of our religious life, the stability of one of the world's major eco-
nomic and governmental structures and the predicaments facing our families,
why ought they not be accused of futile irrelevance?

Yet, I imagine that social scientists, like the rest of us, desire to matter,
desire their work to have meaning and make a contribution to the ongoing
enterprise that is the discipline in which they labor. Certainly social scientists
know that their field of work predates their participation in it and will continue
after they are gone. The social sciences hence are among those practices Alasdair
Maclntyre describes as the historical vehicles within which excellence can be
defined and achieved and progress perceived. With institutions serving to pro-
mote and sustain practices, thus preserving the record of their achievements
over time, "[t]o enter into a practice is to accept the authority of [its] standards
and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject
toy own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which . . .
define the practice" (1981, 175-181). Social scientists know that the body of
work they produce will be judged by the passage of time either to endure or to
be repudiated, ignored or forgotten.

What then is it which potentially gives to the work of a social scientist the
quality of endurance? It is the fact that excellence can be pursued within those
practices that comprise the social sciences. Despite the above-mentioned fail-
ires and humiliations these disciplines have a history (short or long though it
nay be); there is a record of past excellencies achieved in them; of progress
nade and thus there is hope that progress can still be made. It is encouraging to
lote, despite the moral chaos within which we live, that practices survive such
is the social sciences survive and that within them individuals still discover
heir connection to the past and still invest in the future of something greater
han themselves. As one social scientist put it, "[t]he life committed to nothing

3

Relevant Social Science: Making Sense of the Story

larger than itself is a meager life indeed. Human beings require a context of
meaning and hope" (Seligman 1991, 284).

This recognition of common human striving is crucial to the question of
relevance as it links the concerns social scientists have about their work to the
concerns those in other practices share. It means there is a shared interest in
what makes possible the connection between the work of an individual and the
past and future of a practice, such that one may find meaning for one's work in
the hope of making a contribution to progress within a practice. This hope
exists because the work of an individual, when meaningful, is embedded within
his practice in such a way that the narrative of the progress toward excellence
within that practice cannot be recounted without reference to the contribution
of that individual. In the same way that the narrative quality of a human hfe
implies that "the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those
communities from which I derive my identity" (Maclntyre 1981, 200-205) so
is individual work within a practice embedded within the narrative of that prac-
tice.

From seeing this connection and the inevitability of the judgment that time
will make regarding the relevance and endurance of every individual's work
comes a gut understanding of what it is observers expect from the social sci-
ences and why their disappointment is so profound. The predictive failures
recounted above mean more than simply that a good many of the best and
brightest failed to correctly interpret certain data. Rather they mean that social
scientists have not satisfied the longing of that deep center place where people
desire to matter. They have not helped make sense of the story.

Castigation of social sciences as irrelevant admittedly appeals as a kind of
poefic justice, the turning back upon social scientists and their enterprise the
opprobrium which they have cast (albeit unknowingly) upon the historical nar-
ratives of our culture and our lives. There can be no cogent discussion of the
future of the social sciences without courageously facing the depth of, and
seeking to understand the reasons for, the disdain uttered in such scathing com-
mentary as this:

"The new political science puts a premium on observations which
can be made with utmost frequency, and therefor by people of the
meanest capacities. Thus it frequently culminates in observations
made by people who are not intelligent about people who are not

intelligent By teaching the equality of all values, by denyingthat

there are things which are intrinsically high and others which are
intrinsically low, as well as denying there is an essential differ-
ence between men and brutes, it unwittingly contributes to the
victory of the gutter. . . . The crisis of liberal democracy has be-

Mary Elizabeth Kochan

come concealed by a ritual which calls itself methodology or logic.
. . [0]ne may say of it that it fiddles while Rome bums. It is ex-
cused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles and it does not
know that Rome bums" (Strauss 1962, 322; 326).

This is no stinging rebuke of undesirable outcomes; this is not even distmst
of interpretive method or dubiousness about the linking of data to conclusion.
This is disgust; this is from-the-core rejection of an entire system of thought,
its conceptions, models, methods, hermeneutics, explanatory value and pre-
dictive competence. It is a judgment which consigns the work of lifetimes to
ashes and denies the legitimacy of that work's place in the narrative of progress
toward excellence within the practice of social science.

Therefore, a discussion of the relevancy of social science in the new cen-
tury must confront the question of what makes work relevant in any discipline
and gives coherence to the narrative of any practice. The work of an individual
social scientist succeeds or fails to be relevant and enduring within his or her
practice in the same way that the enterprise of social science itself succeeds or
fails to be relevant within the larger cultural construct in which practices exist.
Loss of relevance for social science represents failure to sustain a narrative;
regaining relevance must involve picking back up the thread of that narrative.
We are back to stories.

The Narrative Language

What do stories have to do with science? This is the heart of the matter for
it is human beings who tell stories; it is in the narrative quality of a human life
that a coherent individual identity inheres. If for a practice to be "science" it
must be constrained by use of a formalized language (i.e. a language not merely
clumsily suited for the telling of stories, but exclusive of the linguistic ele-
ments necessary for narrative expression) there will be no way to describe
human beings by such language without engendering the sort of profound dis-
affection we have noted above. This disaffection is symptomatic of the discon-
nection from narrative occasioned by the application of positivist methodol-
ogy to social science:

"[T]he formalized languages of the logic of science, in principle
cannot be used for intersubjective communication .... [A]mong
the parts of speech which cannot be expressed are, above all, per-
sonal identifiers such as "I," "you," "we," etc., which immedi-
ately express the situation of intersubjective communication, and
the reflection upon this situation. ... In short, the logically recon-
structed language of science is destined for describing and ex-
plaining a world of pure objects .... [H]uman beings, so long as
they are considered as possible partners of communication, and

5

Relevant Social Science: Making Sense of the Story

SO of interaction, cannot be reduced to objects of description and/
or explanation by means of formalized languages" (Apel 1977,
298).

The frustration of and with social science in the 20th century then lies in the
sense so many of us have that whatever it is social scientists are examining and
describing it is surely not "I" or "we" who are being described.

What "I" and "we" then resent and protest is not the investigation of our
human world. We are just as fascinated with one another and ourselves as
social scientists are. Nor is it the quantification of information about us that
bothers us; surveys and pie charts and bar graphs, like the snapshots in our
photo albums, do help us to know what we used to look like and how we are
changing. But someone who sees a few snapshots of my family and on that
basis claims to know us will fmd his seriousness in question. Worse, were he to
arrogantly insist that he knows us better than we know ourselves, he would be
scorned. If he expects a respectful hearing for his advice and recommenda-
tions, he will be disappointed; if he succeeds in imposing his recommenda-
tions on us, he will be hated. Thus not only is it the case that "canons of posi-
tivist objectivity cannot be trusted to do justice to the objects of sociological
interest" but "society cannot be studied seriously from [such] a position" and
should positivistic sociology succeed in attaining the "only kind of true objec-
tivity that can be attributed to [it]" by means of "its teachings becom[ing so]
incorporated into the ruling ideology" [that] "they become embodiments of its
intentions, it will likewise be hated" (Bittner 1973, 1 15).

The Fundamentalism of Positivism

This sense, that social scientists who work from a materialistic, positivist
framework not only do not know us but that they do not know what is going on,
receives one instance of confirmation by the incoherence of attempts to make
sense of the mushrooming cult phenomena that has provided so many mo-
ments of public drama in the past few decades. The control that cultic group
leaders exercise over their followers engenders dreadful concern on the part of
almost all observers and well it might given its sometimes-fatal consequences.
What we are observing is the power of a fundamentalism - i.e. a contrived and
rigidly limited epistemology - to damage the ability of individuals to act in
their own best interests. Cultists have been effectively disabled from applying,
to the claims and demands of their leader/s, any normal criteria of criticism.
The substitution of a single decision for an entire metaphysical framework
renders common sense impotent. In the case of cult involvement the decision
in question is "the last religious decision .... [This is] the decision made by
someone to turn over to another the authority henceforth to make all of his or
her religious decisions" (Kochan 1997, 26). Once this decision has been made

Mary Elizabeth Kochan

he cult member will not consider any information from outside of the group,
yi other possible ways of knowing chronicles of the leader's past behavior;
;hallenges from the study of history to the leader's interpretation of the past;
;cientific investigation; syllogistic reasoning; anecdotal accounts of former
nembers; appeals from family and friends; philosophical and theological cri-
iques of the group's teachings; psychological and sociological analyses of the
group's behavior have been eliminated from consideration because the larger
netaphysical framework in which they rest is denied validity. Besides elimi-
lating entire categories of judgment, this decision forces a radical reinterpre-
ation of the cult members life narrative by which previous loving relation-
hips are recast as "demonic influences" and prior interests as "worldly."

Scientific positivism applied to the study of human beings in an effort to
nake the social sciences creditable as "science" can also result in the substitu-
ion of a contrived and rigidly limited epistemology for an entire metaphysical
ramework. When information that is available apart from the positivist meth-
)dology is eliminated from consideration (because the larger metaphysical
ramework in which it rests is denied validity) we see a similar radical reinter-
)retation of narrative and common sense evaluative skill rendered impotent.

The inanities precipitated by the Heaven's Gate cult suicides demonstrated
low this scientific fundamentalism hamstrings intelligent inquiry into social
!vents. That their out-of-context ascetic severity and sci-fi doctrinal stew fla-
vored with equally out-of-context scripture quotations would prompt discus-
ion of this cult as a religion differing only in minor details from historic Chris-
ianity, gives obscenely abundant evidence of academic disconnection from
he heart narrative of our civilization. An editorialist in Commonweal, in con-
rast, made this common sense observation:

"There are ways to judge how closely religious belief and prac-
tice correspond to reality - if not to ultimate reality. Universality
and longevity are two measures, although not infallible or suffi-
cient ones. Still, a creed that has given shape and meaning to the
lives of millions over millennia can claim more than a superficial
understanding of human nature and should not be lumped together
with every passing fancy that happens to 'look like' a religion.
[DJespite [the excesses and failings of Christians], there remains
a profound difference between a suicide cult and any authorita-
tive religion" (Commonweal).

Social scientists would be better equipped to make this distinction were
ley loosed from the fetters of fundamentalist scientific positivism. We need
ocial scientists who can refine by statistical detailing, studied reflection,
cademic rigor and insightful analysis our own common sense observa-

Relevant Social Science: Making Sense of the Story

tions. But common sense is not refined by being ejected for the sake of "objec-
tivity." Simplistic equations of the Heaven's Gate members with Christian
martyrs and monastics reveal the poverty of analysis under a methodology
which must exclude the content of belief systems and world-views from con-
sideration and focus its narrow, value-neutral beam on those few elements of
behavior it is equipped to reference. After all, it is common sense knowledge
that the subjects of inquiiy by social scientists are not objects but people and
that attempts to deal with people as other than the complex beings they are will
eliminate from consideration so much information as to render the inquiry
futile and the findings thereof irrelevant. For the social scientist this results
both in truncated observation and in crippled access to his or her own internal
resources i.e. common sense, empathetic understanding, and so forth:

"The same common sense, ordinary, everyday understandings sub-
jects (actors) themselves have and use must also be made and
used by the social scientist observer. . . . One key test of the valid-
ity of investigations lies in the extent to which the findings are -
faithful to and consistent with the experiences of [ordinary actors
in the everyday world]. Are the findings faithful representations,
descriptions,accounts, or interpretations of what [ordinary people]
would themselves recognize to be true" (Psathas 1973, 1 1-12) ?

There are too many emphatic "No's!" to this question. Therein lies the rel-
evancy problem of the social sciences and the key to the way back to relevancy.

Reclaiming the Story

Where do we ordinary people recognize ourselves, if it is not in the repre-
sentations, descriptions, accounts, or interpretations of positivist social scien-
tists? We find ourselves in stories. We find ourselves identifying with stories
because our own lives possess a narrative quality. This means that our lives are
embedded in larger stories of families, embedded in larger stories of commu-
nities, embedded in larger stories of nations and cultures. We are real, and we
need social scientists to help us understand these real stories, to help make
sense of them because, while we are in some sense authors of our own stories,
we are not free to take the story in just any direction we please. The implica-
tions of the nan"ative quality of human life, explored by Maclntyre, disclose
the relevance of a social science willing to help us make sense of stories. We
human beings, as authors of individual and communal stories, are "constrained
by the actions of others and by the social settings presupposed in [our own]
and their actions" (Maclntyre 1981, 200). Within the boundaries of this con-
straint there is freedom, a freedom that makes the story unpredictable: "[A]t
any given point in the naiTative we do not know what will happen next. . . and

Mary Elizabeth Kochan

he empirical generalizations and explorations which social scientists discover
provide a kind of understanding of human life which is perfectly compatible
^'ith [narrative] structure" (Maclntyre 1981, 200).

A relevant role for social scientists begins to come into focus as we con-
sider the potential which this unpredictability yields. We are using the material
)f the past to build a future; we are building together, not singly.

"We live out our lives, both individually and in our shared rela-
tionships with each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a
possible shared future .... There is no present which is not in-
formed by some image of some future and an image which al-
ways presents itself in the form of a telos - or of a variety of ends
or goals - towards which we a either moving or failing to move in
the present. . . . If the narrative of our individual and social lives is
to continue intelligibly ... it is always both the case that there are
constraints on how the story can continue and that within those
constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue.
... I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can
answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find my-
self a part?' . . . Hence there is no way to give us an understanding
of any society, including our own, except through the stock of
stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. . . . When
someone complains . . . that his or her life is meaningless ... [it is
because] the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to
them. To be the subject of a narrative .... [is] to be open to being
asked to give a certain kind of account of what one did or what
happened to one" (Maclntyre 1981, 200-205).

t is because the social sciences, as practices, can be the subject of a narrative
iccount in which the life of an individual scientist (himself account-able) is
mbedded, that this question of relevance is disclosed. It is a question of how
ach social scientist will respond to the freedom offered by our human author-
hip of our life narrative. At its most productive, this response will be made in
ecognition that we are not free to take the story in just any direction we please
ut rather, will be based upon knowing as fully as possible the story of which
^e are part both in the bittersweetness of its constraints and in the richness
f its possibilities.

Relevant Social Science: Making Sense of the Story

References

Apel, Karl-Otto. 1977. "The A Priori of Communication and the Foundation of the
Humanities." Pp. 292-315 in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. F.R.
Dallmayr & T. A. McCarthy.Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Bittner. Egon. 1973. "Objectivity and Realism in Sociology." P. 109-123 in Phenom-
enological Sociology: Issues and Applications, ed. George Psathas. New York:
John Wiley & Sons.

Carroll, Warren H. 1996. "Banning the Supernatural: Why Historians Must Not Rule
Out the Action of God in History." The Catholic Social Science Review 1:73-81.

Commonweal. "Religion, True or False." 25 April 1997: 5.

Kochan-Woodard, Mary. 1997. "Cults: The Threat is Real." Lay Witness June: 26-7.

Maclntyre, Alasdair. 1981. A/rer Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press.

Psathas. George, ed. 1973. Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications.
New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Seligman, Martin P. 1991. Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf.

Strauss, Leo. 1962. "An Epilogue." Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed.
Herbert J. Storing. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson.

Walker, Alice. 1975. "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston." Ms. March: 74-79; 85-89.

10

Political Science in the 21st Century:
Problems and Challenges for Social Science

Stanley M. Caress,
The State University of West Georgia

Political science and the other social sciences have experienced a number
of controversies during the twentieth century that influenced their devel-
opment into legitimate fields of inquiry. This paper traces how two key
issues, methodology and relevancy, have impacted political science in the
past and certainly will do so in the next millenium.

This paper also explores how an exclusive reliance in research on
quantitative methodology is creating an academic environment that em-
phasizes format over critical thought. This situation could damage the
credibility of all social sciences. This point is illustrated by sciaitinizing
the leading published works on legislative term limits to reveal that logi-
cally constructed mathematical simulations and models have produced
inaccurate findings.

The twenty-first century will bring a wide range of challenges to the aca-
demic discipline of political science that may require a significant alteration in
its fundamental direction. Several conflicting forces throughout the past cen-
tury propelled the development of political science into a legitimate social sci-
ence. While these rival forces resulted in political science experiencing nu-
merous transformations, they also produced considerable controversy. These
past developments, however, may be only a preview of changes and problems
that may confront political science and other social sciences in the beginning
of the new millenium.

In the next century governmental, economic, and other public pressures on
higher education have the potential of creating an environment that may com-
pel political scientists and the other social scientists to rethink their basic ap-
proaches to teaching and research (Wilson 1993). Most social sciences, in-
cluding political science, have enjoyed a degree of protective isolation in the
past, which may not be the case in the future. As curricula evolve to meet new
societal needs, there may be new demands on political science to reshape its
basic mission and enter into new directions that can justify its continuation as
an accepted academic field. These new demands will involve better utilization

11

Political Science in the 21st Century: Problems and Challenges for Social Science

of advanced technology as well as innovations in its ability to produce knowl-
edge that is applicable to the larger society.

This article initially provides a cursory examination of the evolution of po-
litical science and the major controversies that it encountered during the Twen-
tieth Century. It then discusses the current state of the discipline and attempts
to scrutinize a significant shortcoming that currently plagues it. It then consid-
ers some of the problems that political science will face as it enters the next
century. Prognostication is always a risky adventure, but certain trends appear
to be so evident in political science that drawing logical inferences about their
future course can be done with a reasonable expectation of accuracy. Conse-
quently, while this article may not be completely prescient, it still can provide
a useful polemic on the potential future of political science and the other social
sciences.

Political Science In This Century

While the study of politics can trace its origins to the beginning of human
civilization, the use of systematically gathered data to analyze political phe-
nomena is relatively new (Baer, Jewell, and Sigleman 1991). Originally the
study of politics emphasized theoretical conceptualizations of how govern-
ments should be and how those who held power should act. This prescriptive
approach was interwoven with ethical considerations and moral concerns. The
classical writings of the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
were traditionally the centerpiece of most courses of study on politics. The
writings of Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and other Age of Reason philosophers
augmented the classics. And with the inclusion of Machiavelli, Nietsche, Hegel
and a few selected others the typical curriculum of a study of politics was
complete. The study of politics thus was typically an integration of history
and philosophy. It was not until the past hundred years that political science,
as a systematic method of studying contemporary politics began to emerge.

The Twentieth Century in many respects saw the birth of modem political
science. As was the case with many of the other social sciences in this centuiy,
scholars of politics began to adapt scientific principles of study found in the
traditional sciences to their considerations of political institutions and dynam-
ics. Simply theorizing about the consequences of political actions was becom-
ing insufficient and the need for verification of theory through the collection of
observable data gradually became evident. Twentieth century scholars began
to transform the study of politics into a legitimate scientific enterprise by bring-
ing their academic field beyond its total reliance on the writings of the early
classic political philosophers and introducing new methods of inquiry.

Modem political scholars such as Charles Merriam and Harold Gosnell
came to the realization in the 1920s and 1930s that political science had to

12

Stanley M. Caress

describe and analyze existing patterns of political activity and not just pre-
scribe desirable modes of behavior by public officials (Hansen 1997). The in-
troduction of scientific methods for gathering empirical data that could be used
to judge the accuracy of political theories was a revolutionary step in the trans-
formation of the study of politics into the modem academic discipline of po-
litical science (Patterson 1987). This new emphasis on scientifically oriented
methodology and empirically gathered data, however, produced one of the first
major controversies within the discipline in the twentieth century.

The Initial Controversery Within The DiscipHne

Numerous early twenfieth century teachers of politics were rooted firmly in
the nineteenth century practices of classical education (Gow 1985). They origi-
nally believed that observing the behavior of contemporary politicians was not
a valid method for understanding the essential nature of government. They
believed that devising universal truths by searching the ruminations of
humanity's great thinkers was the only legitimate way to truly comprehend the
fundamentals of politics. Their opposition to the new empirically based scien-
tific approach during the first three decades of this century was intense and
resulted in a major conflict within the fledgling discipline. The conflict be-
tween the pure theorists and the new methodologically oriented political sci-
entists lingered for several decades. Gradually, the newly defined discipline of
political science, predicated on the utilization of scientifically credible meth-
odology, began to replace the traditional study of politics. The new emerging
social science, however, encompassed both the empirical and theoretical ap-
proaches. The behaviorist school, with its empirically derived descriptive fo-
cus and reliance on scientific methodologj/, became a major field within poHti-
cal science, but it coexisted with the traditional theoretical school with its pre-
scriptive focus and devotion to the classical political thinkers.

When political science began to focus its attention on the construcfion of
descriptive models utilizing scientific methodology, it began to grow into a
modem social science. Gosnell was one of the first pohfical "sciendsts" who
adapted statistical techniques to the study of a wide variety of political phe-
nomena (Hansen 1997). He believed that statistical measurements could, in
essence, prove the validity of generalizations about the behavior of both politi-
cal leaders and the mass of citizens. His work and the studies of others pro-
duced many of the mdimental studies of political behavior that form the basis
for today's political science curriculum. Numerous other political scientists
engaged in empirical research that created the foundation of the modem disci-
pline (Patterson, Ripley and Trisch 1988). The Elmira voting study conducted
during the 1930s, for example, is still considered to be the seminal work on
American voting behavior and is studied in most courses on electoral behavior

13

Political Science in the 21st Century: Problems and Challenges for Social Science

in the 1990s (Baer, Jewell, and Sigelman 1991). The scientifically supported
empirical approach soon became the accepted form of inquiry in political sci-
ence and it appeared to have enormous potential to further the understanding
of politics.

The appeal of scientifically oriented methods for understanding govern-
ment and political behavior was given further credibility by George Gallup's
adaptation of mathematical probability theory to estimating public opinion and
voting outcomes (Cow 1985). The widespread successful use of survey polls
that extrapolate the views of an entire population from a relatively small sample
using basic mathematical principles suggested to many observers, both in and
outside the field, that the scientific study of politics had numerous valuable
applications. By the middle of this century political science was on the verge
of being an important academic discipline deserving of considerable financial
support from the government and other sources.

The New Controversey Over Relevance

In the years after the Second World War, political science had become^ an
integral part of the higher education curriculum in this country. Political sci-
ence research was well funded by private foundation and governmental grants,
and the research findings were given serious consideration by governmental
policy makers (Baer, Jewell, and Sigelman 1991 ). In the 1960s however a new
conflict began to engulf political science. The controversy was over the issue
of relevance. The concept of relevancy became synonymous with political
activism and was frequently the subject of debate within the discipline during
this decade (Baum 1976). A small but vocal segment of the membership of the
profession began ardently to support altering the objective nature of political
science and moving the discipline towards advocacy of solutions to societal
ills. These individuals believed that political science had to move out of its ivy
tower environment and become actively involved in devising solutions for real
world maladies. Perhaps reflecting the social climate of the civil rights and
Viet Nam War era, the supporters of relevancy believed that professional po-
litical scientists should direct their energies towards curing such problems as
poverty, racism, and social injustice.

The debate over relevancy continued for years between the elements of the
profession who supported increased political activism and those who stead-
fastly held that political science should be exclusively an empirically based
objective discipline. The traditional elements within political science believed
that they and their colleagues should be primarily concerned with studying
government in a non-normative fashion, and not be involved in advocating
positions that could be constmed as partisan or ideological. They contented
that a social science must maintain value neutrality or run the risk of having its

14

Stanley M. Caress

scholarly findings discounted as slanted or biased. The traditional political
scientists also believed that there was no actual consensus within the profes-
sion about solutions to social problems, and that those arguing for more rel-
evancy were merely attempting to impose their will on their entire profession
(Roettger and Winebrenner 1986). To the traditionalists, relevancy was only a
thinly vailed attempt to gain support for various pohtical causes that could
undermine the basic integrity of political science as an academic field. Even-
tually, calls for relevancy began to lessen after a vote of the membership of the
American Political Science Association in the mid 1970s reaffirmed the basic
unbiased scientific nature of political science.

Arguments over the proper role of an academic discipline are not confined
to political science and were found in several of the other social sciences dur-
ing this time. While the debate over social relevancy may have been a reflec-
tion of a particular time in American history, when the needs of society ap-
peared to many to take precedence over all other concerns, it still was a serious
point in the evolution of political science. While personal concern about society's
problems certainly persist on an individual level within the profession, agita-
tion to move academic disciplines into active advocacy of political solutions
has dissipated greatly. It was replaced by an even stronger emphasis on quan-
titative methodology made possible by the dramatic improvements in com-
puter technology in the 1980s.

Many of the emerging problems that now confront political science may
continue into the next century. A serious concern centers around the use, and
perhaps misuse, of quantitative methodology. This is in sharp contrast to prob-
lems faced earlier in the study of political phenomenon. This new problem is
complicated by technological innovations that were inconceivable just a few
decades ago.

Political Science In The 1990s

The basic acceptance in political science of a balance between conceptual
theory and behavior study that characterized the last half of this century gradu-
ally mutated into integrated approach with an increasing reliance on quantita-
tive methodology. The development of mathematically based models using
advanced quantitative methods to illustrate political behavioral patterns has
now become the major thrust within political science. The vast majority of
articles appearing in the elite political science journals in the 1980s and 1990s
have increasingly contained highly complex mathematically derived models
that create paradigms of political or institutional behavior. Knowledge of ad-
vanced quantitative techniques is now a virtual prerequisite for publishing in
these journals, and a strong mathematical background is necessary just to be
able to read and understand most of the articles they contain. This new empha-

15

Political Science in the 21st Century: Problems and Challenges for Social Science

sis on quantitative methodology is generating a controversy that may engulf
political science in the next century.

The Current Crisis In Political Science

Emphasis on publication productivity in the career advancement of aca-
demic political scientists has become commonplace. The focus on publica-
tions, however, was previously confined to major research universities and was
not evident in many universities and colleges that concentrated primarily on
teaching and service. The new expanded role that publications play in the ca-
reers of most political scientists has resulted in a significant increase in aca-
demics attempting to publish their works in credible journals. This new pres-
sure for publications, combined with the increased emphasis in political sci-
ence on the utilization of quantitative methodology, has raised a number of
concerns within the discipline including the old issue of relevancy - but in a
new form.

The most serious problem developing from the intense new pressures to
publish and the emphasis on quanfitative methodology is that the format of a
study, and not the substance of its findings, may now be more critical for its
acceptance by a journal. Many political scientists are becoming fearful that
methodology is the only aspect of their research that is considered by editorial
boards and peer reviewers. They are concerned that the credibility of research
is becoming increasingly judged not by the validity of its findings but by the
sophistication of its methodological approach. There is strong evidence that
research using complex, arcane quantitative methods is more likely to find
professional acceptance than less methodologically oriented works. This is the
case even when the quality of the critical thought is equivalent. Because the
skills necessary to evaluate advanced methodological works are esoteric, few
can question the conclusions of advanced quantitative works with any cer-
tainty. This gives methodologically oriented works an ambiance of greater worth.
Does the utilization of advanced quantitative methods, however, truly increase
the value of a study?

Ultimately, the findings of all credible research must be evaluated in terms
of its predictive power on reality and not on the level of quantitative methods
used to draw its conclusions. If the methodology of a study is sound but the
conclusions derived from the methodology are inaccurate, then the entire ap-
proach is predicated on a fraudulent foundation. If this situation is the norm
within political science, then the discipline runs the risk of becoming irrel-
evant. An examination of recently published studies on the impact of term
limits on congressional behavior illustrates that many works are being pub-
lished that use impressive methodology but may be severely deficient in their
ability to accurately predict political behavior.

16

Stanley M. Caress

The Case Of Term Limit Research

A number of studies have been recently published in leading journals on
the impact of legislative term limits that illustrate the potential incongruity
between mathematically sound models and reality. Since 1992 three major
studies have been published that utilize data from past congressional behavior
to construct models that are intended to predict the ramifications of term lim-
its. All three studies bemoaned the paucity of data from legislative bodies that
had actually experienced term limits. An American legislative body, however,
has in fact experienced the full impact of term limits. The California State
Assembly has labored under impending term limits since the voters enacted
Proposition 140 in 1990. The 1996 election brought about the complete rota-
tion of the Assembly's membership under the provisions of the California propo-
sition. Thus, the California State Assembly, the initial legislative body to fully
experience the influence of term limitations, can provide valuable insights.
Consequently, a comparison between the results projected by the models and
the actual ramifications created by term limits are possible. This type of com-
parison can reveal the ability of sophisticated mathematical models to predict
actual political behavior.

Reed and Shansberg (1995) created an elaborate mathematical simulation
to predict the makeup of the House of Representatives under either three or six
term limitations. They predicted that there would be a massive wave of incom-
ing freshmen at the conclusion of every completed tenure cycle. Their simula-
tion also suggested that the opportunities for minority candidates would de-
crease because they tended to remain in office longer and term limits would
prematurely force them out.

Mondak (1994) constructed a mathematical model utilizing survival theory
to conclude that term limits would reduce the quality of legislators. He con-
tended that since elections act as filters that screen out less able officeholders,
fewer election opportunities would have a corresponding negative impact on
the aggregate quality of a legislative body.

Francis and Kenny (1997) utilized a dynamic equilibrium model to predict
the influence of term limits on tenure and institutional turnover. Their model
demonstrated that the incentive for remaining in office for the complete dura-
tion of the maximum time limit is decreased by a finite tenure. Their calcula-
tion indicated that 36% turnover rate would occur because incumbents would
leave office early to obtain other more stable positions.

The Results From CaUfornia

Term limits on the California State Assembly produces several dramatic
consequences that both contradict and confirm the predictions of the models
found in academic journals. No massive wave of incoming freshmen emerged

17

Political Science in the 21st Century: Problems and Challenges for Social Science

in the 1996 election as suggested by Reed and Schansberg (Vanzi 1996). A
gradual rotation occurred in California because of an increase in incumbents
leaving office before they were actually forced out by term limits. Moreover,
the number of Hispanic and female members increased dramatically as a result
of increased vacancies that are the direct product of term limits. This situation
also contradicts Reed and Schansberg's statistically generated conclusion that
term limits would reduce the number of minority incumbents.

Mondak's elaborate model is predicated on the assumption that the number
of elections won increases legislator quality, and that term limits would there-
fore reduce the quality of legislator performance. This conclusion is also not
supported by the data resulting from the California experience. The number
and comprehensibility of the bills coming out of the Assembly have not de-
creased since term limit enactment, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the
newcomers are as capable as the veterans whom they replaced (Vanzi 1996).

During the 1990-1996 period an increase in voluntary early retirement did
occur in the California Assembly confirming the projections of Francis and
Kenny. Their model however was constructed well after the trend of early -re-
tirement was documented in California (Gillam 1994). Their model therefore
could have benefited greatly by their knowledge that early retirements had
already increased in a term-limited legislature.

The Dubious Nature Of Model Prediction

The observable consequences of term limits on the California State Assem-
bly indicated that quantitative oriented models have little assured predictive
power. Despite their impressive methodology and sound mathematical foun-
dation, the conclusions projected by two of the three studies were far from
prescient. The conditions predicted by the mathematical simulations engineered
by Reed and Schansberg were in error. Minority membership did not decrease
and actually rose considerably. A massive wave of incoming legislators did not
materialize in the California State Assembly and is unlikely to appear in the
future. Mandak's model also had little predictive accuracy. The notion that
term limits would significantly alter the output of a legislature was not evident
in California. Only the projection of the Francis and Kenny that term limits
would increase early retirement proved to be correct. As noted, this prediction
is suspect because it prognosticated an occurrence that had already become
evident in California.

The Future Of PoHtical Science

Ultimately, an exclusive reliance on quantitative methodology may pro-
duce serious problems for political science that may haunt it in the new
millenium. The research produced by political science as a legitimate social
science is intended to be applicable to society and must have an acceptable

18

Stanley M. Caress

degree of validity. An academic discipline that had previously prided itself on
the objectivity and utilitarian nature of its research cannot afford routinely to
produce research findings that are contradicted by real events. The examina-
tion of the term limit articles illustrates that the utilization of sophisticated
methodology has not improved the quality of research findings and appears to
be no more accurate than mere speculation. If esoteric methodology continues
to be not only the primary criteria for publication, but also essentially the only
criteria for journal acceptance, political science may become irrelevant to so-
ciety. And if political scientists continue to produce research that is both in-
comprehensible and incorrect, then the discipline may move from irrelevant to
truly meaningless.

The greatest challenge for political science and all social sciences in the
next century therefore is to develop techniques for analyzing and predicting
political events and behavior that produce accurate results. The format of re-
search should not take precedence over the quality of its critical thought. The
modem field of political science is relatively young. It needs to continue to
strive to improve itself so that it will mature and grow into an academic pursuit
that will merit public confidence.

References

Baer, Michael A., Malcolm E. Jewell, and Lee Sigelman. eds. 1991. Political Science
in America: Oral Histories of the Discipline. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.

Baum, William C.1976. "American Political Science before the Mirror: What Our
Journals Reveal About the Profession." Journal of Politics 38 (November): 895-
917.

Francis. Wayne L., and Lawrence Kenny. 1997. "Equilibrium Projections of the
Consequences of Term Limits Upon Expected Tenure, Institutional Turnover, and
Membership Experience." Journal of Politics 59(1 ): 240-52.

Gillam, Jerry. 1994. "Term Limits Taking Big Toll on Legislature." Los Angeles
Times (20 March): A3.

Gow, David John. 1985. "Quantification and Statistics in the Early Years of Ameri-
can Political Science." Political Methodology 11: (1/2): 1-18.

Hansen, John Mark. 1997. "In Memoriam: Harold F. Gosnell." PS: Political
Science and Politics 30 (3): 582-85.

Mondak, Jeffrey J. 1994. "Elections as Filters: Term Limits and the Composition of
the U.S. House." Political Research Quarterly 48(4): 701-27.

Patterson, Samuel C, Jessica R. Adolino, and Kevin T McGuire. 1987. "Continuity
in Political Research: Evidence from the APS A Since the 1960s." PS: Political
Science and Politics 22 (4): 866-78.

19

Political Science in the 21st Century: Problems and Challenges for Social Science

Patterson, Samuel C, Brian D. Ripley, and Barbara Trisch. 1988. "The American
Political Science Review: A Retrospective of Last Year and the Last Eight
Decades." PS: Political Science and Politics 21(3): 908-25.

Reed, Robert W., and D. Eric Shansberg. 1995. "The House Under Term Limits:
What Would It Look Like?" Social Science Quarterly 76(4): 698-719.

Roettger, Walter B., and Hugh Winebrenner. 1986. "Politics and Political Science."
Public Opinion 9( September/October): 41-49.

Vanzi, George. 1996. "Assembly's Profile Little Changed by Term Limits." Los
Angeles Times (2 December): Al.

Wilson, James Q. 1993. "The Moral Sense." (Presidential Address to the American
Political Science Association) American Political Science Review 87 (March) 1-
11.

20

Myths of Teaching College Freshmen:

Unintended Consequences and Implications for

the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

Charles E. Snare,
Middle Georgia College

Comments on this article are welcome at: csnare@warrior.mgc.peachnet.edu

Numerous changes within society and within educational institutions
have placed college teaching in a state of flux. Consequently, teaching,
learning, students' expectations, responsibilities and roles, the college's
mission, and the role of technology have been altered in response to the
loss of society's reverence of higher education. Such alterations have
created "accepted" ways of teaching college freshmen which have unin-
tended consequences that have undermined the purposes and values of
education. This essay seeks to address eight of these myths and their un-
intended consequences as well as the implications for the social sciences
and society in the next millennium. It is contended that colleges, profes-
sors, and particularly the social sciences are at a critical juncture. We can
either embrace an active leadership role in the process of education or be
relegated to a passive follower role which the myths perpetuate.

Changes In The Educational Environment

Discussions of reforming higher education are ubiquitous in many colleges.
Terms such as multimedia, learning styles, students-as-consumers, internation-
alizing the curriculum, and so forth permeate the college corridors. In turn, the
social sciences, if not directly involved in the reform, are, at a minimum, im-
pacted by it. Colleges and particularly the social sciences face an unusual chal-
lenge that is not comparable with the past as society's reverence for colleges
has evaporated. The educational environment has changed in four crucial ways
in the last seventy-five years.

We are for the first time attempting to educate everyone who desires to
register. This is a dramatic change from the past where mainly the well-to-do
(and a few extremely motivated or fortunate) had such an opportunity. Our
desire for "open access" to a college education has virtually been achieved.

21

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

The GI Bill after World War II and the advent of the 1960's brought us this
possibility.

Second, America has become a consumer society which impacts students
and their expectations. A consumer by definition is not an active participant
but rather a passive player who expects to be entertained or have their desires
satisfied. How students of today view education is decisively different from
the views of seventy-five years ago. Students today view themselves as the
"court of final authority" (Craft and Schmersahl 1997). For instance, when
students think a teacher requires too much work, grades too hard, or assigns
boring reading they take it as their right to make judgments about the teacher
(Craft and Schmersahl 1997, 66-67). Of course we have been accomplices in
this through various overt messages such as administrators who inform stu-
dents they are the consumers as well as through various implicit messages
such as students' evaluations (not opinions) of the faculty.

Third, the type of learning has changed. What is valued today is "abstract
learning" with a steady decrease in learning of "specific" skills (Owen 1995,
9). Abstract learning has a wide application to a variety of circumstances but is
more difficult to leam. Concomitantly, learning consists of controlling the vast
amount of information (considering the explosion of knowledge this century).
Learning what to learn and how to leam are now important skills to possess.

Fourth, parents' views of higher education have changed. In the past there
was an awe or deference to colleges. This "uncritical supportive" view has
been replaced with parents who are "crifical users," if not "unsupportive pref-
erence seekers." Some parents, who are not satisfied with average, interrogate
schools if their children do not attain superior scores. Other parents demand
special preferences so their offspring can obtain a degree (Schalit 1997). We
have few "critical supporters" as trust in all institutions has declined precipi-
tously over the last thirty years. These four changes in the world have put edu-
cation adrift. Colleges and especially the social sciences have come under fire.
Business pushes for real world utility skills (Finn 1997). Religious leaders and
ideological think tanks push their agenda in myriad ways (Payton 1997). Stu-
dents perceive the social sciences as of little use, a matter of opinion, and/or as
(or what should be) "easy" classes. The dissatisfaction will be exacerbated in
the future as college degrees may not add significantly to one's lifetime earn-
ings (Finn 1997). Accordingly, many students with degrees who do not pos-
sess the knowledge, skills, or work productive attitudes employers or society
desires will add further fuel to the fire.

Ironically, faculty are better educated and more student-centered than ever
before. Competition for teaching positions is intense. Yet the dissatisfaction is
greater than ever. Is it just a "perceptual" problem? This is partially the case as

22

Charles E. Snare

Payton (1997) contends college Presidents need to be public teachers. Never-
theless, this is another discussion in and of itself.

The germane question for the twenty-first century is "What is the useful-
ness of the social sciences?" Nothing if they cannot produce students who
possess critical thinking skills, the ability to read, write, and speak cogently,
and the capacity to analyze ethical and value issues. This essay focuses on
eight myths of teaching which are often self-defeating and undermine the val-
ues of education AND the ultimate strengths (and utility) of the social sci-
ences. These myths have been embraced by many as the "truth." Others have
incorporated these myths because of the seemingly benign impact and/or as a
way to appease the critics of higher education. These myths have come to
permeate the way we teach. At best, these myths are partial truths in some
circumstances and therefore result in vaiious negative unintended consequences.

Myths Of Teaching

Myth #1 Failure is the opposite of success. Many teaching institutions
have come to believe that if a student fails a course (or set of courses) then the
professor or college has failed. For the social sciences, this is especially prob-
lematic as students perceive everyone should pass. This myopic view of failure
has not only contributed to lowering the standards but also does not allow the
student to learn. Failure is a step in the process to success. Learning how to
deal with mistakes is a crucial skill to learn. Most entrepreneurs are NOT suc-
cessful with their first venture. Usually they fail a number of times before
ultimately attaining success.

Some students, when they first attend college at the age of eighteen, flunk
out. It provided them with a reality check. It requires them to ask the questions,
"Where am I going?" and "What do I want to do with my life?" Some will
return later and be thankful that they were initially not allowed to just pass
through the system even though they did not know the material, and more
importantly did not exert any effort. Tom E. DuPree, founder and chief execu-
tive of Apple South, twice flunked out of Georgia Tech School of Manage-
ment. Dupree states, "Georgia Tech demanded an awful lot out of me..." (Roush
1996, Al). Incidentally, he recently gave the college twenty million dollars.

In an effort to shield students from failure they have been arbitrarily passed.
A recent survey of education professors indicated "students should not be held
back if they failed to demonstrate mastery of certain skills" (Sengupta 1997).
These education professors, often as consultants or as administrators, have
impacted colleges. The educational mission of colleges has been displaced or
distorted by the goal of building self-esteem as the panacea for all our educa-
tional woes. Arbitrarily passing students does not build self-esteem. Self-es-
teem is EARNED rather than something to be given. As Felson (1984) has

23

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

shown, the positive relationship between self-esteem and achievement can be
entirely accounted for by effort. Consequently, the way educators have attempted
to build self-esteem undeiTnines student effort. McDougall and Granby's (1996)
results support previous research which demonstrates professors who expect
more in-class work from students, in turn, raise students' amounts of prepara-
tion, levels of information recall, and degrees of self confidence.

Myth #2 Helping students is always beneficial. Many of us are com-
pelled to make sure students have everything and every possible kind of assis-
tance. Rodriguez (1981) calls this "The conspiracy of kindness became a con-
spiracy of uncaring." Our goal is to provide students with every opportunity to
leam and then allow them to do it for themselves.

The ideal creative environment is not the one that always encourages or
rewards creative work but one that thiows its share of obstacles in the way
(Sternberg and Lubart 1995, 290). To the contrary, our colleges have removed
most of the potential challenges facing students. Reasonable obstacles are nec-
essary. If we do not hold students accountable for their academic performance
(i.e., give assignments that are "easy," and do things for students they can do
themselves), then students will neglect deadlines, demand good grades with
little effort, expect others to solve their problems, believe mediocrity is a worth-
while goal, and create low goals for themselves (Landfried 1989).

Myth #3 Learning is always fun. We have been sold on the idea that
learning should always be entertaining. We want it to be like MTV or more
generally "edutainment." This is problematic for a couple of reasons.

First, we like to leam about what we already know. One of the most solid
findings in psychology is the "mere-exposure effect" (Zajonc 1968). The more
frequently individuals see, hear, or study something, the more comfortable
they become with it. Knowledge breeds enthusiasm. Since students come to
college with a low knowledge base, many things will seem uninteresting. The
initial learning required to attain a basic knowledge base the introductory
courses will not be the most exciting.

Second, this initial learning, if done, promotes the values of hard work and
persistence. It teaches students that mastery of a subject or a task comes at a
price. Mastery of a task is not given but EARNED with sweat and diligence.
These are values that are in demand in the work world. Thus, beyond teaching
the content of a subject we aie also teaching important values that will make
the student a more productive worker and citizen.

Myth #4 The central task of colleges is to teach students to be active
learners. Such advocates, such as education professors (see Sengupta 1997),
believe every student is a lover of learning. This approach assumes students
are serious, or at a minimum indifferent, about learning. However, Owen ( 1 995,
8) points out that research indicates high school students have strong negative

24

Charles E. Snare

ttitudes toward thinking, class work, and learning. Students invest a great
ieal of energy in persuading teachers to waste time and relax requirements
Everhart 1983). By the time students come to college these attitudes are firmly
stablished. Erickson and Strommer ( 1 99 1 , 1 1 ) report at the University of Rhode
sland most incoming freshmen expect to study three or fewer hours a night to
am a "B" average. Students tend to avoid studying and resistance is a collec-
ive action (Owen 1995. 49-49).

The central task of higher education is changing students' values regarding
naming. This, in turn, leads to active learners. When active learning becomes
lie mission, this resuhs in creating "pretenders of active learning" rather than
true active learners." Loeb (1994, 13), in his interviews with college students
n thirty different states and over one hundred campuses, found that students
iew the success of individuals in our society as relating to how well they
lanipulate appearances to others. They grew up in a time when fortunes were
aade by images (such as Madonna) or by the Milliken's of the world who
lanipulated the system to their advantage. Thus, we have women who seek to
le cute or outrageous and men (and some women) who seek to be shiewd to
lay the game well. Aspects like critical thinking, understanding the world or
inderstanding oneself seem of little relevance. Consequently, students write
lapers to please professors rather than to learn (see Loeb 1994, 72).

Most students interpret college from a "social" and/or "grade" perspective
ather than a "learning" perspective. For instance, students will spend much
ime ascertaining who is the easier teacher, even at times transferring to a col-
ge that has a reputation for being easier. Few students will complain that a
ourse is too easy and they did not get their time or money's worth. This means
vhen the student and professor meet in the classroom the differing agendas
lash.

Myths #5 Students are the consumers in the educational process.
"his has to be the most deleterious analogy ever considered with regard to
ligher education. First and foremost, we are not selling a product; rather stu-
lents are EARNING the right to proclaim upon completion that they have met
he standards and possess certain skills. The institution, not the student, is the
gatekeeper. This has far-reaching implications especially with regard to qual-
ty. In the consumer analogy the customer determines quality. A more appro-
date analogy is the nursing student or franchisee (Ben Lampton, personal
;onversation). An acceptable level of quality has been determined by the nurs-
ng profession or the franchisor. The consumer idea ultimately lowers stan-
lards in two significant ways.

One aspect relates to the system which rewards professors for being liked
)y the students. Most colleges have incorporated a student evaluation compo-
lent as part of the assessment of professors. This has created a situation where

25

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

"I'll pretend you're a good student if you pretend I'm a good teacher" (Andrews
1995, 23). While there are a variety of ways to persuade students to like a
professor, the most obvious way is through high grades. Expected grade has
been found to influence the opinions about the course and the professor
(Goldberg and Callahan 1991; Scherr and Scherr 1990; Brady 1988 ;Aubrecht
1981).

A second aspect is the assumption that instruction must fit the students'
needs. Various learning styles have been proposed visuals, debates, lec-
tures, simulations, and others. It is in vogue that we must teach in different
ways to meet the students' needs. Ultimately this imphes that we should have
special classrooms for each style. The advocates of this have flummoxed needs
with skills. Students need to possess all these abilities. In the future they will
often not have the opportunity to choose which one. They will be forced to
understand the mode that is presented. For instance, recently lecture has been
pegged with a tepid, if not feckless, name. However, much of what is commu-
nicated in our society is in lecture form Presidential debates and presenta-
tions by CEO's to employees. In our society where time is money the lecture
style will be a prevalent way of relaying information. Students need to learn
the skill of listening to a lecture and distilling the important points.

The issue of one best teaching style or method appears to relate to our
cultural inclination to find the truth (see Hofstede 1997). Kromrey and Purdom
( 1 995 ) found in their study of three teaching methods that the method was
irrelevant when students were held accountable (i.e., tested). Furthermore, few
studies fathom the idea that various styles may exist within each method. One
of the few exceptions is the study by Saroyan and Snell (1997) who discuss the
differences of three styles of lecturing.

Second, the student-as-the-consumer view of colleges refocuses valuable
resources on image making and making students (buyers) feel good. The con-
sumer approach would work if buyers knew what was good for them. It is
assumed then that if a seller produces nothing of value, as determined by the
rational market place, it then loses out. As Madison Avenue has discovered,
most buyers are NOT knowledgeable. Thus, it becomes important to make the
consumer feel good to feel valuable. Appeahng to the students' emotions
works equally well and/or catering to students' views of learning.

Third, the consumer approach creates a PASSIVE LEARNER. The student
expects to be entertained, to have fun, and expend little effort. If the student is
not "edutained" then his/her job is to turn the channel. Consequently, the stu-
dent never becomes a full partner in the learning process. This is why many of
our efforts to engage students in the classroom are doomed to failure. The
consumer view puts the responsibility of learning solely on the college and
professor. Our job is NOT to'row the boat but to provide the student with the

26

Charles E. Snare

Dars (the skills) to propel the boat forward. The consumer model forces institu-
ions to get across the lake at any cost even if professors have to row the
5oat.

The consumer approach is also pernicious to the student. One of the re-
sponsibilities of the college is to prepare the student for the world. Employers
ire NOT going to pander to every employee desire or want. To the contrary, the
employee is going to have to adapt to the demands of the marketplace and the
employer. The consumer approach, however, sends the message that the stu-
lent is always right. The world does not work that way and the student is being
jet up for a rude awakening. A report of the National Governors' Association
1986) succinctly states it, "Access without quality is a cruel deception ..."
Erickson and Strommer 1991, 8).

The student-as-the-consumer comminutes the college's reputation. Such
m approach to education is of little value to future employees. It should be of
ittle surprise that according to the National Center on the Educational Quality
)f the Workforce at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, teach-
ers' recommendations rank at the bottom of eleven criteria used for hiring and
students' grades rank ninth (Fialka 1995).

Myth #6 Professors and/or the classroom are the critical ingredient(s)
n students' abilities to learn. This myth is an out-growth of the student-as-
;he-consumer view of colleges and teaching colleges (and professors) who
A'ant to legitimize their existence. Ironically, they have missed the boat in two
lifferent ways. First, as indicated earlier, the mission of colleges is to impart
;ertain values and skills. Second, institutions, consultants, and professors some-
imes misunderstand motivation and are oblivious to group dynamics in the
classroom. There is the false assumption that with the "right" teacher, the "right"
nethod, or the "right" style the student will perform well. However, research
ndicates the student's motivation (i.e., amount of effort) and the base knowl-
edge s/he possesses prior to stepping into the classroom or onto the campus are
;he primary reasons for success (Berliner 1990; Moody 1993; Owen 1995, 4-
5; Perkins 1989; Sternberg and Lubart 1995, 153; Voss and Schuable 1992,
103). As for classroom dynamics, Fassinger (1997) argues, based on her em-
pirical study, that a key component affecting students' actions is their sense of
:heir class as a group. She concludes classes are groups and consequently have
nore of an impact on students' behaviors than the professor. We can provide
^^aluable input (i.e., frame the issues, orchestrate conflict and stress, and de-
velop the structures and processes) but it is ultimately up to the student. To be
neaningful to the student it could not be any other way.

If the professor is not the focus then it is the classroom. It is incorrectly
issumed that most learning is within the classroom. It is easy for a professor to
luickly come to believe that the classroom time should cover all the material.

27

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

This ultimately means that less material is covered and the student can largely
pick up what is needed for the exam from the classroom. This view of teaching
is reinforced upon the professor from consultants, administrators, and students.

A significant portion of the problem stems from consultants who have been
hired to develop or enhance college teaching and administrators who seek an-
swers. In the "Age of Experts" the new professionals have largely replaced
public-spiritedness with private mindedness (Brint 1994). These answer givers
have implicitly sold many colleges on the idea that if we incorporate the "right"
style of teaching that students will magically learn. What is completely over-
looked is that most of the learning experience is outside of the classroom. For
every hour in class the student "should" spend at least two hours reading and
studying the material and the focus needs to be on this aspect.

Myth #7 Being popular v^'ith students is a definitive sign that a pro-
fessor is an effective teacher. From our previous discussion it is apparent that
this may or may not be the case. Owen (1995, 107) states the empirical evi-
dence indicates the average high school student picks easier courses when core
cuniculum requirements are relaxed. Since college students come in with the
high school mentality the implication is straightforward. The higher the effort
requirement the higher the proportion of dropouts (Owen 1995, 73).

A little bit of popularity is good but too much should raise a red flag. Some-
times it is important to be disliked because we "seem" to be demanding a
significant amount of effort from the students' perspectives. We are asking
students to do something they do not want to do. The real test is whether ten
years later they feel they have learned valuable skills and information for their
daily lives. Many students, if not most, will not appreciate the relevance of
learning these skills at this stage in their lives. Richard Paul (personal conver-
sation) contends research shows that students' assessments of professors change
once they have had work and life experiences.

Myth #8 Technological learning is the pathway to education in the
twenty-first century. We have automatically assumed that technology (i.e.,
distance learning) can be used to improve education. For some administrators
and legislators technology is a way to cut costs. Yet as Francis Beer and Robert
Boynton discussed (at the 1997 American Political Science Association An-
nual Meeting), the use of technology is not a cost saver but rather incurs addi-
tional costs. The costs are twofold. It requires the professor to spend more time
with communicative and logistic aspects. A second cost relates to the kind of
learning students obtain via such methods. Distance learning does not promote
interaction among the students, curtails the possibility of utilizing games and
simulations in class, and places more of a burden on the student to understand
the material. Business is very troubled by the lack of communication skills
graduates possess (Lancaster 1996) and distance learning does not allow the

28

Charles E. Snare

student to develop or enhance this skill. However, distance learning seems
very worthwhile for the above average student who is motivated and has devel-
oped adequate social and communication skills. A majority of students will
not fall into this category. Thomas Russell, director of instructional communi-
cation at North Carolina State University, reviewed the literature in regard to
how well students have learned with a variety of instructional approaches
whether they involved traditional classroom lectures, high technology (inter-
active), or low technology (one-way telecast or video recordings). He found
"no significant difference" among the instructional approaches with respect to
how well the students learned (Jacobson 1994).

Implications For The Social Sciences

Our readiness for quick solutions and the tendency to believe one truth
exists is endemic of our culture according to Hofstede (1997). Hofstede (1997,
131-132) argues that the U.S.'s search for truth is a tolerant truth-seeking in
that it allows the search in many different directions. However, he suggests
Americans do not fathom the idea in which human truth is partial. This is also
evident with respect to college teaching.

The response within (and outside) the social sciences has generally been in
two ways. Some speak of reform, often with reference to returning to a mythic
golden age of the past. Such reformers forget society has changed as well as
the challenges we must grapple with. On the other hand, others have proposed
solutions based on their idiosyncratic research. Such ideas seldom integrate
the numerous factors which influence learning such as colleges are open to
almost everyone regardless of their motivation level as well as the consumer
view by students. Both of these avenues while proposing different ideas have a
common feature. They propose quick fix solutions with the idea that their way
will resolve the cunent problems plaguing higher education. Institutions and
faculty often become more concerned with embracing the latest fad (or at least
by following along) rather than asking some basic questions such as "Is this
helpful for the college or the social sciences?" and "What unintended conse-
quences may occur?"

Perpetuation of the myths does not resolve the issues facing the social sci-
ences. Instead it masks the challenges as well as erodes the values and roles of
the social sciences. Perpetuation of the myths results in the social sciences
following rather than leading, embracing a student centered approach rather
than a learning approach, developing dependent learners rather than self learn-
ers, and emphasizing a content and method approach to teaching rather than a
critical thinking approach.

Many of these myths lead institutions and the social sciences to promoting
the idea that the only appropriate role for teaching professors is one of "facili-

29

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

tators" (i.e., guides on the side). Teaching is LEADERSHIP (something the
social sciences should understand) which entails both pushing and pulling stu-
dents along. At times, we must chart the course and take students with us (i.e.,
the sage on the stage); whereas, at other times we must play the role of facili-
tator (i.e., the guide on the side). The former role is crucial to establishing the
type of learning values (hard work, persistence, and personal responsibility)
and skills (verbal, written, and analytic) necessary in the learning process as
learning is far from the top of students' views of what college is all about.
Sometimes we must inform students that as you progress through life some of
the things you learn will fall into place. Erickson and Strommer (1991, 79)
argue students are not likely to fully understand the goals we set in our courses
until the students' levels of intellectual development have progressed to a stage
where they seek understanding of the complexities in the world. Students also
lack a sufficient number of life experiences to be able to put things into per-
spective. College (and life) is about preparing for future challenges especially
ones we have not experienced. Consequently, leadership entails failing their
expectations and taking the heat temporarily (Heifetz 1994).

A student centered approach cripples the college's ability to establish learn-
ing values and skills. Attainment of these values and skills is not negotiable
which is the foundation of the LEARNING approach. Such values and skills
must be taught to students as they have been socialized with another set of
values and usually do not possess the necessary skills (see Aizenman 1997 for
the importance of teaching values and skills with respect to welfare recipi-
ents). The resistance will be overwhelmingly strong. It is the institution's re-
sponsibility to provide the standards. This also encompasses emphasizing and
promoting skill attainment over students' needs which is the cornerstone of the
student- centered approach. The student centered approach requires little, if
anything, from students. Students take negligible responsibility in the learning
process. On the other hand, the learning centered approach expects and de-
mands students to become full partners in the learning process.

With the student centered approach most students are not sufficiently chal-
lenged. As the focus is on the professor, the issue of the "unmotivated" student
is seldom considered. Many introductory classes are filled with unmotivated
students with poor skills. The classroom dynamics do not reinforce learning
but impede the process. The prepared students are not as challenged and the
opportunity to motivate these students is lost. Since the professor must spend
most of his (her) time with the unmotivated who possess poor skills, this leaves
less time for the motivated who possess poor skills. Professors spend time
weeding out the unmotivated with poor skills (as these professors understand
the unmotivated drag everyone else down) or fail many students. Institutions
where the myths have become accepted truths are unhappy with either out-

30

Charles E. Snare

come, often responding by advising (or threatening) professors to maintain
standards, attain high student ratings, and lower the dropout rate.

The myths foster a dependent learner rather than a responsible SELF
LEARNER. The kind of teacher valued in an environment in which the myths
are the accepted ways of teaching may range from charismatic individuals
who can capture the attention of students to those who are extremely respon-
sive to all complaints. Such persons may need to be good actors (see Sacks
1996), tutor students endlessly, give high grades, resort to gimmicks (see Post-
man 1986, 95), take student responses at face value, orchestrate emotional
debates which mirror the McLaughlin format, and other similar methods. A
good deal of the teaching time consists of exchanges between the student and
teacher to improve the teacher's relationship with the class rather than foster-
ing the student's education (Erickson and Strommer 1991, 12; Owen 1995, 3).
We have not stimulated learning, rather, a positive view of the teacher has been
stimulated. Additionally, the result is students are shortchanged in two ways.
First, their critical thinking skills are not developed to the greatest extent. Sec-
ond, students never learn how to take sensible risks which is a critical skill for
doing creative work (Sternberg and Lubart 1995, 48). For instance, students
enroll in safe courses (i.e., teachers that give higher grades) and write safe
papers (Sternberg and Lubait 1995, 48).

Another aspect which cultivates the dependent learner when the myths be-
come truths is the type of teacher-student relationship. Such situations are "au-
thority relationships," whether we acknowledge it or not. One way students
come to understand such relationships (regarding the responsibilities of each
party) is through these experiences. While a charismatic teacher can provide a
very strong hold over people's attention, the potential pitfall of the overly re-
sponsive charismatic teacher (i.e., those valued in where the myths are per-
petuated) is people fail to move on. People (students) fail to discover their own
"magic," their capacity for "responsibility" (Heifetz 1994, 247). Students come
to value charismatic teachers who will "magically" teach them. The myths do
not encourage the development of the responsible self-learner but promote a
dependent learner. Rather than looking for help in doing "their" work, they
look for answers (Heifetz 1994). Student must discover and develop their own
capacity to utilize other teachers without expecting magic. Then we have de-
veloped a self-learner.

The myths accentuate a content and method approach to learning rather
than one that underscores CRITICAL THINKING. Since grades provide little,
if any, clue to learning, numerous assessment measures are instituted. Com-
mon course descriptions, common course objectives, common textbooks for a
particular course become the means for administrators to show legislators,
voters, and the board of regents that colleges are making progress. Discussions

31

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

between administrators/department chairs and professors consist of ascertain-
ing the adequate length of syllabi, measuring student performance "objectively,"
and other similar matters. In the content and method approach the next logical
step is common course content. These efforts to control the process of the
classroom and the professor naturally result from the perpetuation of the myths
as the professor has been the focus and, therefore, must be the source of the
problem. This in turn discourages professors from utilizing what is "consid-
ered" subjective criteria such as term papers or classroom participation grades.
Micromanaging the teacher is reform. Professors spend their time evading the
process or battling much of the reform rather than leading and teaching.

The common content and method approach often hides behind the student
by suggesting this makes it easier for the student who should expect the courses
to be very similar, if not the same. However, this approach has two pernicious
outcomes. First, assessment becomes the end rather than the means. This re-
sults in irrelevant measurements. Second, the common course content or method
approach assumes there in one coiTCCt way. This is particularly troubling for
the social sciences which seek to stimulate students to view the world from
multiple perspectives. The world does not exist in one neatly packaged course.
The critical thinking approach to social science education entails using the
content to develop critical thinking skills. The content and method is the means
to do this not the end.

Implications For Society

How the social sciences teaches has important implications for society at
large. For many students, what they acquire in college may be their last expo-
sure to the social sciences. The lessons learned, or the implications drawn,
may last a lifetime. The educational experience through content learned, role
models, and methods used to cope with the various college demands provides
a means to understand leadership, decision making, and what values are im-
portant.

For instance the myths help undermine democracy. Students come to as-
sume democracy will be there "for" them. They will not realize democracy is a
hard fought battle that requires persistence and responsibility as does learning.
Part of this is perpetuated by searching for charismatic leaders (like charis-
matic teachers). Students have been taught to admire those who are able to spit
out a few soundbites and be extremely responsive to voters. Such politicians
survey extensively to ascertain what words to say something Reagan has
taught subsequent Presidents and members of Congress. In essence we have
taught students to search for leaders with quick and easy solutions rather than
leaders who ask the difficult questions. Habitually seeking solutions is a flight
"to" authority (Heifetz 1994, 73). It creates a passive citizen.

32

Charles E. Snare

Democracy comes to mean allowing people to possess the power. Yet as the
former Soviet Union has found out, this does not necessarily produce an em-
powered or responsible citizen. It takes a responsible citizen to maintain de-
mocracy and students who are allowed to escape responsibility will not main-
tain democracy. The climate is ripe for a charismatic dictator or generates a
cynical public. Democracy is considered a "place" to arrive rather than a never
ending process.

Other implications include turning out students who are self-centered, spend
a significant amount of time avoiding work, are unwilling to take risks, do not
possess the ability to cope with setbacks and difficult challenges that have not
been tailored for them specifically, and are not very effective at relating to
others in the world. They lack empathy and the ability to understand those
from a different perspective or way of life. In this global world this puts them
and our society at a decisive disadvantage.

Conclusion

The social sciences need to be at the forefront as the social sciences have
the most to lose. The myths will relegate the social sciences to a generator of
research for the new age experts (see Brint 1994) and/or to discussing arcane
aspects (e.g., Harwood 1997). More importantly, it will also diminish the so-
cial science leadership role in teaching, which includes at least three aspects.
First, this leadership role entails educating administrators, the public, and fel-
low colleagues about understanding and dealing with ambiguous social, politi-
cal and psychological environments. Within the social sciences this encom-
passes promoting educational research from a multidisciplinary perspective
rather than the purview of one discipline or from select universities who have
a different mission, different students, and a different motivation for publish-
ing the results. Many flowers must bloom. Second, the social sciences must
propose and promote the values it intends to teach such as persistence, hard
work, standards, and so forth. Third, from quality of life to decision making,
ascertaining the relevant questions is pervasive and arguably more important
than solutions. The strength of the social sciences is asking pertinent ques-
tions. Discovering the germane questions will become increasingly important
in the future. As Ross (1997) suggests tomorrow's computers will allow soci-
ety to use less energy for the mundane tasks and more brain power can be
applied to creative endeavors. This, coupled with a twenty-first century world
which is ever more complex and ambiguous, offers the opportunity to be the
"social science century." In order to make the most of this opportunity we must
begin the process at home in our own colleges.

33

Unintended Consequences and Implications for the Social Sciences in the Next Millennium

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36

Keeping Political Science Relevant
in the Next Millennium

James G. Leihert,
Dickinson State University

This paper suggests practical ways to keep political science relevant
in the next millennium. First, we, as political scientists, must point out
the extent of government involvement in daily life. Second, we must
examine students' potential for influencing governmental decision mak-
ers; and third, we must provide opportunities for students to become
involved in the political process both on campus and off campus. Further-
more, professors are encouraged to become more active in their commu-
nities, engage in applied research, and expand internship opportunities.
All of these activities will show that the social sciences in general and
political science in particular are currently relevant and will continue to
be relevant in the next millennium.

For the social sciences to be thought of as relevant in the next millennium
we must show that they still are relevant. It is not enough to assume relevance
because of past glory. The attitude toward education today, in boards of higher
education and in schools themselves, leans heavily toward practical and expe-
riential learning. Students, as well, have adopted this perspective. If they do
not see the immediate value of a subject, they assume that it does not have any
use. Departments of political science, as well as many of the other social sci-
ences and humanities, are going through a rejustification process now- with
their boards and their state legislatures as policy making bodies search for
relevancy and value in their curricula (Finifter Baldwin and Thelin 1991).

It may be cliche to say life in a civil society requires the social sciences
(Blitz 1997). Where are we going to get an understanding of whom we are,
from where we came and in what direction we are going if not from the social
sciences? The social sciences are the only fields equipped to ask and propose
answers to these questions. No other field is ready or able to deal with these
questions. Unless we are willing to forego the advancement of civil society,
the social sciences are and will remain relevant for the foreseeable future. As a
political scientist, I will direct my remarks specifically to this discipline.

37

Keeping Political Science Relevant in the Next Millennium

Relevance of Political Science to General
Education Students; the basic case

Two general categories of students take political science courses: those
choosing classes for their general education requirements, those who are ma-
joring or considering majoring in political science and those who are pursuing
an advanced degree. Each category will be addressed in turn.

The general education students will probably constitute the larger pool of
students in political science courses. Furthermore, these students will prob-
ably take only one course in political science which will probably be American
government or introduction to political science. This may be our only opportu-
nity to show students that political science is impoitant and relevant to them in
their daily lives. This, also, may be the only opportunity to teach students the
value of being active citizens in a representative democracy (Blitz 1997; Pollio
and Humphreys 1996; Rowyer 1995; Van Dyke 1977; Wronski and Bragaw
1986).

Three tasks of a political science professor

The first task of the political scientist is to show how the political process
affects our lives. If students think politics is something that only happens in
Washington, D.C., or in the state capitol, they will have little interest in politi-
cal science; and our attempts to show them that it is relevant will most likely
end in failure. One way to engage students is to point out that virtually every-
thing in life is affected by the government in some way. One exercise that I
have used in the past is to follow a student's day from the time they get up in
morning to the time they go to sleep. While we are following their day, I point
out to them some different governmental regulations and agencies that have an
impact on their daily lives. I follow this up with an offer of an "A" to any
student that can come up with something, anything, that they can do that the
government does not in some way affect. I do have an "ace in the hole:" the
Clean Air Act and laws on the disposal of the dead. In other words, for the
government to not be involved, students would have to discover something
that they can do where they are not breathing but are not dead. This wager
raises the interest of even the most cynical students (APS A 1951 ; Horace Mann
in Elias 1995; Stoker 1995; Wiseman 1969).

The second task is to show how individuals can make a difference. Having
students understand that politics affect their lives is a necessary condition for
showing the relevance of political science, but it is not by itself sufficient.
Students must know that they can make a difference in the policies that the
government makes and implements (APS A 1951; Van Dyke 1977; Wiseman
1969). Voting is the most common way to point out to students that they can
make a difference. However, most students will correctly point out that their

38

James G. Leibert

single vote will not make any difference in a presidential election. But, collec-
tively, the student vote can have a large impact in any election. Most students
do not realize how much of a difference their votes will make in state and local
elections. In many school board elections the winning candidate has a margin
of only a 100 or so votes. In a 1992 election for the North Dakota State House
of Representatives, a candidate lost by two votes. His wife and parents later
commented that they should have voted in the election.

Furthermore, state and local governments affect our lives more directly. It
is at this level where a few votes can have a more immediate impact and it is
with this level that more people come into contact with government. The uni-
versities that many attend are state universities. State legislatures provide col-
leges with an operating budget and states disburse federal financial aid at the
local level, with national oversight. Also, the drinking age is set at the state
level, or at the local level for cities with home rule. The police that will arrest
them for violations of the drinking age will be local police. The judges that
they will go before will be local or state judges. The impact of state and local
government is more direct and immediate than the impact of the national gov-
ernment (Marsh and Stoker 1995; Van Dyke 1977, 1960; Wiseman 1969).

Voting can and does make a difference, but it is only the first step. Students
should also be encouraged to become actively involved in the political process,
and avenues should be made available for them. There are many ways to be-
come involved, and I will discuss three.

The first is to encourage individual activity. Let students know that they
have a right to address their government regarding today's issues. They can do
this in a number of different ways: call a government official, write a govern-
ment official, write a letter to the editor, write an op-ed piece, or write to their
school newspaper. However they want to get involved, the experience of politi-
cal participation is a great teacher (Kain and Neas 1993).

Students can also become involved in the political parties on or off campus.
The political parties are always looking for bright, young new members. Stu-
dents can become as active as they want to be in the parties. The more they
become involved the greater the opportunity to make a difference. Students
involved in party affairs often have the chance to meet with decision makers in
the legislative and executive branches as well as other state and local govern-
mental officials. Furthermore, political activity can lead to a full time career in
3olitics if the student so desires. The political parties and political consultants
leed people with the skills and experience to organize and manage campaigns,
:o do research on the strengths and weaknesses of their candidate as well as
3pposition candidate (Kain and Neas 1993; Rogers, Roberts and Weinland
1988).

39

Keeping Political Science Relevant in the Next Millennium

Interest groups afford another opportunity for students to get involved. In-
terest groups generally need the same types of skills needed by political par-
ties. Students gain another perspective from other actors in the political pro-
cess. There are also greater employment opportunities with interest groups
than there are with political parties.

Whether the student becomes involved individually, through a political party
or with an interest group, the student needs to know that their involvement can
and will make a difference. If the student simply writes a letter, a response
from a member of Congress will let the student know that their effort was not
in vain. By taking a more active approach, through working with a political
party or an interest group, the student will have a greater oppoilunity to affect
legislation or rule implementation. However the student becomes involved,
once the student realizes that they can have an impact on the government they
will be more likely to become involved and actually make an impact (APSA
1951; Van Dyke 1977; Wronski and Bragaw 1986).

Often pohtical participation is presented as a "duty" or an obligation. How-
ever, students can be taught to think of political participation as an "invest-
ment." If people invest enough time and effort, they can make a difference. The
investment required will vary depending on the expected return. The larger the
expected return the larger the required investment. For example, if one wants
to clean up the environment throughout the country, a large investment of time
and effort is required. However, if one's goal is to clean up a local landfill the
time and effort required will be much less. This sort of analogy can show stu-
dents that an immediate result is not necessary for success.

The last task of the political scientist is to firmly ground the students on the
basics of the political process. These basics include, but are not limited to, the
general structure of the political system and the vocabulary of political sci-
ence. The political scientist must pass this information along for a dialog
even to be possible. If this basic information is absent, students will not be able
to see any relevance of political science in their lives. Fortunately, most of the
introduction to political science and/or introduction to American government
texts covers these topics very well. All too often, covering the basics is all that
we are able to do in our introductory courses. If we simply show the students
the political structure and introduce them to the vocabulary of political science
they will be able to understand the role of political science in the twenty-first
century (APSA 1951; Van Dyke 1977, 1960; Wiseman 1969; Wronski and
Bragaw 1986).

All forms of democracy need informed, intelligent citizens. If we simply
teach students how to make more informed election decisions we have shown
that political science is still relevant. However, if we go beyond that and teach
our students how they can make a difference in the policy with which they will

40

James G. Leibert

live, then political science is without a doubt relevant in their lives. Our goal
should be to teach students how to make a difference. If we can do that, as
political scientists, our relevance and value become obvious both now and in
the future (Rogers, Roberts and Weinland 1988; Van Dyke 1977; Wronski and
Bragaw 1986).

Relevance of Political Science to Political
Science Majors: the Advanced Case

Students majoring in political science or while obtaining an advanced de-
gree, already understand the relevance of political science. Their case is differ-
ent. The goal with these students is to go beyond simply showing them that
government affects their lives and how they can make a difference in the politi-
cal process. We should prepare these students for leadership roles in the mak-
ing, implementation and evaluation of policy (Kain and Neas 1993; Van Dyke
1977).

We can prepare our students for leadership roles by giving them the tools
that they will need to make informed decisions. Students will need to know the
policy making process and how foreign policy differs from domestic policy,
rhey will need to know how to assess the impact of a bill, and be imaginative
enough to see the consequences of a piece of legislation. Students should be
able to understand the difficulties of policy implementation and the role of the
bureaucracy in modem society. These students will have to be able to evaluate
Dolicy to check whether the policy does address the problem; and, if it does,
whether it does so in an efficient way (Kain and Neas 1993).

We must also provide students with the opportunity to actually make deci-
sions and take leadership roles. Students who practice what they are taught,
earn the lessons better. If students are not afforded opportunities to partici-
3ate, are not allowed to make mistakes or misunderstand a reading assign-
ment, they will have missed a valuable lesson. One way to get students more
nvolved is to lecture less and discuss the material more. This is not to say that
everyone's opinion is equally valid, but it does force the students to take an
ictive role in their own educadon (Carin and Sund 1971; Weltzien 1994). Dis-
cussion also allows us to catch and conect a student when they misunderstand
m author.

The more students believe that they can have an impact on their lives the
nore they become involved and take control. The more they take control the
nore responsible they become. As students become more responsible for them-
lelves, they are better able to fulfill the leadership positions for which they are
)eing trained.

41

Keeping Political Science Relevant in the Next Millennium

Other Tools

What can professors of the social sciences do to meet the needs of the twenty-
first century? One of the first things that we can do is to use the new technol-
ogy that is available to us. The introduction of computers can add significantly
to discussion in the class. Data analysis can be incorporated into a lecture. The
students will see the factual basis for our lecture, and if students have compet-
ing theories they can test those theories in class.

Another thing that we can do is to become actively involved in our area of
specialization. To enhance teaching we can become active members of a po-
litical party or of an interest group. Not everyone can take advantage of this
option, but those that can, should. Active involvement will increase our knowl-
edge about how government or interest groups actually work, as well as how it
should work or how things generally occur. This experiential knowledge should
be passed on to students.

Applied research in our area of specialization is another area that should be
explored. Applied research has some advantages and a number of drawbacks.
One advantage of applied research is that it is often funded. Also, applied re-
search is an easy way to get students involved in the actual practice of political
research. Students, citizens and community leaders can see the use of applied
research more readily than that of pure research. We can also make contacts
that can be used for guest lectures and internships. However, administrators
may not see the value of applied research. Seldom is applied research consid-
ered a positive when applying for promotion and/or tenure and this begs a
review.

One final area to explore is the use of internships. Internships give students
first hand experience in the political process. The traditional internships have
generally focused on sending a student to Congress, or to the state legislature
during the legislative session. These traditional internships have been useful in
the past and are a good starting point for those students who want to work in
government. However, many students do not want to work in government, or
are not able to spend a semester away from campus. For these students there
should be alternatives. There are any number of nontraditional internships that
are available close to campus, for example; city and county governments, non-
profit organizations and local affiliates of interest groups. The local unions and
chambers of commerce are other areas one can explore. Internships show stu-
dents the impact that government has on our everyday life. Furthermore, the
internship can be a link between what we teach in the class and what happens
off campus. The internship can be one of the most direct showcases for the
relevance of political science there is available (Rogers, Roberts and Weinland
1988).

42

James G. Leibert

The above briefly outlines the approach that I have taken in teaching political
science at our University. Relevancy and practical experience are the keystones
of our program. Judging from a ten-fold increase in the number of political
sciehce majors, we have been successful. Now, there are College Republicans
and College Democrats and they are active and participating in all aspects of
college life from entering floats in the homecoming parade to cosponsoring
debates between candidates. College Republicans and College Democrats have
attended national political gatherings such as the Republican National Con-
vention and the Democratic Grassroots Organizing Workshop, as well as state
and local level political functions.

The internship program has also been very successful. Thus far we have
had about fifteen student internships. Of these, two were traditional interns in
Washington, D.C., and both were offered full time employment with the sena-
tor for whom they interned. Another has graduated and has been offered full
time employment. The internship program is entering its second year and from
all indications it should continue to grow.

Conclusion

Our civil society faces numerous challenges- solving intractable problems,
maintaining a stable social course in a relentless wave of technology and over-
coming apathy. Democracy requires informed participation at all levels of poli-
tics. Unless one understands government's impact, participation is unlikely.
Therefore, understanding and appreciating the political process is necessary
for a civil society. A program that demonstrates its relevancy promotes under-
standing and plants the seeds for the maintenance of that civil society, for it
will have made a positive difference in our lives.

References

American Political Science Association. 1951. Goals for Political Science.
NY: William Sloane Associates, Inc.

Blits, Jan H. 1997. "DeToqueville on Democratic Education-the Problem of Public
Passivity." Educational Theory Al{ 1 ): 15-30.

Carin, Arthur, and Robert Sund. 1971. Developing Questioning Techniques. Colum-
bus, OH: Merrill.

Elias, John L. 1995. Philosophy of Education: Classical and Contemporary. 1st ed.
Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishers.

Finifter, David H., Roger G. Baldwin, and John R. Thelin. 1991. The Uneasy Public
Policy Triangle. NY: MacMillan.

43

Keeping Political Science Relevant in the Next Millennium

Kain, Edward, and Robin Neas. 1993. Innovative Technologies for Teaching

Sociological Concepts. Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.

Lindquist, Jack. ed. 1978. Designing Teaching Improvement Programs. Berkely:
Pacific Soundings Press.

Marsh, David, and Gerry Stoker. 1995. Theory and Methods in Political Science.
NY: St. Martin's Press.

Pollio, Howard R., and W. Lee Humphreys. 1996. "What Award Winning Lecturers
Say about Their College Teaching." College Teaching 44(3): 101-106.

Rogers, Vincent, Arthur Roberts, and Thomas Weinland. eds. 1988. Teaching Social
Studies: Portraits from the Classroom. Washington, D.C.: National Council For
the Social Studies.

Rouyer, Alwyn R. 1995. "Making Connections in Introductory Political Science."
College Teaching 43( 1 ):32-35.

Van Dyke, Vernon. 1960. Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

. ed. 1977. Teaching Political Science. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities

Press, Inc.

Weltzien,0. Alan. 1994. "Two Great Professors-Formidable Intellects with Affection
for Students." College Teaching 42(4): 124- 130.

Wiseman, Victor. 1969. Politics- The Master Science. NY: Pegasus.

Wronski, Stanley, and Donald Bragaw. eds. 1986. Social Studies and Social Sci-
ences: A Fifty Year Perspective. Washington, D. C: National Council for the
Social Sciences.

44

The Designated Mourner:
The Future of Public Administration's Past

Louis E. Howe

The State University of West Georgia

Every charisma is on the road from a turbulently emotional life that knows
no economic rationality to a slow death by suffocation under the weight
of material interests: every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this
end (Weber 1978, 1120).

I lived in that Brookline-Cambridge world for eight years. These are
people who don't like the Pledge. They have disdain for the simple and
basic patriotism of most Americans; they think they're smarter than ev-
erybody else, and they don't like these kinds of rituals. That bothers me.
I think it should bother a lot of people (Bennett 1992, 96).

Introduction

The future practice and teaching of any social science will necessarily en-
tail telling a story about its past, and this story will constitute part of the back-
ground context which authorizes and orients that social science. The reason
for this is that, unlike the natural sciences, the "sciences of man" are not sim-
ply observational, but are also reflexive (Connolly 1981; Connolly 1983;
Dallmayr and McCarthy 1977; Gadamer 1976; Hollis and Lukes 1982). They
are self-revelatory and self-assertive. People who know that you have a theory
about them, can change their behavior. For instance, stockbrokers know that
the Federal Reserve Board has theories about the behavior of brokers. Taking
these theories into account, brokers develop theories of their own about Fed-
eral Reserve behavior, and the brokers' theories will try to take into account
both the expected behavior of brokers and the expected behavior of Board
members who take into account the expected behavior of brokers. If this is
accepted, it follows that any story about a social science's past is a political act
aimed at influencing who we are and what we ought to do. Specifically, these
stories can settle or unsettle the question of what and who is a worthy object of
study. This is contestable terrain and it has shifted a great deal in the past few
years.

45

The Designated Mourner: The Future of Public Administration's Past

Lately when I teach Public Administration I feel like what playwright
Wallace Shawn has termed the designated mourner (Shawn, 100). Shawn tells
a myth of tribal cultures that, when the last member of a clan dies, appoint
someone from another clan to be the vanished clan's designated mourner, to be
the last bearer and witness to the clan's memory. And somehow I find myself
in that position, remembering, for instance, Herbert Kaufman, Grant McConnell,
Frederick Mosher, or Emmette Redford. That old gang. It is not that no one
reads them anymore, but that no one seems to understand them anymore. For
instance, if one bothers to question the justice of our recent shift from taxes to
user fees and lotteries (Osborne 1992, 198-200), even administrators old enough
to remember the shift merely keep repeating that no one (the poor) ought to get
to use, say, soccer fields for free. Or if faculty tenure guidelines increasingly
equate "community service" with paid consulting work rather than altruism,
younger colleagues reply that it is a welcome change, since it gives the univer-
sity a high profile in the community, and makes sure that faculty members
keep up with what is going on "out there." Clearly they believe "out there"
should set the agenda "in here," and do not remember that only about ten years
ago we at least claimed that it did not. The thing that the old giants of the field
used to understand, the thing that elicits no gut response from students, practi-
tioners, or younger colleagues, is that the giants in the field -whom, to be
honest I never really liked that much saw their mission as oZ?serving power
rather than serving it (Lowi 1992). Of course, I am speaking of private power
as much as public power. This essay seeks to understand how those gut re-
sponses were devalued, and how that devaluation might effect the teaching and
practice of public administration. I will try to show that such gut reactions
were crucial to the practice and study of Public Administration, and their ab-
sence is crucial to what is increasingly called Public Sector Management. But
I am not the only one to notice this absence. In fact, there is competition over
who should be its designated mourner. Neo-conservative writers especially
advocate and celebrate the devaluation of New Deal values, and they do so
with all the zeal of the patricidal sons in Freud's Civilization and its Discon-
tents (Freud 1961, 78-80). In the final section of the essay I will contest both
this neo-conservative story of the absence and the neo-conservative self-un-
derstanding which enables that story.

About This Mode of Inquiry

The designated mourner indicates a relation to the past. That relation is
ambiguous, agonistic, and discontinuous. It does not claim to be the only way
that public administration should relate to its past, but does claim to be an
antidote to some of the discipline's other, more usual, practices; like, simply
ignoring the past literature, or claiming that our current knowledge has super-

46

Louis E. Howe

seded it, or even claiming that we are merely building on the foundation it laid
down. All of these pragmatic and behavioral responses to the past are in danger
of too uncritically accepting the neo-conservative story of absence. The old
literature, on the other hand, can disrupt many of the commonplace assump-
tions of current thought and practice. A mourner acknowledges a loss, and can
even admit that his or her joy depends crucially upon something or someone
that is missing. A mourner has lost his or her joy and searches for a new one.
The goal of mourning is to learn to seek out, cultivate, and appreciate those
qualities in the world which made the missing one so sustaining, so beloved. { 1 }
Thus, one possibility of mourning is that it acknowledges loss by celebrating
the world. It en-joys the world; makes it joyful (Bennett 1997). The designated
mourner implies a certain arbitrariness and uneasiness about being selected. In
baseball, a designated hitter is, in a since, not batting in his own right. The
designated mourner is a proxy, not unlike someone called for jury duty. One
receives a call, and the question remains, why me?

This is not the strategy pursued by William Bennett (Bennett 1992, 1994).
It is instructive to compare Bennett to Jack, the main character in Wallace
Shawn's play. The Designated Mourner. Jack says his strategy is the strategy
of the rat; and the rat seeks merely to survive as a fat sleek rat; one gets out of
the way when something big is about to hit you. Jack accomplishes this in the
play by retreating into a sort of hyper-stoicism (see Chaloupka 1997), he in-
habits only the part of the sinking cultural ship which has not yet gone under.
Like many neo-conservatives, Bennett was a lifelong Democrat who switched
parties as popular faith in the New Deal vision of justice waned. Bennett mourns
by devaluing his past, by hating conservatism's enemies more than conserva-
tism would actually require. He constantly accuses liberals of being unlike
"most Americans," or he often leads readers to believe that liberals have some-
how authorized marginal constituencies to use drugs, remain unemployed, or
get divorced, always linking liberals with those whom middle class Americans
fear. Liberals, it seems, are the friends of our enemies.

"It's that thing of people whom you actually know and with whom
you actually live deciding consciously to be the friend of your
enemies that can get you really terribly upset, because your en-
emies after all are actually trying very hard to kill you" (Shawn
46; see also Bennett 1992, 96).

This stance has important political implications because by classifying
people as enemies and friends of enemies (traitors), one rules out a whole
series of possible questions for research. People classed as enemies are avail-
able for policies of intervention. They need not be thought of as fellow citizens
deserving of good will. The social agendas of the friends of enemies can be

47

The Designated Mourner: The Future of PubUc Administration's Past

summarily dismissed and their research grants denied on the grounds that their
agendas are political (Bennett 1992, 17-19). The silencing of certain kinds of
inquiry, in turn, results in a bleak and stoic intellectual landscape, where no
one dares be critical of, say, a war on drugs for fear of being labeled a friend of
our enemies. One hesitates to question careerism, or meritocracy, or consum-
erism for fear of being accused of thinking one is better than "most Ameri-
cans."

Emmette Redford and the Democratic Morality

Emmette Redford (Redford 1969) pursued a question typical of his genera-
tion, namely, can the administrative state be made compatible with the Ameri-
can ideal of democracy? There is a kindness and humaneness in his writing
that might seem unusual today; he is constantly admonishing his reader to
make sure the poor can participate, that workers are not merely means to an
organization's ends, or to even admit that while civil disobedience and rioting
might be fiightening, if they energize participation among those who have
been "silent subjects," namely, youth and minority races, then they "can only
be welcomed by the believer in democratic morality" (Redford, 68). It is hard
to imagine such generosity today.

Redford worked in the heyday of the deontological movement; deontology
was a doctrine which maintained a strict agnosticism about how people chose
to live their private lives or pursue their personal satisfactions (Rawls 1971;
Sandel 1982). Deontology, while individualist, was never libertarian, since it
asserted that a strong role for government was needed in order to guarantee
that all citizens had the opportunity to pursue whatever good life they chose.
Redford, a student of micro-level politics, probably would think that today's
libertaiians had not looked out the window for a long time.

"Escape from the administrative state would not mean escape from
the administered society. The latter is ubiquitous and exists in
both public and private sectors: for the business of society, the
whole of society, is conducted by organizations with specialized
functions" (Redford, 180).

Redford's was not the first attempt to somehow make the administrative
state work democratically. Ever since the Pendleton Act of 1883, and espe-
cially after President Roosevelt created the New Deal, students of public ad-
ministration had been aware that the administrative state required a new theory
of democracy (Lowi 1985, 44-66; Milkis 1992; Tuhs 1987). Two influential
attempts to articulate such a theory were the President's Committee on Admin-
istrative Management in 1937 (President's Committee 1937), which recom-
mended expanding the White House staff and creating the Executive Office of
the President, and the American Political Science Association's Committee on

48

Louis E. Howe

Political Parties (reprinted White and Mileur, 235-250). which called for a
more responsible pohtical party system. For Redford, both of these approaches
are necessary but insufficient conditions for democracy in an administrative
state. Though he clearly prefers the charismatic presidency to the parochial
congressional party (Redford, 120-123). he fmally rejected the president, and
even top down democracy, as being an insufficient guarantee. His reasons are
instructive. The president, we are told, is, like the rest of us, a prisoner of
modem political-administrative structures. There may have been wonderful
gains, but overhead democracy, whether presidential or congressional, is
doomed to be ineffectual.

This is revealing because it gives us an unusually candid glimpse into the
essential nature of what practical deontologists believed democracy to be.
Redford never actually calls himself a deontologist, or even a "liberal." He
prefers the term "the democrat." This sort of moral presumption uniformly
infuriates neo-conservatives, and it seems to me that neo-conservatives are on
to something important here. The broader question is, if normal republican
representative political institutions and structures are ineffective in bringing
democracy to bear in the administrative state, while yet, in spite of this, he
remains optimistic that through practice and common sense democracy can
prevail, what does "the democrat believe democracy to be?

Democratic morality turns out to be a spiritual-material force that moti-
vates and legitimates the administrative state. Since democratic morality oper-
ates as an extraordinary force, inspiring people to endorse the administrative
state, we can call it, following Max Weber, a form of charisma (Macintosh
1986; Weber, 241-254; 439-450; 1 1 1-1 156). There are three tenets of demo-
cratic morality: 1 ) man is for man, the belief in individual realization; 2) all
men have worth, the belief in egalitarianism; and 3) universal participation, the
belief that all individuals should have a say in the decisions that effect them.
The best way to promote "individual realization" is to expand individual op-
tions. In practice this is best accomplished by a generalized pursuit of material
well-being. Thus the magical elements are tied to a materialist ethical vision. It
is the ethical task of the administrative state to pursue the general welfare, a
task that derives from an e.itraordinary, or charismatic source. It is not too
much to characterize that source, staying within Weber's framework but stretch-
ing him somewhat, as an enchantment with disenchantment, or, an enchant-
ment with rationality. But, this ambiguous form of charisma turned out to gen-
erate a mine field of quandaries.

The administrative state is a form of collective action and its entire reason
for being is that it expands options for individual realization. Yet the democrat
immediately worries that collective action also places powerful constraints on
individual realization. This is because the organizations which facilitate mod-

49

The Designated Mourner: The Future of Pubhc Administration's Past

em collective action tend to produce people as functionaries; or, in Weber's
language, rationalization tends to emphasize rules, hierarchy, and routines; not
a fertile environment for individual self-realization. Exhaustively surveying
every aspect and every institution of the administrative state, Redford every-
where finds quandaries for democracy, that is, roadblocks to self-realization.
Most of these quandaries are part of the routine literature in public administra-
tion: functionalism, administrative discretion, professional expertise, policy
subsystems. I will focus on two: his analyses of our personal subjection to
administration and of the dilemmas inherent in his notion of pluralism.

Personal Subjection to Administration

"While organizations may provide men with opportunities for
work, they may at the same time be harsh with respect to condi-
tions of employment, material benefits, and severance of the em-
ployment relationship. Workers can be abused physically, humili-
ated, and robbed of their spirit; their initiative can be crushed,
their self-development frustrated, and their independence as men
destroyed" (Redford, 158).

While in many ways there has been progress and convenience, and drudg-
ery is disappearing, we depend on the kind of organization that needs our kinds
of skill. For millions of middle-aged people, this is "a new serfdom." Organi-
zations today have the power to "engross" individuals by appealing to a need
to belong, and enveloping them in the group's work. Fuilher, social science
can be used to "engineer consent," public relations and personnel counseling
can make men and women feel like part of a larger movement. "We have left
home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organizational life"
(Redford, 160).

We have no good antidotes for this. Redford considers authoritarian man-
agement, unionism and collective bargaining, the human relations movement,
and the answers given by administrative law. None of these can make adminis-
tration less engrossing, because the very nature of public service is service.
Organizations can and should achieve their employees' developmental pur-
poses, but the organization's requirements can never be the same as the work-
ers' needs. All cannot be promoted, all cannot make As, all cannot participate
in each and every decision. There are limitations and bad fortune. To run an
organization is to discriminate. While all organizations do require all workers
to adapt to their purposes, even to be submissive, management, Redford in-
sists, must also adapt to workers. Why? Because we hold the "ideal of a hu-
mane society"(Redford, 172).

50

Louis E. Howe

"Harshness, indignities to men, engrossment of their private lives,
and lack of empathy for their material and psychological needs
are inconsistent with... democratic morality" (Redford, 175).

If one wonders how democratic morality could permeate the existential
constraints of modern organization, Redford insists throughout that modem
organization is in fact porous. Bureaucratic rationale is always incompletely
rational, society is never exhaustively socialized, and professionals are never
totally professionalized. The order is never so tightly drawn around us that a
little magic cannot happen.

The Dilemmas of Pluralism

Turning to the quandaries presented by the pluralist vision itself the orga-
nization of people into "shared interests" public policy deals in requirements
shared by many persons; basic requirements, from food to art exhibitions. These
shared requirements are "objective needs" for those who hold them and give
rise to subjective attitudes which are shared by a number of people. When
these shared attitudes are articulated by these people acting as a group, they
become political demands, or system inputs. It is worth noting that for deon-
tology if the group happens to be really big, one might call this shared interest
a "public interest," meaning everybody happens to have it at the same time, but
there is no conception of a common good (Connolly 1 98 1 , 90- 118). That would
violate deontology's agnosticism.

This way of sharing interests is said to present the democrat with two quan-
daries: conflicting interests and particular applications. Conflicting interests
mean that some people have to lose, or, at the least, get less than they wanted.
Particular applications refers to the fact that every policy opens some options
while closing off others. Hiring more women may mean hiring fewer men, and
it is hard to reconcile this with the notion of equal protection before the law.
Equality of opportunity cannot guarantee equality, or even equity, of the result.
What is more, people have different intensities and quantities of interest, where
intensity refers to subjective preferences, while quantity measures one's ob-
jective stake in the policy. A mother with several sons fighting in Vietnam has
a greater stake in peace than a peace activist whose children are not involved in
the fighting. Quantity interests present a quandary for the democrat because if
unequal amounts of interest legitimately exist for different persons, then a simple
majority vote ought not always determine the issue.

If opportunities for self-realization grow out of public policies that effect
specific groups selectively and differently, then surely, muses the democrat
probably thinking of minorities, more weight ought to be given to those who
hold the higher stakes. In a consumer society everyone needs lower prices, but
in a given workplace, employees might need higher wages. It may be that the

51

The Designated Mourner: The Future of PubHc Administration's Past

employer believes he or she can easily pass this new cost along to consumers
in the form of a price increase. Presumably, everyone's long-term, but low
quantity, interests suffer while the workers' short term, but high quantity, inter-
ests prevail. In a progressive era the issue is decided in favor of workers, pre-
sumably because everyone acknowledges that workers need relief. But what
happens, we wonder today, when this sense of goodwill erodes? The demo-
cratic morality offers no reason why management's high quantity interest could
not be substituted for labor's or a conservative political agenda substituted for
Redord's (Scalia 1989). Higher prices are an externality to which the system
responds selectively. To say that every man has validity does not allow one to
favor one interest over another in these cases. The democratic morality is even-
tually undermined by the externalities it authorizes. Programs we put in place
today problems of nuclear waste disposal resulting from allowing the nuclear
industry to freely develop its options would be a good example (Offe 1996, 8-
10) will limit the options available for our children. Even in the present, par-
ticipation is based on information one receives about his or her interests. Groups
with high quantity interests tend to be better represented and some groups are
better at aggregating their supporters than are others, leading to "an imbalance
in representation of interests... bet ween those paiticipating selectively and other
persons," or even between those selective players with unequal influence. Equal-
ity of opportunity does not just acquiesce in inequality of result, it fosters it.

Redford's solution to all this is brokerage. And keeping options open. It
may be that none of our institutions is satisfactory, but because they are all
porous they can all be infused with a spirit of democratic morality and any one
might help bridge the lapses of the others. Where they all fail, brokerage comes
into play. Presumably politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats will play facilitat-
ing roles, balancing the representation of varied interests, seeing to it that dif-
ferences in kind, intensity, and quantity are accounted for. What is absolutely
crucial for democratic morality is to insure access to each affected group inter-
est. "Distinct interests cannot be protected without meaningful opportunities
for their assertion." Beyond mere representation, groups need to obtain "con-
sideration of numerous variations in interests" (Redford, 26). Once all these
different degrees and kinds of claims have been brought together in open fo-
rums, it is the role of decision makers to broker their claims. One looks in vain
in Democracy in the Administrative State for anything beyond exhortation that
these forums be made accessible to every affected group. If it happens, it will
happen only because the democratic morality "commands it."

Looking back we can see what went wrong. A political regime that cel-
ebrated the widening and ever widening horizon of options, ended up so se-
verely limiting options that it the entire project became suspicious. In the ab-
sence of a conception of the common good, one cannot value one set of op-

52

Louis E. Howe

tions over any other, not even on the grounds that some policies open the space
of options while others constrain it. Neither does one have the option of limit-
ing any option which does not directly harm another. Since all policies are
particular choices, and there is no conception of common good, or acknowl-
edged limit, we must develop a neutral framework where everyone may (must?)
pursue his or her interests. The very encouragement of private interests this
rationalizing of the pursuit of interests into a systematic support of plural-
ism routinely produces externalities which not only undermine the ethos of
democratic morality, they crowd the space of democracy itself (Offe, 16).

Deontology and its Mourners

While deontology always professed to be agnostic about which demands
prevailed, actual deontologists were zealously egalitarian and cared passion-
ately about who won, who lost, who participated, and who was shut out. Since
such concerns could not be part of their official system, the deontologists con-
tinually had to turn for their hope to the spread of economic affluence and to
social progress, and Redford routinely turns to these developments when insti-
tutions fail him. Since democratic institutions do not themselves possess demo-
cratic morality, their great egalitarian inspirations, their spurs to greater and
more comprehensive participation, had to come from beyond government, be-
yond elections, beyond interest groups, and, perhaps, beyond politics itself.
We do not demean workers, for instance, because it is against our democratic
morality. The democrat remains optimistic because he has faith that the grace
of democratic morality will continue to inspire the democratic impulses of
those within organizations. The source of that grace is consistently taken as
obvious.

Which brings me back to charisma. The reason one might want to intro-
duce charisma into the administrative state, is that, because administrative ra-
tionale is neutral, it requires other-worldly inspiration to give it a compelling
ethical direction; that is, a goal that participants can enthusiastically endorse.
The administrative state offers a powerful technology for accomplishing large
endeavors, but threatens to reduce human life to an anthill. Charisma makes it
possible that human busyness might achieve the status of human action. How-
ever, charisma depends crucially on its ability to make itself heard. As Max
Weber reminds us:

"Charisma is self-determined and sets its own limits. Its bearer
seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others
obey and follow him by virtue of his mission. If those to whom
he feels sent do not recognize him, his claim collapses; if they
recognize it, he is their master as long as he "proves" himself.
However, he does not derive his claims from the will of his fol-

53

The Designated Mourner: The Future of PubUc Administration's Past

lowers, in the manner of an election; rather, it is their duty to rec-
ognize his charisma" (Weber, 1113. emphasis in original).

At one level what happened was simple. People stopped experiencing de-
ontology as a duty. Once that happened, once its talk had been unchained from
its magical source, it simply sounded pompous and hollow (Shawn, 54-58).
One can see this in virtually any neo-conservative discussion of the 1970s.
Peggy Noonan offers a typical example:

"And get me off this bus! I looked around, and saw those mouths
moving and shrank in my seat. What am I doing with these people?
What am I doing with these intellectuals or whatever they are,
what am I doing with this this contemptuous elite?" (Noonan,
13; see also Bennett 1992, 96; Federici 1991; Frohnen 1996 on
Charles Taylor, 43).

At another level, a pluralist politics which believed in agnostically opening
options crowded out the possibility of opting for a future that was more egali-
tarian and democratic than the present, it could no longer "prove" itself (Offe,
22). All of Redford's quandaries remained, but it became impossible to believe
that democratic morality would redeem them. For instance, organizational en-
grossment of individuals might be irremediable.

Like most neo-conservatives William Bennett claims to be re- valuing Ameri-
can values. From the perspective developed here he might better be under-
stood as a man disenchanted with disenchantment. This highlights the essen-
tial ambiguity in the title of his book. The De-Vahdug of America, which overtly
seeks to show how liberals de-valued America, but in fact spends all its ink in
de-valuing liberalism, an old and honorable American tradition based, as I
have tried to show, in a belief in the spirit of disenchantment. Thus Bennett
actually works very hard to foster de-valuation in America. The broader ques-
tion is why America can no longer afford its tradition of disenchantment? Here
it is useful to turn to Wallace Shawn's play and the character in it who most
resembles William Bennett, Jack.

Jack is the designated mourner for a group of literati led by his father-in-
law, Howard, whom he hated, and his ex-wife, Judy. Howard is a quiet though
well-known dissenter, a sort of English socialist in a society which seems too
precarious to allow any challenges to its very aggressive exploitation of the
"dirt eaters." Apparently to even mentioning them is to risk death. Jack had
never really fit in with Howard's circle because he could not share their plea-
sures, especially reading. "I mean, I was clever enough to know that John Donne
was offering something that was awfully enjoyable I just wasn't clever enough
to actually enjoy it" (Shawn 27). He always feels out of it, and as the play
progresses finds their speech, their pleasures, their morals and their political

54

Louis E. Howe

commitments less and less coherent. He especially cannot understand their
concern for the "enemies," the dirt eaters. At one point Judy asks him: "But
what about the idea of a better world?" and he answers, "I did take a bath this
morning, if that's what you mean." Recalling a visit they once took to an or-
phanage where he tended a sick little girl, she asks him how he understands
himself now. He replies that he no longer has any meaning beyond his appear-
ance. "I don't see myself "as" anything at all. ..This is me. This is me, and this
is all there is to me" (ibid.).

Throughout the play Jack's horizon is shrinking and his personality is get-
ting thinner. In a time when it is dangerous to "be" anything, he survives by
shedding everything that would label him as dangerous. In such a world, where
bodies turn up daily in the parks, one needs to be completely focused on im-
mediate things. "Perhaps I could somehow train my mind to focus less com-
pulsively on terrifying images of death and disease... Let me learn how to re-
pose in the quiet shade of a nice square of chocolate" (75-76). Finally he thinks
of himself as a "cheerful ghost," and is relieved that he no longer has to posture
or try to be anything, "I guess I've always been a lowbrow at heart." As his
horizon shrinks he loses his ability to care or to even be aroused by his favorite
pornographic magazines. "One day it went. I looked at the pictures and got
absolutely nothing. I felt nothing. I saw nothing. The pictures were dead. They
were paper" (94).

If Jack mourns by shrinking his horizon and thinning out his personality, so
does William Bennett, though Bennett adapts to an order that can tolerate more
diversity than can Jack's. In a paraphrase that completely subverts Madison's
Federalist 10, Bennett writes:

"Our common culture serves as a kind of immunological system,
destroying the values and attitudes promulgated by an adversary
culture that can infect our body politic" (Bennett, 1992, 193; Dia-
mond 1979; cf. Howe 1994; see also McConnell 1966, 107-1 12).

Emmette Redford examines questions that Bennett might take to be infec-
tions against which we ought to innoculate ourselves. Is work in a large orga-
nization "engrossing?" Do modem organizational practices produce "engineered
consent?" Does the practice of interest group politics produce externalities
which undermine and shrink the space where free political action is possible?
In the face of such questions Bennett is simply optimistic and confident. He
can be confident because he has retreated into stoic acceptance of the con-
straints imposed by an administrative society (Chaloupka, 1997). However, if
one puts pressure on Bennett's stoicism, he can quickly become cynical, using
majoritarian appeals to threaten those vulnerable to majority moods. Bennett

55

The Designated Mourner: The Future of PubUc Administration's Past

has taken the vows of organizational hfe, but denies that he has had to leave
home to do so.

As opposed to William Bennett, Emmette Redford offers us a vision of the
past that need not rely on either stoicism or cynicism. For Redford, politics
was still the realm of the possible, and he measured our institutions against
possibility rather than uniformity. He celebrates realization rather than inocu-
lation. He shows us that a study of administration which wished to en-joy itself
would have to fmd new possibilities for enchantment. I continue to believe that
the best way for our discipline to proceed is to press the question of democracy
against the demands of organization and order; to seek out new openings for
democratic citizenship in a world of evolving and constricted organizational
cultures; and to seek out new ways of appreciating and living democratically
with those marginal constituencies that our increasingly stoic regime tends to
regard as enemies.

References

Bennett, Jane. 1997. "Ethics and Enchantment: The Enchantment of Hybridity."
Paper presented at Inspiriting Institutions Panel, Ninety Third Annual Meeting.
American Political Science Association. Washington. D.C.

Bennett, William J. 1992. The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for our Culture and
Our Children. New York: Simon and Schuster.

. 1994. "Revolt Against God: American's Spiritual Despair." Policy Review

67(6): 19.

Chaloupka, Bill. 1997. "Praising Minnesota: The Coens' "Fargo" and the Pressures
of Stoic Community." theory & event 1:2 on line journal, Johns Hopkins
University, http://muse.jhu. edu/joumals/theory_&_event.

Committee on Political Parties. 1950. "Towards a Responsible Two-Party System."
American Political Science Review 44(Sep): Pp. 1-14, reprinted in Challenges to
Party Government, ed., John Kenneth White and Jerome M. Mileur. Carbondaie,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Connolly, William E. 1981. Appearance and Reality in Politics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

. 1983. The Tenns of Political Discourse, 2d Ed. Princeton. NJ: Princeton

University Press.

. 1996. "PluraUsm, Multiculturalism, and the Nation-State: Rethinking the

Connections."" Journal of Political Ideologies 1(1): 53-73.

Dallmayr, Fred R., and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds. 1977. Understanding and Social
Inquiry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

56

Louis E. Howe

Diamond, Martin. 1979. "Ethics and Politics: The American Way." Pp. 39-72 in The
Moral Foundations of the American Republic, 2d, ed. Robert H. Horwitz.
Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.

Federici, Michael. 1991. The Challenge of Populism: The Rise of Right -Wing
Democratism in Postwar America. Greenwood, CA: Praeger.

Freud, Sigmund. 1963. Civilization and its Discontents. Translated by James
Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton.

Frohnen, Bruce. 1996. The New Communitaricms and the Crisis of Modern Liberal-
ism. Lawrence, KS: LIniversity Press of Kansas.

jadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David E.
Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mollis, Martin, and Steven Lukes, eds. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.

Howe, Louis E. 1994. "Political Immunology: Political Subjectivity (Subjection) in
the Information Age." New Political Science 30/3 1 : 11-91 .

Lowi, Theodore J. 1985. The Personal President: Power Inverted Promise Unful-
filled. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

. 1992. "The State in Political Science." American Political Science Review

86(1): 1-7.

Vlilkis, Sidney M. 1992. "Programatic Liberalism and Party Politics: The New Deal
Legacy and the Doctrine of Responsible Party Government." Pp. 104-132 in
Challenges to Party Government, ed. John Kenneth White and Jerome Mileur.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

VlcConnell, Grant. 1966. Private Power and American Democracy. New York:
Random House.

Mcintosh, Donald. 1986. "The Charisma of Reason: The Magical Basis of Rational-
Legal State Authority." Unpublished.

!*^oonan, Peggy. 1990. What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan
Era. New York: Ballantine.

Dsbome, David, and Ted Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing Government: How the

Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley.

Dffe, Claus. 1996. Modernity and the State, East, West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.

'residents Committee on Administrative Management. 1937. Report of the Commit-
tee With Special Sections. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

lawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ledford, Emmette S. 1969. Democracy in the Administrative State. New York:
Oxford University Press.

57

The Designated Mourner: The Future of Public Administration's Past

Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Scalia, Antonin. 1989. "Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretation of Law."
Duke Law Journal : 5 1 1 .

Shawn. Wallace. 1996. The Designated Mourner. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.

Tulis, Jeffrey K. 1987. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.

Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society, eds., Guenther Roth and Claus Wittlick.
New York: Bedminster Press.

White, John Kenneth. 1992. "Mandates Without Parties." Pp 84-103 in Challenges
to Party Government, ed. John Kenneth White and Jerome M. Mileur.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Footnotes

'My understanding of mourning owes a grateful debt to discussions with Patricia
Nicholson.

58

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative
for the Twenty-First Century

Patricia J. Campbell and Paul E. Masters
The State University of West Georgia

The 21st century offers social scientists, as well as others, the oppor-
tunity to re-evaluate their disciplines noting both successes and failures
and to use these lessons to create a dynamic new approach to the study of
the social sciences. The authors believe this exercise is both useful and
essential. Further they assert the course for the 21st century to be inter-
disciplinary with a focus on globalization. To accommodate this chal-
lenge a new conceptualization of global studies is necessary. In what
follows, the authors describe the traditional approach to global studies,
its weaknesses and their proposal for a dynamic new program of global
studies.

Introduction

As we enter the 21st century, we, social scientists, are being asked to re-
evaluate our disciplines in an effort to begin charting the course for the next
millennium. We believe this to be a useful endeavor for several reasons. First,
our disciplines have undergone dramatic changes and challenges in the past
100 years. From these our disciplines have redefined, remolded and
reconceptualized our methods and our analytic tools. Second, pausing to re-
:onsider both the successes and failures of our disciplines offers us the oppor-
tunity to be cognizant of our limitations as social scientists as well as to boldly
venture into new pedagogical and epistemological territory. Third, building on
this maturation and derived from this evaluation, we conclude the course for
he next generation of social scientists to be interdisciplinary research and in-
struction which considers the impact of globalization. As we are presented
with new challenges and with an increase in communication and technologies,
we need to consider curriculum redefinition that takes this into account. There-
fore, we are developing an innovative Global Studies major as a significant
way to move forward using the analytic tools provided by the maturation of
;he social sciences.

59

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative of the 21" Century

Traditional Approaches to Global Studies

Global Studies is necessarily multidisciplinary, transcending national fron-
tiers. Instead of the traditional unit of analysis, the nation-state, the focus is on
many other levels: the individual, the grassroots organization, the cultural group,
the international organization.

Global Studies is earth-centered and based on the recognition that science,
technological change, economics, cultural integration, and simple curiosity have
propelled humankind into an era of interdependence. This interdependence
requires us to study themes that unite and divide the global community, such
as ecology, human rights and ethnic rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Yet as the earth grows smaller and more interdependent, many scholars and
practitioners continue to perceive the world in terms of independent nation-
states, each claiming the absolute rights of a Machiavellian sovereign to do
what its national interests appear to dictate. This state centric approach to in-
ternational relations has a long history. Such an approach dominated scholarly
thought prior to the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century Denis Diderot
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau debated the validity of the nation-state as the pri-
mary organization to which human beings belong. Diderot "assumed the unity
of the human race and the existence of universal bonds and obligation"
(Modelski 1972, 277). According to this line of thinking the standards of gov-
ernment were set by the general will of the human race as embodied by the
laws and practices of civilized peoples. Rousseau strongly disagreed with this
view: "for him the society of the whole human race was 'a veritable chimera,'
in that race alone did not constitute a society; mere likeness of kind or identity
of psychological conditions creates no real union" (Modelski 1972, 227-228).
Rousseau felt a society must be founded on a common language, an identity of
experience, a common interest and well being only provided by the nation-
state.

Rousseau's argument has prevailed through the centuries and is echoed by
the Realists whose thought dominated the study of international relations after
World War II. The core of Realist thinking was the unreality of all community
except the national one. These thinkers provided an ideology that put the na-
tion-state as the dominant political institution of the world. The Realists put
ethnocentrism at the heart of international relations. For these scholars inter-
national relations was the study of relations between states, relations which
were lacking in community, consensus and monopoly of the legitimate means
of violence. The Realists saw the international system as lacking many of the
characteristics of the nation-state, chief among them a sense of community.
The only real community was the national one; the idea of a global community
was rejected as belonging to scholars that did not understand the real world of
international relations. Due to this conceptualization Realists emphasized the

60

Patricia J. Campbell and Paul E. Masters

"foreign policy" of states. They studied the foreign policy of State A toward
State B. Consequently, the rest of the world tended to be viewed in terms of
nation-centered foreign policy objectives.

Stanley Hoffman's (1959) critical essay, "International Relations: The Long
Road to Theory" signaled a change of approach and movement away from
Realism. One major change in this new approach was the development of sys-
tems analysis in international relations. Spurred by Talcott Parsons' theorizing
in sociology and David Easton's in political science, international relations
scholars began to rediscover the concept of an international system. Morton
Kaplan ( 1 957 ), James Rosenau ( 1 96 1 ) and Klaus Knorr and Sidney Verba ( 1 96 1 )
helped promote this concern with the state of the entire global system and its
systemic interdependence. Whereas Realists emphasized nation-centered for-
eign policy, the system theorists focused on the entire global system of state
interaction.

However, despite the advances made by systems theorists, their theory still
remained nation-state oriented. The basic framework continued to emphasize
ethnocentrism and looked upon the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis.
The systems theorists moved from the Realist nation-centered foreign policy
to a system-of-nations perspective that continued to emphasize state interac-
tion in the international system. This system-of-nations perspective led Morton
Kaplan to feel the nations-states were still the major actors in the international
system.

Although most political scientists continued to emphasize the importance
of the state in the international system, international lawyers were the first to
recognize the increasing importance of non-state actors. As early as 1958, C.
Wilfred Jenks writes:

"Contemporary international law has outgrown the limitations of
a system consisting essentially, or perhaps even primarily, of rules
governing the mutual relations of States and must now be re-
garded as the common law of mankind in an early phase of its
development. By the common law of mankind is meant the law
of an organized world community, constituted on the basis of States
but discharging its community functions increasingly through a
complex of international and regional institutions, guaranteeing
rights to, and placing obligations upon, the individual citizen, and
confronted with a wide range of economic, social, and techno-
logical problems calling for a uniform regulation on an interna-
tional basis which represents a growing proportion of the subject-
matter of the law. The imperfect development and precarious
nature of the organized world community is reflected in the early

61

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative of the 21" Century

Stage of development of the law but does not invalidate the basic
conception. On such a conception, the law governing the rela-
tions between States is one, but only one, of the main divisions of
the subject" (Jenks 1958, 8).

Writing around the same time, Philip Jessup says the term international law
"is misleading since it suggests that one is concerned only with relations of
one nation (or state) to other nations"(or states) (Jessup 1 956, 1 ). Jessup coined
the term "transnational law" to replace international law because it "regulates
actions or events that transcend national frontiers" (Jessup 1956, 2). Individu-
als and organizations not just nation-states are the concern of transnational
law. "Transnational situations, then, may involve individuals, corporations,
states, organizations of states, and other groups" (Jessup 1956, 3). Thus the
emphasis of Jenks' "common law of mankind" and Jessup's "transnational
law" has not been to deny the impoilance of nation-states but to point out the
increasing importance of the individual and groups of individuals in the inter-
national system.[l]

By the 1970s the concept of transnational relations began to achieve promi-
nence in the study of world politics. Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane are two
pohtical scientists who have dealt with transnational interactions:

"Some global interactions are initiated and sustained entirely, or
almost entirely, by governments of nation-states. This is true of
most wars, a large amount of international communication, con-
siderable trade, and some finance. These we consider "interstate"
interactions along with conventional diplomatic activity. Other
interactions, however, involve nongovernmental actors individu-
als or organizations and we consider these interactions
"transnational." Thus, a transnational interaction may involve
governments, but it may not involve only governments: Non-gov-
ernmental actors must also play a significant role. We speak of
transnational communication, transportation, finance, and travel
when we refer to non-governmental interactions across state
boundaries. Thus, "transnational interactions" is our term to de-
scribe the movement of tangible or intangible items across state
boundaries when at least one actor is not an agent of a govern-
ment or an intergovernmental organization" (Nye & Keohane
1971,332).

Nye and Keohane's interest in nongovernmental organizations and their
activities across state boundaries represented a significant shift away from the
state-centric approach.

62

Paul E. Masters and Patricia J. Campbell

A New Global Perspective

In the last two decades more social scientists have recognized the impor-
tance of a global perspective that looks beyond the nation-state. These scholars
focus on the complex interdependencies among peoples and between human-
kind and the rest of the natural world. Yet many globalists argue that we are not
disposed to meet the challenges of the next century. The historian Paul Kennedy
(1993) concludes that institutions of higher education are inadequately pre-
pared to help humankind understand and solve global problems such as popu-
lation growth and environmental degradation.

The interdisciplinary nature of these as well as other global problems is
becoming apparent not only within the study of international relations but also
within other social sciences. The work currently being done in international
relations suggests global political analysis take into account the role of reli-
gion, culture, language[2], minority or communal group rights (Guit 1995,
212-217) as well as factors such as norms (Florini 1996, 363-390) and the
physical sciences (Modelski 1996, 321-342). In his much- debated essay ''Jihad
vs. McWorldr Benjamin Barber lays out the two conflicting principles con-
fronting the international community: tribalization and globalization. Using
an interdisciplinary lens, he describes the threat they both pose to democracy
{Atlantic Monthly 1992).

Barber's argument suggests that in order to understand the globalization of
politics we must understand the four imperatives upon which it rests: market
imperative, resource imperative, information-technology imperative and eco-
logical imperative. The market imperative, he explains is the "quest for ever
expanding markets (which) compel nation-based capitalist economies to push
against national boundaries in search of an international economic imperium."
Thus we must understand economics, international law governing international
transactions, and market psychology. He reminds us in his discussion of the
resource imperative: "(E)very nation, it turns out, needs something another
nation has; some nations have almost nothing they need." This requires better
management of resources available within not just the nation-state, but the
world. When Chiapas rebels can relay information about human rights abuses
perpetrated by the Mexican government via email and Chinese dissidents pre-
paring for democracy demonstrations communicate via the fax, one can hardly
doubt that "(i)n their social requisites, secrecy and science are enemies:" enter
the information and technology imperative. This requires that we consider sci-
ence and the communication revolution in our analysis. Finally, Barber warns
us of the ecological imperative. Here his concern is more than just ecological
degradation which itself is a global problem not confined within borders, it is
also the growing inequality this degradation brings as developed nations insist
that the developing world cannot "develop" as they did. The developed world

63.

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative of the 21" Century

continues to insist, "(t)he world cannot afford your modernization; ours has
wrung it dry!" (Barber 1992, 53-55; 58-63).

Each of these imperatives demands we begin to understand the
interconnectedness of not just the social sciences, but also the physical sci-
ences. Each of these along with tribalization trends evident in Bosnia, Rwanda
and many other countries, pose threats to democracy. Barber argues. Thus he
and others argue democracy and the question of political and economic devel-
opment require a more comprehensive approach. [3] Failure to identify and
understand this shift threatens the credibility of the social scientist.

While "interdisciplinary" has become somewhat of a vogue phrase of late,
we believe this to be so because of the recognized need of such an approach.
Further, like other "vogue" concepts, it is often sprinkled throughout social
science literature without ever truly being applied or incorporated. At first
glance, this can have the unfortunate effect of devaluing its cuiTcncy. However,
further scrutiny reveals a rich amount of work currently being done across
disciplines. The recent growth of Women's Studies, Black Studies, Chicane
Studies, Native American Studies, all approach their subjects through an inter-
disciplinary lens. For example, women's studies programs can be housed in
the political science department, the sociology department or the psychology
department. This is so because the subject, women, does not belong to one
discipline. Thus the study of this subject requires economic, historical, anthro-
pological, sociological, political, psychological, literary, analysis. While these
programs may be argued to have been devised to be interdisciplinary, this trend
is evident within disciplines as well.

A new genre of research being done in international relations centers on the
interconnectedness of race and gender. This exciting research demands we
consider the state and its actions through the lens of gender and ethnicity. This
literature brings in anthropology, psychology, literature, music, art, tourism,
militarism, religion, language, economics, development and the physical sci-
ences, in order to more comprehensively deal with the role of gender and
ethnicity in shaping both domestic and foreign policy. (Please see, Enloe,
Peterson, Tickner, Stannard, Jeffords, for example)

Even more "mainstream" international relations research is highlighting
the need for interdisciplinary work. A recent International Studies Quarterly
issue was dedicated to what it called "Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social
Sciences." Set up as a series of workshops from which the articles were taken,
this issue explores the need to study international studies from an evolutionaiy,
interdisciplinary basis. [4] For Modelski this means viewing the evolution of
world politics in conjunction with physical, biological, social and cultural evo-
lution. Florini further suggests that the natural and social sciences "have long
borrowed ideas from each other" and that acknowledging and continuing this

64

Patricia J. Campbell and Paul E. Masters

practice can lead us to a better understanding of the evolutionary nature of
international norms. All of the participants [5] stress the advantages of interdis-
ciplinary work.

How the Social Sciences Can Respond

In accordance then with our belief in the need for an interdisciplinary ap-
proach to the study of the global problems confronting the world community,
we have designed a global studies major which is substantially different from
the traditional concept of global as a state centered enterprise. Our
conceptualization of Global Studies is predicated on an appreciation of the
interconnectedness of local and global events. This is a truly interdisciplinary
approach purporting to explain global issues in an analytical framework which
emphasizes the role of the individual in his or her local community and its
relationship to the global society. Unique about this approach is the emphasis
on interdisciplinary work.

Key to the success of the Global Studies major is the introductory course.
This course is designed to be a one semester core class, taught by two or more
instructors from different disciplines. This helps emphasize the interdiscipli-
nary nature of the course and also exposes students to the topic from different
pedagogical approaches. The course is designed around themes/topics which
have been approved by the global studies committee. Each semester's themes
are then determined by the expertise of the instructors. Examples of these themes
include, but are not limited to: technology, human rights, sustainable develop-
ment, migration, peace/war, poverty, ecological degradation, comparative cul-
tures and religions, food, population, and disease.

Work on each one of these topics has been done in a variety of disciplines
and this course offers students the opportunity to explore these issues through
an interdisciplinary lens. For example, research and work being done in the
field of sustainable development requires an economic analysis of develop-
ment strategies. This alone is not enough (World Bank 1989). However, the
impact of these strategies on the environment must also be considered (Haas
1994; Nagpal 1995, 10-15; 30-35; World Commission on Environment and
Development 1987). More specifically, how will the carrying capacity of the
environment be affected? In other words, can the suggested strategy be sus-
tained ecologically or will it add to degradation such as desertification and soil
erosion {West Africa 1989)? What of the political and ethnic relations within
the state? Will this strategy benefit one political or ethnic group more than
others? Are members of one ethnic group willing to focus development efforts
in a region occupied by members of another ethnic group?[6] Since women do
the majority of agricultural production in most areas of the world and men
make the majority of decisions regarding development programs, will these

65

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative of the 2P' Century

Strategies be appropriate for those asked to implement them? (Anderson and
Moore 1993; Jacobson 1993; Wilde 1994). Does the strategy being proposed
involve encroachment upon indigenous peoples' territory? What types of tech-
nology transfers are needed and from where will the funding come? Who will
benefit from the strategies? Sustainable development, therefore demands we
move away from the state-centric idea and toward a more comprehensive ap-
proach. Each theme/topic then, is designed to be conceptualized as global stud-
ies.

A critical part of this course is exposing students to the richness of other
cultures. This can be done in several ways. The choice of textbook is critical.
This is even more important with this class because there is no established
protocol and/or textbook. We have chosen the following two textbooks: 1.
WorldWatch Institute, State of the World 1997, New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1997 and, 2. Peter Menzel, Material World: A Global Family Por-
trait, San Francisco: SieiTa Club Books, 1995. Choosing books that are either
designed to be interdisciplinary or using a combination of texts from different
disciplines can facilitate the goal of exposing students to other cultures as well
as being interdisciplinary.

Students will also be encouraged to independently experience other cul-
tures through exploring the world via the internet, attending various events
sponsored on campus by the international studies office, spending time with
our international students, and taking advantage of multicultural festivals on-
going in Atlanta.

In addition, as part of the Global Studies major, we believe it is essential for
students to not only be exposed to other cultures but to experience them. To-
ward that end, a requirement of this major is a study abroad/cross-cultural
experience. Students will have access to the University's study abroad pro-
gram which includes programs in England, Mexico, France, Japan, Russia,
Argentina and Israel, to name a few. For those for whom this is too great a
financial burden, they will participate in programs domestically that allow them
a cross-cultural experience, time on a Native American reservation, for ex-
ample. In conjunction with this desire for students to experience other cul-
tures, it is necessary students can communicate, thus, the major has a foreign
language requirement the equivalent of a minor in the student's language of
choice.

Conclusion

The state-centric approach of Rousseau, Kaplan, and the Realist and sys-
tems schools of thought which had been the traditional base of Global Studies
is being replaced by an earth-centered approach which requires recognizing
the interdependence of the global community and demands we posit creative

66

Patricia J. Campbell and Paul E. Masters

solutions to the themes that both unite and divide us. With the increase of tech-
nology and communication we no longer can investigate issues as if they stop
at the border of the nation-state. The issues that pose the biggest crisis for us in
the future will be those that extend beyond borders: disease, pollution, migra-
tion, development, etc. Therefore, it is imperative social scientists begin to
restructure curriculum to address these issues. The Global Studies major is one
such attempt. It is an exciting new major designed to prepare students intellec-
tually for the challenges of the future. The skills students acquire will not only
prepare them for careers in an ever- shrinking world, but also for conceptualiz-
ing hfe in the 21st century.

Notes

'The concept of human rights has been partly responsible for the revisiting and in
some cases a reconceptualization of who should be a "legal person" within interna-
tional law and international relations, a distinction traditionally reserved for the nation-
state. The European Commission of Human Rights allows individuals to petition the
Commission (only if a state agrees) as does the relatively new Inter- American Com-
mission on Human Rights. The Inter- American Commission omits the states' consent
in allowing individuals. NGOs as well as friends and relatives of an aggrieved indi-
vidual to bring a case before it. This is a marked change from the International Court of
Justice, the European Court of Human Rights or the Inter- American Court of Human
Rights which only allow nation-states to submit disputes. This traditional notion of
only allowing nation-states to submit disputes is further challenged by recent events.
Human rights scholars, as well as many international law publicists, have advo-
cated the establishment of a permanent court to handle cases of severe human rights
abuses during war time: a permanent war crimes tribunal. While this is fraught with
much debate, recent war crimes tribunals set up to deal with the atrocities of Bosnia
and Rwanda appear to be a step in this direction. Yet, the international commitment to
this has wavered in several ways: monetarily, the court has been hampered by insuffi-
cient funds to conduct proper investigations; politically, some of the accused are par-
ticipating in the peace settlement, and lack of diligence of interested parties in arrest-
ing the accused. This has negatively impacted the court's ability to vigorously conduct
its business. Despite this, however, the first war crimes conviction since the end of
World War II has occurred and for the first time in history rape has been elevated to a
war crime. Thus, actions of nation-states with regard to individual and group rights are
increasingly coming under scrutiny by international organizations. This further calls
into question the study of the nation-state as the sole actor in the international arena.

-For example, Samuel Huntington's essay, A Debate on Cultural Conflicts, theorizes
that "(t)he clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between
civilizations will be the battle line of the future." He suggests we need to move away
from analysis of conflict predicated on ideology and/or economics and consider in our
analysis religious, cultural, linguistic cleavages, (Hunfington 1993).

67

Global Studies: The Social Science Imperative of the 21" Century

^Eileen McCarthy-Amolds reminds, "(t)he traditional realist perspective within the
field of International Relations gives little guidance for explaining this thinking about
individual rights, human centered development and participatory democracy since its
emphasis is on states, it has made little space for theorizing about individuals." (Eileen
McCarthy Arnolds, "Human Rights, Development and Democracy: Conceptual Chal-
lenges" presented at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting, Chi-
cago, April 1997). Further, work being done on development and democracy have forced
an interdisciplinary approach to the study of politics. Increasingly international organi-
zations and transnational bodies have moved to the center of these discussions.

"According to Modelski and Poznanski, "The workshops have shown the advantages
of pursuing evolutionary themes on an interdisciplinary basis, embracing potentially
several of the social sciences. While such thought pervades all of these, development is
unequal, and learning opportunities abound across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Political scientists, for instance, have learned with some purpose about the recent ad-
vances in evolutionary economics, drawing as they do on a great tradition (Modelski
and Poznanski 1996, 318)."

-''George Modelski, Kazimierz Poznanski, Andrew Farkas, Ann Florini, Geoffrey
Hudgson and Robert Gilpin.

''This recently became all too clear with the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and several
others who were Nigerian environmental and human rights activists demanding envi-
ronmental justice for the Ogoni. Their land is being destroyed by Nigeria's oil industry
which is primarily benefitting the Northern dominated military dictatorship.

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Barber, Benjamin. 1992. "Jihad vs. Mc World." Atlantic Monthly 269 (March): 53-
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Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Florini, Ann. 1996. "The Evolution of International Norms." International Studies
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Gurr, Ted Robert. 1995. "Communal Conflicts and Global Security." Current
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Hoffman, Stanley. 1959. "International Relations: The Long Road to Theory."
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Jacobson, Jodi. 1993. '"Women's Work." Foreign Sennce Journal 26-29
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Jenks, C. Wilfred. 1958. The Common Law of Mankind. New York: Praeger.

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Knorr, Klaus, and Sidney Verba, eds. 1961. The International System: Theoretical
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McCarthy Arnolds. Eileen. 1997. "Human Rights, Development, and Democracy:
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Modelski, George. 1972. Principles of World Politics. New York: The Free Press.

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Rosenau, James, ed. 1961. International Politics and Foreign Policy. New York:
The Free Press.

Stannard, David E. 1992. The American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New
World. New York: Oxford University Press.

"The Agricultural Crisis: Who's to Blame." West Africa 3728 (30 January: 5
February 1989): 136.

Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on
Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wilde, Vicki. 1994. "Gender Analysis has Crucial Role in Planning Workable
Farming Systems: W= ? + (:?." Cere5 26 (July): 28-31.

World Bank. 1989. Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Development.
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World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future.
New York: Oxford University Press.

r' I

70

Of Nuclear Energy and Acceptable Risk: The

Relevance of Social Science to Societal

Technology Choices

M. V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long
University of Oklahoma

The social sciences have become critical to understanding and im-
proving societal choices about technologies and acceptable risks. We dem-
onstrate this point through an exploration ot the rise and decline of nuclear
energy. Nuclear energy's fortunes depended crucially on social accep-
tance rather than technological merit. The nuclear energy debate legiti-
mized public participation in societal decision making about risky tech-
nologies. This led to the emergence of a multidisciplinary, social scien-
tific analysis of technology choice, broadly termed risk studies, which
examines the rejection of nuclear energy and illuminates the working of
technology choice processes generally. We trace the development of risk
studies to show how they increase our understanding of public risk per-
ceptions and their effects. Risk studies, and the social sciences they draw
upon, will continue to be critical in helping society meet the challenge of
developing participatory decision-making processes to arrive at reasoned
and legitimate choices about acceptable risk.

Introduction

Plus ga change, plus c 'est la mime chose. As society enters the new millen-
nium, at least one thing is guaranteed to remain the same society will con-
tinue to struggle with the question of acceptable risk. Technologies will con-
tinue to evolve and to transform the lives of people, as they have been doing at
an exponential pace since the industrial revolution. It is important to note, how-
ever, that the portfolio of technologies that will prevail in the marketplace of
the twenty-first century will depend not on the technologies' economic or tech-
Qical merits but on society's willingness to allow them to exist in particular
forms. How such choices are made within and among societies is
quintessentially the realm of the social sciences and the humanities.

Technology choice is inherently political. Technological change empowers
some groups within society over others and alters the nature of resource distri-

71

The Relevance of Social Science to Societal Technology Choices

bution and competition within societies (Blank 198 1 ). Technology choices also
have implications for the deeply held values of different groups in society. For
example, the choice of nuclear power as an energy source entails that society
will bequeath dangerous radioactive waste to future generations. Whether so-
ciety is willing to make such a choice depends significantly on societal values
and how they are translated into collective choices. Social scientific analysis
helps to illuminate, inform, and improve societal decision making about tech-
nology choices and acceptable risk. It also enables us to understand the diver-
sity in societal responses to these issues through its attention to the impoitance
of cultural and historical influences.

In this essay we will demonstrate the relevance of social science to technol-
ogy choices and acceptable risk in twenty-fu"st century societies through the
use of historical analogy. Our focus is on the rise and decline of nuclear power
as an energy option. Nuclear energy, while an atypical technology, is an appro-
priate example because its fortunes have ultimately depended on societal ac-
ceptability of its risks rather than its own technological merits or demerits.
Further, the challenges associated with managing nuclear energy have paved
the way for public participation in policy making, and also resulted in the emer-
gence of a new, multidisciplinaiy, social scientific analysis of technology choice,
broadly termed "risk studies."

Risk studies have been able to illuminate why nuclear energy, which once
held so much promise, is now regarded as a failed venture, particularly in the
United States. We will demonstrate that nuclear energy's decline was due in
part to the lack of attention paid to social scientific aspects of technology choice
and acceptable risk by proponents of the technology and poHcymakers. If soci-
ety is to avoid such costly policy failures in the future, it needs to develop
decision-making processes that will enable it to arrive at reasoned, participa-
tory, and legitimate choices about technologies and acceptable risks. In the
social sciences, risk studies are helping to increase our understanding of how
people perceive risks and how such decision-making processes can be created.
Risk studies are therefore critical to societal choices about technologies and
acceptable risks in the twenty-first century.

The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Energy:
The Criticality of Societal Perceptions

Nuclear energy's fate in the United States depended critically on American
society's conclusion that it presented an unacceptable level of risk. Trying to
understand why and how this occurred, nuclear safety engineer and risk ana-
lyst B. John Garrick ruefully reflects:

"The evidence is strong that nuclear power is among the safest of
the developed energy technologies in spite of the high profile ac-

72

M.V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long

cidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The problem is that a
large segment of the world population is not convinced of the
safety of nuclear power, and there is always the chance of a major
accident, however unlikely it may be. Unlike most major indus-
tries affecting our quality of life, safety has been a first priority of
nuclear power since its very beginning. Nevertheless, the "fear
anything nuclear" syndrome prevails. This is probably because of
the manner in which nuclear fission was introduced to the world,
namely as a devastating weapon of mass destruction. Of course, a
nuclear power plant is nothing like a nuclear weapon." (Garrick
1997, 329).

The "fear anything nuclear" syndrome which Ganick denigrates did not
always exist. In the 1950s, when President Eisenhower proclaimed the "Atoms
for Peace" program, there was considerable enthusiasm in United States policy
circles for nuclear energy. It was widely expected that the military origins and
role of nuclear weapons in devastating Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be re-
placed in the public mind with an appreciation for the enormous possibilities
of nuclear energy as a source of clean electricity. Indeed the early vision of
nuclear energy's future was captured in the phrase, "energy too cheap to meter."
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 heralded a new phase of nuclear energy pro-
duction by both pubhc and private sector utilities, and the industry's growth
was highly subsidized by the government. For instance, the Price-Anderson
Act of 1957 capped the industry's liability in the case of an accident; liability
in excess of the cap was to be borne by the federal government (Clarfield and
Wiecek 1984).

During the early yeais of its establishment, particularly in the 1 950s, nuclear
energy issues were managed in complete secrecy by the Atomic Energy Com-
mission (AEC). A group of "nuclear elites" including the AEC, members of
the scientific community, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic En-
ergy, and businesses seeking to capitalize on nuclear power, operated as a
"subgovemment" committed to the development of nuclear energy technolo-
gies (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). The combination of secrecy, elitism, and
a subsidized market laid the foundation for the conflict between social and
technocratic acceptability of nuclear energy.

The conflict became clear when a section of the scientific community formed
the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in reaction to their perception of the
nuclear establishment's attempt to mislead the public. This brought a match-
ing level of technical competence to nuclear energy's critics. The UCS and
ather critics utilized the Environmental Impact Statement requirements under
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to investigate nuclear safety
issues publicly and in the judicial arena, notably in the Calvert Cliffs case. In

73

The Relevance of Social Science to Societal Technology Choices

this case, the AEC had argued that it did not have to consider non-radiological
environmental impacts in its reactor permitting process. Judge Wright's piv-
otal decision in this case rebuked the AEC for attempting to evade the spirit of
NEPA and brought nuclear power under NEPA's purview (Clarfield and Wiecek
1984). The special treatment granted the nuclear energy industry finally came
to an end with the energy crisis in the 1970s, which brought nuclear energy
into the public debate about energy policy choices (Davis 1993).

The Atomic Energy Commission's reaction to public and scientific con-
cerns about the risks posed by nuclear energy, however, focused entirely on the
quantitative and technical aspects of the risks rather than on their qualitative
and social aspects. It commissioned the Reactor Safety Study in 1974, com-
monly termed WASH 1 400 or the Rasmussen Report after its lead author, which
used probabilistic risk analysis, a strict quantitative method for assessing the
risk of a technology, to show that the chances of a reactor accident were infini-
tesimal (Clarfield and Wiecek 1984). However, the Rasmussen Report was
criticized by other scientists for its technical flaws as well as for its inattention
to the possibilities of human error, and was eventually repudiated by the Nudear
Regulatory Commission in 1979 (Clarfield and Wiecek 1984).

The limitations of assessing acceptable nuclear reactor risk purely on tech-
nical or quantitative bases were later acknowledged by Rasmussen himself:

"The quantities calculated by these procedures do not include any
societal preferences for the type of risk. Since the goal of these
analyses is to produce information that might aid decision mak-
ers, and since decision makers must be responsive to public pref-
erences, clearly the information developed by the PRA falls short
of providing everything needed" (Rasmussen 1981).

This insight becomes amply clear through the case of the Three Mile Island
accident. This incident involved a failure of the coolant system at a nuclear
power plant near Hanisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. The plant was quickly
brought under control, but only after people living in the neighborhood of the
plant had been evacuated, and a small amount of radiation had escaped into the
atmosphere. These developments were sufficient to trigger significant public
alarm. Nuclear scientists were left incredulous by the public reacfion to Three
Mile Island. Hoyle and Hoyle (1980) emphasized that the radiation leakage
from that incident was less than the background level of radiation that humans
are routinely exposed to, a point reiterated by Gairick (1997). Despite the low
levels of actual exposure, the public perception of the event was that a tremen-
dous harm had been done. Policymakers responded to the public reactions to
this incident by tightening the regulatory permitting and oversight of nuclear
power plants, and by increasing safety requirements (Davis 1993). These

74

M.V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long

changes transformed the economics of nuclear power (National Research Coun-
cil 1980) and eventually crippled the industry.

Even before the Three Mile Island incident, social scientists had been work-
ing towards a better understanding of the factors which affected the public's
reaction to nuclear energy. They found that the public assessed technological
and natural hazards on a range of dimensions, including qualitative dimen-
sions which went beyond the quantitative factors expected mortality and
morbidity considered by scientists in assessing risks. These social scientists
found that:

"Nuclear power . . . had the dubious distinction of scoring at or
near the extreme on all of the characteristics associated with high
risk. Its risks were seen as involuntary, delayed, unknown, uncon-
trollable, unfamiliar, potentially catastrophic, dreaded, and severe
(certainly fatal). . . . Both electric power and X-rays were judged
much more voluntary, less catastrophic, less dreaded, and more
familiar than nuclear power" (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein
1979).

These authors further emphasized that rather than dismissing the public's
emphasis on these qualitative dimensions of risks as irrational, scientists and
policymakers should have paid attention to these factors as expressions of pub-
lic values about what levels of risks were acceptable. They also pointed out
that while some aspects of the public's reaction were due to cognitive "mis-
takes," scientists and experts were themselves as fallible, for example, by be-
ing subject to overconfidence in their own analytic results (Slovic, Fischhoff,
and Lichtenstein 1979). The search for better techniques for societal decision
making about acceptable risks led to the exploration of alternative decision-
making mechanisms which would integrate and legitimize public participa-
tion, perceptions, and values (Fischhoff et al. 1981). This was, and remains,
essentially a social scientific undertaking.

The Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union in 1986 had an even
more deleterious effect on public opinion. It resulted in the loss of about thirty
lives, radiation and bum injuries to about three hundred people, and the evacu-
ation of 45,000 residents from the vicinity of the site, making it the world's
worst nuclear power accident (Garrick 1997). The radiation from the accident
was first noticed in Sweden, as the closed nature of the former Soviet regime
ensured that the accident initially was kept a secret. According to Garrick (1997,
333), the Chernobyl incident "has left a scar from which the nuclear power
industry may never recover." The factors underlying the public's fear of nuclear
power risks involuntariness, catastrophic potential, severity, and dread are
all demonstrably highlighted in the Chernobyl accident. These fears also were

75

The Relevance of Social Science to Societal Technology Choices

enhanced by the mistmst in the Soviet government's lack of openness and
inabihty to manage technologies safely, and led to concerns that the morbidity
and mortality figures cited by the Soviet government might have underesti-
mated the true impact of Chernobyl.

Another major issue which has made nuclear energy an unacceptable risk
to society is that of waste disposal. Nuclear waste is a problem because it
contains material which will remain radioactive and dangerous to health for
thousands of years. Further, the reprocessing of wastes can enable the manu-
facture of nuclear weapons, and this has raised concerns over security. The
waste issue was not given sufficient attention during the years when civihan
nuclear power was being enthusiastically developed. Writing in the immediate
aftermath of Three Mile Island, Schurr et al. (1979) conveyed the prevailing
scientific optimism that geologic disposal techniques then being investigated
would be able to safely isolate wastes for time immemorial, especially given
that the total volume of wastes generated through 2000 would be less than one
hundred acre-feet (Schurr et al. 1979). "Nevertheless," they concede, "fadure
to develop a feasible waste-disposal plan is one of the major failures of current
U.S. nuclear policy" (Schurr et al. 1979, 356). This policy failure has more to
do with the politics of nuclear waste than with the technical and scientific
aspects of nuclear waste disposal (Easterling and Kunreuther 1995).

Governmental efforts to site a nuclear waste repository have demonstrated
that siting hinges critically on questions of trust in government and risk man-
agement agencies as well as procedural and distributional equity. Distribu-
tional equity concerns the benefits and costs associated with such risky facih-
ties which accrue to different groups in society. When the potential host com-
munity perceives itself as bearing an unjust burden, there will be opposition to
siting. Procedural equity focuses on the fairness of the processes used to arrive
at the decision over the siting of a noxious facility. These processes should be
regarded by all participants as fair, consistent, respectful of the rights of all
concerned parties, and as providing opportunities for participatory decision
making (Vaughan 1995). If the procedure used to arrive at the choice of a host
community for the repository is regarded as unfair, significant opposition will
result.

Easterling and Kunreuther (1995) state that the public does not trust the
federal government to build and operate a waste management facility safely.
Further, the process utilized by the government to find a waste disposal site has
raised questions about procedural equity. Congress, thi"ough the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act and its amendments, decided on Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the
sole site to be considered for a permanent waste disposal facility. This site was
chosen more because of Nevada's lack of political clout than because Yucca
Mountain presented the best site on technical grounds. This outcome has also

76

M.V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long

been criticized as unfair on distributional equity grounds, because most of the
nuclear waste is generated by power plants in the eastern United States while
the waste disposal efforts are focused on the western United States (Easterling
and Kunreuther 1995). Finally, the parallel governmental effort at finding a
temporary Monitored Retrievable Storage facility for nuclear waste through a
voluntary siting process has floundered, after the only potential volunteers turned
out to be Native American tribes, raising charges of "environmental racism"
(Gowda and Easterling 1997).

Fundamentally, the lack of attention to the social dimensions of the risks
associated with nuclear energy has led to its stagnation and eventual decline in
the United States. Baumgartner and Jones (1993) flatly state that by 1974,
nuclear power production was "dead" as an option. Rosa and Freudenburg
(1993) point out that no new civilian nuclear reactors have been ordered since
1978. Further, all orders for nuclear reactors placed between 1974-78 have
been canceled (Kraft, Rosa, and Dunlap 1993). This decline can be traced to
the transformation of the economics of nuclear power that has resulted from
the acknowledgment of public concerns and from the inability of society to
agree on a location for nuclear waste disposal (National Research Council 1980).

Social scientific analysis thus helps us understand why and how American
society has opposed nuclear power and made it an unacceptable technology.
Yet, in spite of the problems faced by the nuclear power industry in the United
States, as Garrick (1997) points out, other countries have high levels of nuclear
power usage, reflecting the relative acceptability of this risk in those countries.
For example, nearly 70% of the energy in France and Belgium, 50% in Swe-
den and Switzerland, and more than 40% in Korea and Taiwan is generated
from nuclear power plants, compared to only about 20% in the United States
(Garrick 1997). Whether and why these countries and their people choose to
accept the risks of nuclear power are questions that do not have technical an-
swers alone, but also need the insight and understanding generated by social
scientific analysis.

III. The Search for Acceptable Risk:
The Development of Risk Studies

Nuclear energy's history in the United States illustrates what can happen
when risk managers and policymakers do not consider social perceptions of
risk. The ABC News-Louis Harris and Associates polls and Cambridge Re-
ports have shown repeatedly since the early 1980s that despite assurances of
minimal technical risk, nuclear power is viewed as a largely unacceptable risk
in the United States (Rosa and Freudenburg 1993). It was in response to and in
conjunction with public reactions to nuclear energy that risk studies have
emerged and evolved as a field of study.

77

T.eRe.evaceofSocia,Sc,ece,oSocie,a,TecHo,,,CH,ce. '

When nuclear energy was introduced, policymakers and experts typically
assessed technologies and risks on the basis of their technical or scientific
properties to determine what could be considered to be "safe enough." By 1969,
economist Chauncey Starr had recognized the limits of a risk assessment that
neglected the social aspects of risk. Starr (1969) wrote that it is not enough to
consider only the technical aspects of risk. Rather, social perceptions of risk
are important in determining what will be accepted by society. StaiT tried to
understand why some technologies are accepted and others are not by examin-
ing historical records of accidental deaths associated with technological devel-
opment. Starr suggested that the level of a certain risk present at a given time
revealed the amount of that risk that was socially acceptable. This "revealed
preference" could then be analyzed to help understand what determines social
acceptability.

StaiT found that the public accepts voluntary risks at a higher rate than
involuntary risks. When the individual has control of exposure to the risk, she/
he is more likely to accept a higher level of exposure. Further, Starr found that
the catastrophic potential of the risk impacts the acceptance of the risk. The
more catastrophic the threat, the less likely the public is to accept the risk. In
the nuclear power saga, this point is particularly clear.

Starr's work opened the door on a new way of thinking about risks in soci-
ety, because it emphasized the importance of trying to understand social per-
ceptions of risk. But Starr's work has been criticized as mistakenly equating
the risks present in society with risks acceptable to society. Critics argue that
simply because there is currently a specific level of risk associated with a given
technology does not mean that that level of risk is acceptable. Society may feel
that there is too much exposure to a certain risk but may not know of any way
to reduce the risk.

In an effort to try to move toward an understanding of what is acceptable,
psychologists Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein (1979)
focused on asking people what they considered to be acceptable risks. This
approach thus went beyond Starr's focus on revealed preferences about ac-
ceptable risk by focusing instead on the preferences people explicitly expressed
regarding risks and their acceptability. Psychometric studies present subjects
with a set of risks and gather information regarding the subjects' knowledge
and ratings of those risks on different dimensions, such as controllability, fa-
miliarity, and dread.

These studies have found that two main factors, "dread risk" and "unknown
risk," are particularly potent in impacting individuals' acceptance of risk. Dread
risk involves factors of risk such as controllability, voluntariness, dread, cata-
strophic potential, impact on future generations, irreversibility, and fatal con-
sequences. Risks that are more "dreaded" are less acceptable to individuals.

78

M.V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long

Jnknown risks are those which are new, difficult to observe, and which have
ong latency periods. The more unknown the effects of the risk, the lower the
evel of acceptance of that risk. The distribution of risks and benefits, trust in
he risk-generating and risk-managing institutions, and media coverage of risk-
elated situations also have been found to significantly impact the way risks
ire perceived and the degree to which they are accepted by society.

While psychometric studies at the individual level try to determine why
isks are accepted or rejected, this approach does not provide much informa-
ion about why individuals react differently at different times, to different haz-
ird related events, or from one another. The theory of the social amplification
)f risk attempts to answer these questions. Social amplification theory sug-
gests that risks are amplified or attenuated as hazard-related events interact
vith psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes (Kasperson
1992). If a hazard-related event touches a social or psychological nerve, that
5vent may lead to significantly decreased or increased acceptance of the risk
nvolved. Certain individuals and groups in society act as amplification or at-
enuation stations by collecting information about risks and then distributing
hat information in a manner consistent with their goals. A tobacco company
nay act as an attenuation station by distributing information that minimizes
he perceived risk of smoking. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency may act as
;ither an attenuation or an amplification station by distributing information on
luclear power. The essential element of social amplification theory is that the
iegree to which a risk is accepted in society is affected by and can be changed
)y agents that successfully elicit psychological, institutional, social, or cul-
ural responses in the public.

There are clear examples of the social amplification of risk throughout the
listory of nuclear power. The incident at Three Mile Island is a particularly
/ivid example. Despite the fact that experts released information stating that
he amount of radiation that had escaped was minimal, the risk was amplified
hrough the media and by anti-nuclear groups in such a manner that the risk
vas perceived as being significant to the public. The opposition to the siting of
luclear waste facilities is another such example. There is now such a stigma
ittached to waste disposal facilities that the risk is significantly amplified in
he eyes of the public.

The recognition that risks are amplified and attenuated in society has been
;een as having significant policy potential by psychometric theorists. If public
perceptions of risk can be impacted by the delivery of information as risk am-
jlification theory suggests, or if people are reacting to qualitative aspects of
isk, as the psychometric approach suggests, then it should be possible to pro-
/ide people with information about what experts consider the risks to really be
md the public should then no longer "misinterpret" or "act inappropriately"

79

The Relevance of Social Science to Societal Technology Choices

with regard to these lisks. Risk communication theory emerged as an approach
to enable risks to be intentionally attenuated through the provision of relevant
information so that society could move toward identifying acceptable risk (Na-
tional Research Council 1989).

In the management of nuclear energy in the United States, the influence of
risk communication theory can be seen. Experts geared up to make informa-
tion available to the public once it became clear that there was widespread
resistance to the technology. These experts believed that if they could take
away the uncertainty by providing people with the "correct" information re-
garding the level of risk associated with nuclear power, they could thereby take
away the hesitancy to accept the technology. Yet this type of communication
strategy has not been particularly effective in winning acceptability for nuclear
power.

Bradbury (1989) has leveled significant criticism at this type of communi-
cation. Risk communication, when detlned as a one-way delivery of narrowly
conceived information, is not a workable policy solution to problems of risk
acceptance. It often tends to downplay people's values and treats laypeople^s
ignorant. It is therefore not often successful in addressing concerns that arise
from those values. Communication "conceived in the limited sense of the [risk]
manager's ability to explain risk concepts clearly" (Bradbury 1989, 387) is not
effective in changing people's understanding or acceptance of risks. Rather
than focusing on expert-to-public communication, society needs to evolve demo-
cratic decision-making procedures that involve pubhc input and integrate pub-
lic concerns.

Legitimizing public viewpoints is critical to societal decision making be-
cause lisks are essentially socially constructed. Anthropologist Mary Douglas
and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky argue that people's differing percep-
tions of risk are related to individuals' social and cultural contexts and their
view of their place in the world (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). These social
and political contexts are important to understanding how and why individuals
accept risk as they do. Dake (1992) classifies people based on their attitudes
towards social and political issues, which he terms worldviews. He argues that
people's reactions to risk and their choices about acceptable risks and risk
management strategies are derived from these worldviews.

At the societal level, Jasanoff (1990) suggests that political factors also
strongly influence the ways in which risks are perceived and accepted. Jasanoff
found marked differences between the level of acceptance of the biotechnol-
ogy industry in the United States and Germany. Higher levels of pollutants in
rivers and lakes that are legally acceptable in Canada are unacceptable just
across the border in the United States even in the same rivers and lakes.
Jasanoff attributes these differences in levels of acceptability of risk to differ-

80

M.V. Rajeev Gowda and Paula Owsley-Long

ent social and political traditions in the various nations. In the United States,
high levels of political competition combine with greater access to the legal
system and more scientific pluralism to generate very different policy responses
than are seen elsewhere. Jasanoff 's insights suggest rationales that explain why
there are such different levels of nuclear power usage in different nations.

The variations in responses and definitions of acceptable risk across na-
tions are themselves changing. The global nature of the economy, the increas-
ing ease of the international exchange of information, and the transnational
nature of many environmental problems make international communication
and coordination ever more complicated. Understanding the ways in which
political and social factors influence defmitions of acceptability of risk is there-
fore becoming ever more difficult, and important. The work of social scientists
will enable us to understand better the social and cultural factors that affect the
acceptability of risk. The lesson from the American experience with nuclear
energy is clear: the social acceptability of a specific risk must be considered in
the pursuit of developing the technology that presents that risk.

While research in risk studies has enhanced our understanding about what
factors are important in determining societal acceptance of risk, there are a
number of challenges that are yet to be addressed fully. New concerns are
arising over aspects of equity in the distribution of risks. One such concern is
about environmental justice. Significant research suggests that communities
of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other minority groups are ex-
posed to environmental hazards at much higher rates than whites (Bryant 1995;
Bullard 1993). In the nuclear waste context, the possibility that Native Ameri-
can tribes may serve as hosts for a temporary nuclear waste repository has
raised these concerns (Gowda and Easterling 1997). Concerns over environ-
mental justice have transformed the perception of the risks in communities of
color and led to a decreased acceptance of risk in these communities. In the
future, risk studies will need to pay attention to the way the distribution of
equity impacts the social acceptance of risk.

Another challenge facing social scientists is to develop decision-making
processes which will integrate analysis and deliberation and genuinely involve
expert and public perspectives on risks. Deliberation is important to encourage
participation of all relevant groups early in the process of defining acceptable
risk (Stem and Fineberg 1986). Interest groups must be identified and pro-
vided with the resources needed to make them vital players in the process. Yet
how to determine which individuals or groups have a legitimate interest in the
process and how to find ways to help them participate are issues that must be
resolved.

The appropriate role of experts and technical assessments of risk must also
be defined. Expert views and technical assessments should not be privileged as

The Relevance of Social Science to Societal Technology Choices

the sole claimants to "truth," as experts are fallible and scientific knowledge is
often incomplete. As sociologist William Freudenburg (1992) has found, ex-
perts often make poor decisions because they are overly confident in their abil-
ity to foresee all possible ways a technology may fail. The systems with which
they are involved tend to be very complex with many interrelated components,
and even experts are often unable to foresee the consequences of these systems
interacting with one another. Experts even fall victim to such human errors
such as miscalculations in the production of their estimates of risk. Further,
Freudenburg points out, statistical estimations of events with very low prob-
abilities the area in which many of society's risks fall are particularly vul-
nerable to error.

Freudenburg (1992) suggests that even though there may be no conscious

effort on the part of experts to minimize risk, social preferences and statistical

uncertainty often lead to that result. He further posits that this can lead to a

lack of confidence in expert predictions. The lack of confidence can then lead

't to a societal backlash and accompanying amplification of the risk in society.

;' This seems to be a possible explanation for what is happening with nucle^ar

power. While experts continue to argue that nuclear energy production is a

] I low-risk endeavor, past incidents have led to a distrust of the risk estimates and

therefore a lower level of public acceptance of the risk.
[. Yet even though experts are fallible and perhaps mistrusted, they surely

:; play an important role in determining how risky a technology is. They have a

special kind of knowledge. But to what degree should that type of knowledge
be privileged? How can other types of information from other interested groups
be included? Is the cunent process of determining risks capable of adapting to
new demands for consideration of deliberation, equity, and information or is a
^' new process needed? The challenge for risk studies as a discipline and the

;> social sciences in general is to look for the answers to these questions so that

] society will not be as likely to face the failure of promising technologies in the

' future. In grappling with new technologies in the twenty-first century, societ-

ies will have to pay attention to the social responses to those technologies,
because in this aspect lies the key to the technologies' success.

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for the Risk Communication Process." Risk Analysis 15:169-180.

Health Care Policy in the U.S.:
A Social Science Perspective

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

Auburn University

This paper seeks to demonstrate the continued value and vahdity of
social science by applying it to an important field of public policy
health care, where both liberal and conservative packages of refomas went
down to politically costly defeat during the mid 1990s. In particular, we
apply a social science conceptualization of policy-making to indicate the
difficulties in policy-making about health care. Moreover, an analysis of
public opinion shows that neither the liberal nor the conservative approach
is in step with popular desires. A possible way out of this impasse is
suggested, though, by another social science data set on comparative na-
fional health care statisfics which finds that the U.S. health care system is
both much more privatized and much less cost efficient than those of
other developed nafions, thereby pointing the way toward a variety of
reforms.

The new millennium of the 21st century promises to be exciting and chal-
lenging for the United States with considerable economic and social change
widely expected. However, predictions about what is in store for us run a huge
gamut from the very optimistic visions of new technologies, greater prosper-
ity, and creative jobs to the very pessimistic predictions of increasing inequal-
ity and social discontent as good paying semi-skilled jobs migrate overseas.
Moreover, the harsh economic competition which globalization has brought is
widely perceived to have undercut the power of governments to use social
policies to ameliorate the effects market-driven inequality (Barber 1995; Ohmae
1990; Strange 1996; Teeple 1995). The early 21st century also promises to be
a challenging one for social science as well. Within academia, the conven-
tional theory and practice of social science is being increasingly challenged by
"postmodernism." In the arena of public policy, moreover, social science tech-
niques have become widely used in policy formation and evaluation (Dye 1984;
Oh 1996). Yet, the momentous economic and perhaps political changes that
are currently under way challenge "business as usual" in government as well.

85

Health Care Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective

This paper examines the role that a social science approach might play in
health care reform in the United States. Health care has been a central political
issue in the mid 1990s with first Democratic President Bill Clinton and then
Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposing widespread re-
forms whose defeat evidently hurt their parties at the next elections (1994 and
1996 respectively). We argue that these failures were not preordained. Rather,
they occurred because each was based on prevailing ideological stereotypes. A
more objective approach to health care policy based on objective social sci-
ence techniques, in contrast, might well produce more acceptable and effective
policies.

The paper is divided into five sections. The first describes the dominant
social science approach used in policy-making and the challenge that has been
directed at it by postmodernism. The second provides an overview of the po-
tential health care crisis in the United States as the 21st century approaches
and indicates how the social science approach provides a valuable overview of
it. Two case studies then show how sets of simple social science data can be
brought to bear upon central questions in health policy. Finally, the conclusion
argues that a social science perspective is valuable for analyzing the options in
health care reform.

I. A Social Science Perspective on Policy-Making

Social science as a self-conscious field can be traced back at least to the
work of Max Weber which assumed that the study of social and political life
should be modeled on the "scientific method" that had proved so successful in
the physical sciences. That is, phenomena should be subjected to rigorous and
objective observation; explanations for these phenomena could ultimately be
made in terms of "law-like" relationships based on statistical and correlational
analysis; and work in the social sciences should approximate as closely as
possible the experimental technique of the "hard" sciences with its emphasis
upon deductive hypothesis-testing as the central process for advancing knowl-
edge. In short, the social sciences are built upon "objective" observations and
laws which are valid and reliable because they are based on the "scientific
method" which is often termed "logical positivism." For most of the twen-
tieth century, then, the development of the social sciences consisted of the twin
processes of 1 ) adumbrating these principles with greater sophistication and
clarity and 2) using the scientific method to produce increasingly better obser-
vations and more inclusive laws about social phenomena (Babbie 1992;
Bernstein 1988; Hempel 1965; Hoover and Donovan 1995; Popper 1972; We-
ber 1949).

The twentieth century has also witnessed a fundamental change in public
policy-making in the sense that "objective social science" is now seen as play-

86

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

ing a central role in formulating, justifying, and evaluating governmental poli-
cies. This growing relevancy of the social sciences for policy-making repre-
sents the culmination of five significant transformations in American political
and academic life. The first two, which occurred in the first third of the twen-
tieth century, were the Progressive program of reforming government through
administration by "scientific management" and the considerable expansion of
federal activities into social policies during the New Deal. The next two oc-
curred somewhat later, but were consolidated by the end of World War II. One
was the "professionalization" of social science research; and the other was the
application to government policy-making of the "analytic perspective" de-
composing problems or issues into smaller components and evaluating each
specific alternative (e.g., cost-benefit analysis). Finally, the 1960s and 1970s
witnessed the full-fledged development of a distinct field of "policy science"
as the application of social science theories and techniques to governmental
policy-making and evaluation.

Policy analysis combines several different types of theoretical and empiri-
cal endeavors associated with social science. It is perhaps most closely associ-
ated with "empirical description," that is, using objective data, usually quanti-
fied indicators, to describe social situations and policy outcomes. Yet, such
description by itself is usually not sufficient for policy-making. Developing a
policy almost always depends upon not just describing a situation, but also
entails providing an explanation for it in what is called "empirical theory." For
example, the welfare policy that would be advocated would vary greatly de-
pending upon whether an analyst subscribes to the conservative theory that
Great Society Programs engendered "welfare dependency" or to the liberal
theory that the flight of manufacturing from urban centers created large pock-
ets of "endemic poverty" (Dunn 1994; Dye 1984; Gredler 1996; Oh 1996).

Mainstream social science, however, has faced a growing challenge from a
variety of theoretical perspectives that may be grouped together under the ru-
bric "postmodernism." Postmodernism denies the validity of the presumed "sci-
entific foundation" of social analysis. In particular, postmodernists argue that
social science's proclaimed "objectivism" is illusionary and that its concern
with "method" leads it to ignore vital social phenomena, thus biasing its re-
sults and arguments. Thus, postmodernists see social inquiry as of necessity
involving "relativism" far more than "objectivism."

According to postmodernists, understanding of complex social phenomena
by both participants and scholars is almost always incomplete because their
actual meaning and significance are often highly dependent upon cultural and
historical circumstances. Thus, scholars must engage in "interpretation" rather
than the mechanical application of objective laws. Such interpretations, more-
over, must be somewhat problematic and influenced by the perspective of the

87

Health Care Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective

analyst; so that they are "contestable" in the sense that different scholars may
reach quite different conclusions, as seen in literary "deconstruction." More
fundamentally, postmodernism also tends to be "critical theory." It argues that
social science's limitation to the easily observable means that it misses the
"deep structures" of a society and economy which shape social life, almost
inevitably in ways that are biased toward the powerful (Bernstein 1988; Brown
1995; Cantor 1997; Foucault 1972; Gibbons 1987; Habermas 1988; Kelly 1994;
Yeatman 1994).

There are two distinct responses to the postmodernist critique of mainstream
social science. One is to view social science and postmodernism as incompat-
ible alternative approaches and to pick the alternative that appears to be the
more reasonable. The other is to accept the critique in terms of the general
limits that it posits on social science techniques and theory. Rather than reject-
ing social science out of hand, however, social science can be applied to pro-
vide more nuanced conclusions. In particular, if distinctions are made between
direct observation and statistical interpretation, on the one hand, and interpre-
tation and normative positions, on the other, the advantages of both perspec-
tives may be gained. In the following sections, we briefly discuss health care
policy in the United States to illustrate such an approach.

II. Health Care in the U.S.: Creeping Crisis, Ideological
Stereotypes, and Growing Gridlock

For most of the postwar era, the health care system in the United States
appeared to perform quite well. The U.S. was considered the world leader in
medicine and health care and almost certainly had the most extensive network
of high quality medical facilities in the world. Health care was financed by
private insurance purchased by corporations and individuals which threatened
to leave many uncovered and, consequently, quite limited to publicly provided
health care. The Great Society programs of the 1960s, though, extended cover-
age to the elderly (Medicare) and many of the poor (Medicaid). Still, access to
the health care system remained more unequal than in many other developed
nations which had more universal welfare states, thus accounting for America's
somewhat poorer performance than most OECD countries on measures of ag-
gregate health care outcomes, such as infant mortality and life expectancy (see
Appendix 3).

During the 1980s, however, the system came under increasing strain from
sharply rising health costs. Health's share of GNP, for example, rose from 9. 1 %
in 1980 to 14.0% in 1992 and 14.5% in 1995 (OECD 1996). This rapid rise set
off what might be called a "vicious cycle." As prices increased, some busi-
nesses and individuals could no longer afford insurance, and the federal gov-
ernment limited Medicare and Medicaid payments. For example, the propor-

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

tion of Americans covered by employer health insurance fell from 70% in the
early 1970s to 50% in the late 1990s. In turn, health care providers increased
their charges to those with full insurance to cover the treatment of indigents
and make up for decreased Medicare/Medicaid payments. It obviously did not
take very sophisticated projections to calculate that this vicious cycle could
not continue indefinitely before the system broke down. Indeed, many Ameri-
cans applied such social science reasoning and began to fear that health care
would soon become unaffordable for even many in the middle class (Greenberg
and lezzoni 1995; Johnson and Broder 1996; Mueller 1993; Patel and Rushefsky
1995; Walker 1996). The prevalent social science conceptualization of the
policy-making process indicates why these growing financial strains pushed
health care to the top of the political agenda in the United States. As sketched
in the top portion of Appendix 1, public policies emerge from some combina-
tion of negotiations and conflict among the "stakeholders" (i.e., those who are
affected by the policy in question). The stakeholders, in turn, base their posi-
tions and goals on their perceptions of the "policy environment" or the social,
economic, and political factors that impinge upon their interests. After enact-
ment, the policies produce social and economic changes, sometimes intended
and sometimes not, called "policy outcomes." If the policy outcomes are large
enough they may well then change the policy environment significantly, thereby
setting off a new round of policy-making (Dunn 1994; Dye 1984).

This model certainly indicates why health care has the potential to become
a high priority issue in U.S. politics (see the bottom portion of Appendix 1).
The stakeholders include most members of society, sometimes in several ca-
pacities. The direct providers (e.g., hospitals, physicians, and related clinics
and professions) constitute a major industry in themselves which accounts for
one-seventh of the U.S. GNP. Almost all Americans are their consumers; and
health is seen as a central concern of the elderly through their powerful lobby-
ing group the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). In addition,
beyond individuals, businesses that provide employee health insurance and all
levels of government spend large amounts of money on health. If this were not
enough, insurance companies and the legal profession (i.e., skyrocketing mal-
practice insurance) play an important intermediary role between providers and
consumers; and taxpayers and businesses that do not provide health insurance
also have a financial stake in health care policy.

While the model presented in Appendix 1 explains why health care might
emerge as an important issue, it also implies that it would be quite difficult to
make major reforms in the health care system for two distinct reasons. First,
the stakeholders include a wide array of powerful interest groups with con-
flicting financial stakes in the health care system. Consequently, agreement
among them on who should bear the inevitable costs of change would appear

Health Care Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective

unlikely; and, in the absence of agreement, many of the groups had enough
political resources to probably prevent drastic change. Thus, a priori, one would
expect the social science model of "policy by muddling through" (Lindblom
1959) to be applicable to American health care politics in the 1990s.

Second, the two major political parties in the U.S. have very different nor-
mative and ideological positions toward social services, such as health care.
Democrats generally support the liberal position that government, as the rep-
resentative of society as a whole, has the responsibility to ensure equal treat-
ment and the meeting of "basic human needs" for all citizens. Republicans, in
sharp contrast, argue that government is inefficient and wasteful, so that the
private free-market economy can deliver services better than a "bloated bu-
reaucracy." These positions, of course, reflect a number of conflicting norma-
tive beliefs about government, business, poor people, and so on. Social science
cannot make choices among competing normative claims, but it can predict
that such conflicting perspectives can create "ideological blinders" that will
make policy-making much harder.

Indeed, the debate over health care during 1993-1996 produced all of the
elements suggested above. When Bill Clinton was elected President, he put
health care reform at the top of his agenda in response to public support for
reform. Clinton began with the "liberal project" of expanding services by pro-
viding medical insurance for many of those not already covered. The Clinton
plan hoped to pay for this by reducing medical costs through restructuring the
health care system. This proposal, however, provoked major opposition based
on fears that it was too costly, involved too much intervention by the federal
government, and threatened to disrupt the successful parts of the health care
system.

The failure of the Clinton initiative almost certainly played a significant
role in the Republicans' capturing both houses of Congress in 1994. Yet, the
garlands of victory proved to rest very uneasily on Republican brows when
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich took the Republican victory as a mandate
for downsizing government, including substantial cuts in Social Security and
Medicare. This also provoked an outburst of popular opposition, especially
among the elderly; and the Democrats' "Mediscare" campaign is widely cred-
ited with helping Clinton win re-election in a surprisingly easy campaign in
1996 (Johnson and Broder 1996; Mueller 1993; Patel and Rushefsky 1995;
Walker 1996).

The "gridlock" in public policy resulting from the clashing interests among
political parties and organized interest groups (Johnson and Broder 1996;
Kemper and Novak 1994) did little to help the corporate sector whose gener-
ous health care packages for their employees were being strained by rapidly
rising costs. Business responded, not by dropping health care coverage, but by

90

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

using its market power to limit increases in health costs. The way in which this
was done was extremely ironic since the private sector picked the same mecha-
nism that first Clinton and then Gingrich had advocated a "managed care"
system in which a set fee was paid for annual health services rather than the
traditional "fee for service" system without success. In contrast, the busi-
ness community simply used its market power to force workers to accept man-
aged care programs and insurance companies (who passed the pressure on to
hospitals and physicians) to hold costs constant. It is estimated, for instance,
that by the year 2000 four out of five Americans will be under the rubric of the
managed care system (Anders 1996; Callahan and David 1995; De Sa and
Staiger 1995).

On one level, the changes in the U.S. health care system during the 1990s
could be taken to constitute a successful instance of "muddling through." The
switch to managed care stabilized rising costs (e.g., as noted above health spend-
ing as a share of GNP leveled off after 1992); and the sense of crisis that ex-
isted a few years ago has become muted. Yet, the social science technique of
projecting current trends into the future suggests that "all is far from quiet on
the health front" for several reasons. First, the system will almost certainly be
challenged by the exploding health needs of the aging baby boom generafion.
Second, the fundamental problem of what to do about the forty million Ameri-
cans who are not insured has not even been addressed and has probably been
exacerbated by the pressure of managed care to resist the conventional "cost-
shifdng" of indigent care by charging those with insurance higher premiums.
Third, complaints about managed care's refusal to pay for the "best" treatment
are growing as well. All these trends, then, suggest that "muddling through" is
just delaying the day of reckoning.

III. The Inappropriateness of Ideological Stereotypes:
What Americans Want in Health Care

The failure of both the Clinton and Gingrich initiatives in health care sug-
gests that their conventional ideological stereotypes about the role of govern-
ment in providing public services may be out of step with the views of U.S.
citizens. This section, hence, tests this hypothesis by examining a set of social
science data a large scale survey of the American public conducted at the
time of the 1994 elections.

Bill Clinton came close to betdng (and losing) his presidency on the as-
sumption that Americans supported the "liberal project" of using government
programs to expand popular access to the health care system. This was not
seemingly a blind gamble. At the time of the 1992 elections more than three
times as many Americans (59% to 17%) believed that Clinton could do a better
job of making health care more affordable than George Bush {National Elec-

91

Health Care Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective

tion Study Codebook 1992, 417). Two years later, after Clinton's failure to get
his health care plan accepted and the Republican takeover of Congress in the
1994 elections confirmed the fallacy of this assumption. Newt Gingrich bet the
Republican ascendancy on the assumption that, if Americans rejected the lib-
eral approach, they must staunchly support the "conservative project" of re-
ducing government involvement in health. However, the 1996 presidential re-
turns indicated that this presumption was fallacious as well.

Public opinion data from the National Election Study in 1994, which are
presented in Appendix 2, confirm this image that neither Clinton's liberal ap-
proach nor Gingrich's conservative one was what the American public really
wanted. The top of the table shows an America at one with the Republicans'
Contract with America. Clinton's health policy was quite unpopular as nearly
two-thirds of all Americans disapproved of it (in contrast to the slender majori-
ties who approved of Clinton's overall performance and economic policies).
This presumably stemmed from the fact that most Americans had health insur-
ance and felt fairly satisfied with the health care that they were receiving. In
fact, much more sophisticated statistical analysis not reported here shows that
health care was the one specific issue that affected voting for House candidates
in 1994 even after partisanship and demographic characteristics are controlled
(Clark and McEldowney 1997). Moreover, the public was certainly not in a
pro-government mood as large majorities believed that their country was "on
the wrong track," was quite distrustful of government, and believed that the
federal government wastes lots of tax money.

While this facet of public opinion explains the Republican victory in 1994,
the bottom half of the table suggests that a "Clinton's Revenge" might be lurk-
ing for Gingrich if he tried to apply the Contract with America in the field of
health care. For example, Americans were almost evenly divided over whether
the private sector or the federal government should have primary responsibil-
ity for providing health insurance. In addition, well over a third no longer be-
lieved that they could afford health care; and almost a third said that they put
off health care because it was too costly. In fact, despite very strong satisfac-
tion with personal health care (75%), only 36% of Americans expressed satis-
faction with the U.S. health care system as a whole. As a result, despite their
disapproval of the Clinton plan, Americans still believed that Democrats were
better able to solve the health care problem than Republicans by a margin of
nearly two-to-one (41% to 22%). Moreover, the improving economy of 1995
and 1996 did little, if anything, to allay these feelings of unease. In the summer
of 1996, for example, approximately half of Americans believed that the health
care system was getting worse; and just under three-quarters believed that health
costs and insurance coverage were becoming bigger problems (Kaiser-Harvard
Program 1996),

92

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

In short, these social science data show that people seemingly wanted fun-
damental change in the system. They just did not want the change proposed in
the Clinton Plan. Furthermore, Americans were quite liberal in the sense that
they strongly supported more governmental spending on health care, despite
their desire for less government services in general and aversion to specific
areas of social spending, such as welfare. Even more surprisingly perhaps,
Americans did not extend their antipathy toward taxes to health care as 60%
favored raising taxes to improve health care and education and 70% opposed
cutting health care and education spending to reduce the deficit. Clearly, there-
fore, the American public viewed health care much differently from the lib-
eral-conservative dichotomy that Clinton and Gingrich represented.

An examination of U.S. public opinion, in sum, explains why both liberal
and conservative programs went down to defeat the ideological stereotypes
that they held concerning health care clashed with basic desires of the Ameri-
can people. Both the Democrats and Republicans, in addition, appear to have
been good social scientists in one respect and rather poor ones in another. Both
sides were quite effective at marshalling the relevant public opinion data and
using it in devising "marketing strategies" to maximize opposition to the other's
program. Conversely, both failed miserably at marketing their own programs.
Thus, health care provides a good illustration of how social science data are
used (and misused) in public policy-making.

IV. The U.S. Health Care System in Comparative Perspective:
Do Americans Want "Pie in the Sky"?

While the examination of public opinion about health care in the previous
section may explain recent health care politics in the United States, however, it
does little to point the way toward policy reform. Seemingly, the American
public wants a strong social welfare net in the area of health, but does not want
to give the government the power or resources to provide it. Before concluding
that Americans are doomed to be frustrated in the area of health care policy,
however, it is instructive to analyze another set of social science data statis-
tics comparing the health care system of the United States with those of other
advanced industrial nations.

The Clinton and Gingrich plans both implicitly accepted the social science
theory that a trade-off exists between the extension of access to health care, on
the one hand, and the quality and efficiency of health care, on the other. The
welfare state and socialized medicine, thus, can provide cheap and inclusive
health care, but almost inevitably only at a considerable cost. The health care
system becomes overly bureaucratic and highly inefficient, while strong in-
centives for overutilization are created. The undesirable results include low
quality health care and long waits for medical treatment unless there is an

93

Health Care Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective

acute emergency. Conversely, a more privatized system should result in high
quality health care that is rationed by price rather than by queue, thereby be-
coming much more cost efficient. Presumably, in such a system some of the
poorer members of society forego the health care that they would receive if the
state subsidized their consumption of it (Evans 1990; Klein 1995).

Before we accept this theory or explanation, though, a brief review of health
care statistics from the developed world would seem in order. Appendix 3 pre-
sents the health care profiles of the developed (OECD) nations sorted by GNP
per capita since health care systems and health outcomes are presumed to be
better in wealthier societies. Indeed, just eyeballing the data indicates that richer
countries have lower infant mortality rates (INFMORT), more health facilities
as indicated by hospital beds per 1,000 population (HOSPBEDS) and physi-
cian contacts per capita (PHYSCON), and higher levels of health spending
both on a per capita basis and relative to GDP. In contrast, the state's share of
total health spending (PUBHLTH) in a specific nation has little association
with its level of affluence. Evaluating the stereotype of the United States, though,
produces more ambiguous results. The U.S. does, as expected, have by far the
most privatized health care system in the developed world. The public sector
in America finances only 42% of health care expenditures, compared to 62%
in the next lowest country (Portugal) and the median of 79% in the developed
world. Such a privatized system should, according to conventional economic
theory, be efficient in holding down costs. For example, America's ratio of
hospital beds to population is only slighUy over half the median for the devel-
oped world, while the number of physician contacts (as well as the ratio of
physicians to the population) is just about average, suggesting that the Ameri-
can system cuts down on unnecessary visits to the doctor and especially on
costly hospital stays. In contrast, this limited access might well be expected to
produce some poorer overall health outcomes. Indeed, the infant mortality rate
in the U.S. (10.0 per 1,000 live births) is significantly above the median of 8.1
and is only exceeded in three much poorer countries (New Zealand, Greece,
and Portugal); and exactly the same situation exists in many other indicators of
health care outcomes not included in Appendix 3, such as life expectancy and
the percentage of low weight babies (Schieber et al 1991 ), implying that not all
of the foregone medical treatment was "unnecessary."

The most striking aspect of Appendix 3, however, is that the privatized
health care system in the United States appears to be probably the most inejfi-
cient one in the developed world when we turn to the direct indicators of effi-
ciency. First, the U.S. had the lowest hospital occupancy rate (HOSPOCC) of
69% in the. developed world (three other countries had rates of 70%-71%)
compared to the median of 79%, connoting an underutilization of existing fa-
cilities. Much more impoitantly, the U.S. had by far the highest levels of health

94

Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

Spending in the world in terms of both per capita expenditures and as a share of
GDP (HLTHPC and HLTHGDP) subsequently, escalating health costs in
the early 1990s brought them to nearly 15% of GDP (OECD, 1994). Obvi-
ously, this is anything but efficient!

It is easy to discern several reasons for the high cost of American medicine.
First, the U.S. does have the most high technology medicine in the world which
undoubtedly contributes to better medical care. However, when hospitals in
the same area compete by acquiring expensive technology, costs are driven up
needlessly. Second costs are also driven up by needless tests which occur for a
number of reasons: defensive medicine in the face of malpractice suits, at-
tempts to increase clinic profits, and the demand of patients with good insur-
ance coverage. A third, and less cited reason, though, is almost certainly the
major culprit. The American health care system is marked by extremely high
administrative costs 25% versus 7% in most others (Woalhandler and
Himmelstein 1 99 1 ) which turns on its head the assumption of "privatization
theory" that businesses will minimize costs, while government bureaucracies
will expand them because of the absence market competition (Savas 1987).
Evidently, the insurance industry exercised enough market power in the 1980s
and 1990s to push price increases on to the consumer.

A social science study of comparative health statistics, thus, is quite sug-
gestive for health reform in the U.S. Clearly, the market in the health care field
has become greatly distorted, thereby driving up costs considerably. This, in
turn, points to major savings that can be made without sacrificing quality
tort reform to defuse the high costs of malpractice insurance and defensive
medicine, policies aimed at reducing the overexpansion of expensive technol-
ogy, and, most dramatically, bringing administrative costs into line with those
that exist in other industrialized nations.

V. A Social Science Perspective:
Pointing Toward a More Viable Alternative?

Escalating health costs created a crisis in the early 1990s that neither the
liberal solution of expanding government programs nor the conservative solu-
tion of getting government out of the way could ameliorate because both gen-
erated strong public and interest group opposition. Private business then re-
sponded by using its market power to force the radical transformation of the
health care system from a "fee for service" basis to a "managed care" basis in
well under a decade. This organization revolution seemed legitimate in the
public eye either because it occurred entirely within the private sector or, more
probably, because the average citizen did not understand it (Kaiser-Harvard
Program 1996). Yet, while costs have stabilized, at least momentarily, many of
the basic problems remain.

95

Health Care Policy in the United States: A Social Science Perspective

Appendix 4 summarizes a "social science perspective" on this policy dy-
namic (normative, descriptive, and explanatory analysis are separated by heavy
lines in the chait). It begins with the very different normative positions of Clinton
and liberals, as opposed to Gingrich and conservatives. Both had an ideologi-
cal "project" expanding public services for the needy and cutting back a
wasteful government, respectively which created "blinders" as they ana-
lyzed the "objective situation." This picking and choosing of what descriptive
materials they recognized made them and their staffers very poor social scien-
tists in justifying their own projects but also made them good social scientists
in terms of devising effective marketing strategies to defeat their opponent's
project. However, the resulting gridlock did little to resolve the problems fac-
ing American health care.

The two types of empirical theories examined here further indicate what
needs to happen if the U.S. is to transcend this gridlock. First, given the stake-
holders and ideological conflicts, social science theory would predict political
gridlock and limited "muddling through" for health politics in the 1990s. This,
in fact, turned out to be the case. The second theory, an abstract explanation t)f
policy outcomes in all political settings, posited a trade-off between welfare
state development and economic efficiency. Yet, the data presented in Section
III demonstrate that America's "privatized" health system is highly inefficient
in terms of costs. Theoretically, this should provide "slack" that might be used
to finance either the liberal or conservative program. Yet, as noted in Appendix
4, the liberal focus on poor consumers and the conservative one on providers
and taxpayers has seemingly created ideological blinders that prevent either
side from attacking the unnecessary costs created by the intermediaries (i.e.,
insurance companies and attorneys).

The social science perspective, therefore, appears both valid and valuable
for analyzing one of the United State's serious policy challenges. A social sci-
ence model or conceptualization of the policy-making process indicates the
difficulties of refoiTn; and a social science analysis of public opinion data shows
that these difficulties are exacerbated by the public's rejection of both the lib-
eral and the conservative programs in the health care field. Consequently, the
social science theory of "muddling through" accurately describes the U.S. health
care system during the 1990s; however, social science projections also imply
that "muddling through" will come under increasing pressure in the near fu-
ture.

Fortunately, a final social science analysis points to a way out of this quag-
mire. The failure of the market to act efficiently for health and medical ser-
vices means that there is an opportunity to reap substantial savings that could
finance broader health services. To take advantage of the opportunity, of course,
powerful groups insurance companies, attorneys, and others who reap "mo-

96

' Cal Clark and Rene McEldowney

nopoly rents" from health care must be challenged. Yet, other powerful
groups businesses insuring their employees, the AARP, and governments
under fiscal strain have a vested interest in changing the system. The
postmaterialists are probably at least partially conect in claiming that much
social science does not challenge deep-seated social institutions or "the estab-
Hshment." Still, we hope that this paper has shown that social science model-
ing, even on a fairly simple level, can provide a nuanced appreciation of power
and how it affects our lives.

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99

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Appendix 2
1994 PUBLIC OPINION ON HEALTH CARE

Gingrich's Ascendancy

Approve Clinton's Health Policy 36%

(Approve Clinton's Performance)* (51%)*

(Approve Clinton's Economic Policies) (52%)

Has Health Insurance 88%

Satisfied with Health Plan 82%

Satisfied with Current Health Care 75%

(Trust Govt Most of Time) (22%)

(Govt Wastes Lots of Tax Money) (70%)

(U.S. on Right Track) (30%)

Bill's Revenge

Primary Responsibility for Health Insurance

Private Sector/Fed Govt

41%/38%

Can Afford Health Care

62%

Put Off Medical Care Due to Cost

31%

Sadsfied with U.S. Health Care System

36%

Health Spending: Increase/Cut

63%/9%

Social Sec/Medicare: Increase/Cut

52%/5%

AIDS Spending: Increase/Cut

50%/14%

(Welfare Spending: Increase/Cut)

(13%/54%)

(Govt Services: Increase/Cut)

(30%/42%)

Which Partv Bettei on Health Care

Democrats

41%

Republicans

22%

Cut Health & Ed to Reduce Deficit 30%

Raise Taxes for Health & Ed 60%

(Raise Taxes to Reduce Deficit) (41%)

*Items in parentheses do not directly relate to health care but are included in the table for

comparative purposes.

SOURCE: Computed from data from the 1994 National Election Study of the Survey Re-
search Center of the University of Michigan, distributed by the International
Consortium for Polifical and Social Research. Random selection was used within
a stratified geographic sample. Sample size = 1795. Reprinted with Permission.

101

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103

Geographic Information Systems in Social
Policy Formation

Ronald Keith Gaddie, University of Oklahoma

Russell Keith Johnson, Innovative Environmental

Solutions & Tulane University

John K Wildgen, University of New Orleans

The technical progression of geographic information systems (GIS) is
advancing at a tremendous rate. What was once a pricey tool that could
only be used by a handful of highly skilled computer geographers and
engineers is rapidly finding a place in the offices of researchers and policy
makers across many fields, including universities, municipalities, and fed-
eral agencies (Robinson, Frank, and Karimi, 1987). Rudimentary GIS
systems can be accessed via the Internet, and geography programs that
adopted this technology to their curricula are finding new life as students
across disciplines use this new tool of social research.

What is GIS? Keith Clarke (1997), in his fine volume on using GIS, offers
four dimensions of GIS, as a toolbox, an information system, a science, and a
business. Technically speaking, GISs are "automated systems for the capture,
storage, retrieval, analysis, and display of spatial data" (Clarke 1997, 2). Indi-
vidual observations in a data set are referenced by some set of spatial or geo-
graphic coordinates an address, or latitudinal and longitudinal points. The
system then allows the analyst to manipulate or display this "geocoded" nu-
meric data on a map. This is the most important technical function of GIS,
because the coordinates are the vehicle by which data are linked to maps.

How new are the benefits of GIS? In the discipline of political science, GIS
is bringing us back to a place we knew long ago: political geography. Some of
the great pioneers of political science, most notably V. O. Key in his classic
Southern Politics (1949), found the geographic presentation of electoral data
to be most useful in formulating hypotheses and presenting findings about
southern politics. However, this was tedious work. In the forward to the 1984
edition of Key's work, his former research assistant. Alexander Heard, noted
that Key crafted his maps by hand, sitting in bed, while glancing over tables of
data to be coded onto maps. This process was time consuming; Key needed to

104

Ronald Keith Gaddie, Russel Keith Johnson, and John K. Wildgen

have a fair degree of certainty about the relationships evident in his data before
placing effort into mapping.

So, mapping is useful; however, in the recent past the benefits of mapping
was often lost to many analysts due to the difficulty of pairing complex data
with a meaningful spatial display. As political scientists and sociologists have
moved into the examination of political dimensions of other issues, such as
environmental problems like the role of race in the siting of environmental
hazards and other locally-undesirable land uses (LULUs; see Bowman and
Crews-Meyer 1997), it is becoming apparent that there are geographic dimen-
sions of these policy problems. Social scientists can benefit from the use of
analytic techniques that allow them to develop and test hypotheses that have
geographic dimensions; hence, a role for GIS.

In this paper, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of GIS in social re-
search. In particular, we examine the origin of GIS as a tool used in the formu-
lation of redistricting plans. Then, we look at the role of GIS in the extension
of social research into the hard sciences, especially as it is applied to social
data for policy making. And, we then examine the potential errors that can
arise when GIS is misapplied. This paper should illuminate how GIS has af-
fected the relevancy and role of social sciences in not only social, but applied
and interdisciplinary research, and also extend caveats regarding the affection
some scholars show for this tool at the risk of committing potentially egre-
gious errors.

I. An Application of Political Science: GIS and Redistricting

In 1980, the U.S. Congress responded with alarm to the revelation that data
from the most recent census would not be completely available in time to con-
duct congressional redistricting for 1982. Congressional hearings to investi-
gate the problems of data management and data availability led to the creation
of the Topically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system (TI-
GER), for use with the data to be obtained by the 1990 census. Developed
jointly by the Bureau of Census and the U.S. Geological Survey, this informa-
tion system contained demographic data and topographical features that are
located spatially with geographic coordinates. The system also includes a pro-
prietary software for accessing the data base and presenting the data contained
therein as maps. This geographic information system (GIS) represented a dra-
matic jump forward in the ability to access and apply census data (Shelley, et
al 1996).

The 1991-1992 drawing of legislative districts was subject to the extensive
use of GIS by legislators and other political players in developing potential
representation plans for Congress, state legislatures, and local governments.
Traditionally the venue of back-rooms and crayon wielding legislators, GIS

105

Geographic Information Systems in Social Policy Formation

allowed mapmakers to merge the sophisticated TIGER data on race and socio-
economic attributes with precinct-level, geo-coded electoral data, and then
quickly fashion possible maps that would, for example, maximize the number
of legislative districts with black majorities or the number of districts with
marginally-democratic tendencies. For example, in the state of Georgia, a per-
manent reapportionment staff used sophisticated GIS to craft possible district
maps at the request of legislators while the legislator waited. Other legislators
took advantage of GIS systems provided by the Republican Party to develop
alternative representation plans. Or, as Fred Shelley and his coauthors recently
observed, "new technology has led to previously unattainably refined levels of
. . . gerrymandering" (1996,171).

In particular, this new technology facilitated the crafting of maps that re-
flected detailed information about communities of interest - distinctive units
that share common concerns with respect to one or more identifiable features.
In the past, legislative majorities were often positioned to limit the ability to
draw district plans that represented alternative communities of interest (mi-
norities, economic groups, cultural groups), due to the limited information
available, and the lack of convenient tools for marshaling and mapping with
large data sets. Geoff Earle (1997) ably described the old approach to redis-
tricting in the early 1980s

"[Wjhen the political map of Illinois' Cook County was redrawn
following the 1980 census, the two most precious commodities
were wall space and acetate. Wall space was needed to hang the
ever-changing versions of giant, ceiling-high drawings of the dis-
tricts. Acetate was used to create clear overlays to display how
each set of boundaries meshed with other factors, such as popula-
tion, partisanship, or ethnicity. Another . . . resource came into
play as well: college kids. A number of them could be found each
day sprawled on the floor of a borrowed union hall, entering data
into key-punch sheets that would be fed each night into a giant
computer rented from a local bank, in order to tabulate the data
that undergirded the colored lines on the maps" (73).

The use of GIS lowered the technological barrier to information, and dis-
pensed with the space and manpower needs of previous redistricting efforts.
And, in conjunction with the interpretation and implementation of the Voting
Rights Act by the U.S. Department of Justice, these alternative plans were
often implemented, resulting in complex legislative maps that split traditional
communities of interest - towns and counties - to instead represent other com-
munities of interest - ethnic and racial minority groups. The task of identify-
ing minority communities of interest and then crafting representation plans to

106

Ronald Keith Gaddie, Russel Keith Johnson, and John K. Wildgen

represent those groups would have been far more difficuh without access to
GIS.

The access to this technology is growing, placing in the hands of both inter-
ested social scientists and the lay public the ability to craft representative dis-
tricts. Geoff Earle notes that the cost of mapping software has fallen dramati-
cally, to as little as $1,200 for "adequate" software. This drop in price further
democratizes the redistricting process. To reiterate a quote from Clark Benson
of the political analysis firm POLI-DATA, "More people will play the game
... the entry level is a lot lower, so any body can draw a district" (Earle 1997).
In the most recent mid-decade redistricting dispute, regarding the Georgia con-
gressional districts, the US Justice Department and the Georgia General As-
sembly (which has its own permanent GIS office) were joined by the often
financially-constrained American Civil Liberties Union in drafting and sub-
mitting maps for the federal court to consider in the resolution of Miller v.
Johnson. Georgia reapportionment director Linda Meggers estimates that a
total of 1,500 district plans were produced, indicating that redistricting has
definitely become more precise and more proletarian due to the advent of GIS.

II. Extending Social Science into the Study of Risk Through GIS

GIS has extended the ability to marshal and use information in areas be-
sides legislative districting. One area where GIS is especially useful is in hy-
pothesis testing in public health and environmental sciences. The general pub-
lic confronts more and more environmental information. How that informa-
tion is being presented is an important concern to scientific and regulatory
communities. Environmental issues qualify for the adjective "social" because
they involve human judgment, decisions, and choices under which people live
(Cvetkovich and Earle 1992). The characterization of environmental risk must
be done in a responsible manner, based on the seriousness of the factors being
identified. Communicating that risk via GIS can expedite the education of the
public regarding the issue of the risk. A geographic reference to risk allows
individuals to assess the relevance of risk to themselves, which is a goal of
applied social science in a free society. The reasons that GIS became so popu-
lar among political mapmakers (the ease of marshaling geographic population
data) is related to its emergence as a tool for health and resource management
officials. The power of the application in presenting data as a picture, and then
using the tool to display the multiple population characteristics that support or
refute scientific hypotheses.

An area of particular interest in the application of GIS are those disciplines
involved in human risk assessment. Epidemiologists, biologists, environmen-
tal scientists and medical researchers are often spied in front of computer ter-
minals evaluating maps that show representations of their latest data on human

107

Geographic Information Systems in Social Policy Formation

health characterizations, where data are often discussed in spatial connota-
tions. An example is the characterization of a site that is believed to be con-
taminated by particular pollutants. The potential risk emanating from the site
is in relation to known plumes of the contaminant that exist at specific loca-
tions. Potential populations at risk are identified based on a variety of factors;
however, the most prominent are their location on the water table or relative to
the wind gradient from the plume, which are geographic relationships.

During the 1980s the Environmental Protection Agency began defining the
role of risk assessment and risk management in the policy making decision
process. Then-EPA director William Ruckelshaus wrote that

"risk assessment is an exercise that combines available data on a
substance's potency causing adverse health effects with informa-
tion about likely human exposures, and through the use of plau-
sible assumptions. It generates an estimate of human health risk.
Risk management is the process by which a protective agency
decides what action to take in the face of such estimates" ( 1 985).

In order to maintain continuity in risk assessment, the scientific and policy
communities have defined the process into four steps: Hazard Identification;
Dose Response; Human Exposure Assessment; and Risk Characterization. Of
the four steps, GIS can easily be adapted to assist in analysis of three of the
steps: hazard identification; human exposures; and risk characterization.

Hazard identification is the collection and evaluation of data on environ-
mental factors that could possibly cause injury and disease. Geographic infor-
mation systems have the capability to aid in this step by tracking known con-
tamination through spatial orientation and recording the effects. This in turn
allows an analyst or decision maker to determine whether the chemical or in-
dustrial affluent acted as predicted. With regard to exposure assessment, GIS
is especially well-suited to the task of comparing concentrations of known
environmental contaminants to the locations of populations in a geographic
area. This ability in turn allows an assessment of whether a particular popula-
tion is at risk. Spatial relationships can be found in many environmental and
medically related variables. The Division of Science and Research, New Jer-
sey Department of Environmental Protection and Energy, and the University
of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey used this technique to study the ex-
posure of children to lead (Guthe, et al. 1992). Areas within Newark, East
Orange, and Irvington, New Jersey, were identified where there is greater envi-
ronmental exposure to lead. Populations of sensitive individuals were identi-
fied by using U.S. Census Bureau data.

With regard to the final component of risk assessment, risk characteriza-
tion, GIS can graphically display the conclusions reached from the previous

108

Ronald Keith Gaddie, Russel Keith Johnson, and John K. Wildgen

investigative steps. This function of the GIS takes on special significance when
trying to present the findings of the study to people not technologically famil-
iar with the risk assessment process.

III. An Application in Policy: Environmental Justice

Under executive order of President Clinton, federallyfunded projects that
address environmental risk or environmental cleanup must include an evalua-
tion of whether the externality constituted a threat to environmental justice.
Environmental justice, simply defined, is an argument that environmental ex-
ternalities and environmental risks are situated with discriminatory intent on
the basis of race or economic class. The use of the geographic information
system allows us to pair the population data like that used in the most recent
redistrictings- with data on the location of environmental hazards or instances
of disease and mortality to illustrate relationships and test hypotheses.

The concept of environmental justice is derived from the earlier concept of
environmental racism. Environmental racism was first explored systematically
by Robert Bullard (1993), who, in his study of hazardous waste treatment fa-
cilities, found that proportionally more blacks than whites were placed at risk
from site placement. Bullard uses this finding as a basis for an argument that
racist or economic discrimination was at the center of decisions when placing
negative externalities. Work by the United Church of Christ found limited evi-
dence of a racially discriminatory relationship between waste site placement
and minority and poor populations (Center for Policy Alternatives 1994).

Litigation to seek redress for environmental racism or environmental jus-
tice "violations" have met with no success. Suits filed under secdon 5 of the
Civil Rights Act failed to prove intent to discriminate in the placement of toxic
waste facilities. The lower evidentiary standard that is applied under CERCLA
legislafion (Superfund) might support an environmental justice argument, but
the lack of intent in the Superfund procedure makes it dubious to the purpose
of environmental jusfice. Skeptics of the environmental justice argument con-
tend it is simply a mechanism to elicit wealth transfers, not unlike the
KaldorHicks function, from the largely white middle and upper classes to the
more diverse lower and working classes (Posner 1982).

Arguments in favor of environmental justice are often made based upon
episodic data. The examination of more comprehensive data to model the rela-
tionship between externalities and minority communities has been hindered
by both a lack of data and a lack of analytic tools to display data in an easily
interpretable fashion. The following figure illustrates an application of GIS to
the question of minority exposure to toxic externalities. Population data and
data on toxic chemical releases are presented. Parish population and demo-

109

Geographic Information Systems in Social Policy Formation

graphic data are drawn from the 1990 United States Census; data on toxic
releases are from the EPA (1994).

The initial map (Map 1) shows the distribution of AfricanAmerican popu-
lation in the parishes of Louisiana (a parish is an administrative unit equivalent
to the county in other states.) The overall population of Louisiana is approxi-
mately 31 percent black, 68 percent white. However, the AfricanAmerican
population is not evenly dispersed throughout the state. The most heavily black
parishes are found in the urban areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Mon-
roe, and in the old Delta parishes along the Mississippi River. Numerically,
most AfricanAmericans are found in the major urban centers.

Parishes

0- 16,199
fi - 16.199-32,398
32,398 - 48,597
^m 48,597-64,796

MAP 1: PERCENT BLACK IN LOUISIANA PARISHES
(population data from 1990 U.S. Censu.s)

Toxics

Parishes

0- 16,199
[:i 16,199-32,398
MB 32,398 - 48,597
^H 48,597-64,796

MAP 2: RACE AND TOXIC RELEASES. 1987-1994

(population data from 1990 U.S. Census: toxic release data obtained from U.S. EPA [1995])

110

Ronald Keith Gaddie, Russel Keith Johnson, and John K. Wildgen

f

Hydrology
Toxics 92

. Parishes

\ 0-16,199

J\ ^ 16,199-32,398

^ ^J 32,398-48,597

\

mt

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i

^^hI

W

MAP 3: RACE, TOXIC RELEASES. AND WATER COURSES

(population data from 1990 U.S. Census: toxic release data obtained from U.S. EPA [1995])

In Map 2, the frequency of toxic releases in the state of Louisiana for 1992
are laid over the distribution of black population from the first Map. Most
releases occurred in a pair of belts that straddle the more heavily black par-
ishes in Acadiana (Louisiana is typically divided into four historic regions:
South Louisiana., which is New Orleans and the surrounding parishes; Protes-
tant Louisiana, consisting of parishes in the northern "stovepipe" of the state;
Acadiana, consisting of parishes south of the stovepipe and west of New Or-
leans, with strong French-speaking traditions; and the Florida Parishes, which
are east of the Mississippi River and north of Lake Pontchartrain), but not in
the most heavily black parishes. In Map 3 we overlay the pattern of water
courses in Louisiana, along with the incidence of toxic releases and black popu-
lation. The location of toxic release points closely corresponds to the major
water courses of the Mississippi and Red River basins.

There are obvious limits to the detail of the data presented here. The level
of aggregation for population is too great to meaningfully test the relationship
between minority population concentrations and toxic releases. However, at
this level the GIS representation can inform hypothesis construction. There is
an undercurrent of history in the patterns of black population concentration
and toxic releases. Both follow the major water courses that served to fuel the
labor intensive agricultural economy of sugar and cotton in Louisiana. Histori-
cally, major industries, especially the petrochemical industry, have constructed
their facilities near water to facilitate waste disposal. Other hypotheses can be
discerned from this presentation; it is the convenience and power of the tool in
hypothesis generation and testing provided by GIS that helps inform policy
formulation.

Ill

Geographic Information Systems in Social Policy Formation

IV. The Perils of GIS

There are limits to the appHcation of GIS. In particular, the level of analysis
and the lack of a common baseline for measuring phenomena can lead to po-
tential eiTors. Both the baseline problem and the level of analysis problem are
relevant to the environmental justice example. A recent study by Bowman and
Crews-Meyer (1997) analyzed the county-level occun^ence of locally-unwanted
land uses in eight southern states. Their analysis indicated that, while eco-
nomic and racial factors structured the placement of environmental "bads,"
another substantial factor over-looked by environmental justice scholars was
the size of local populations: Locally-unwanted land uses (LULUs) occurred
more frequently in counties with large populations. Analysis that looks at the
geographic dispersion of occunences of social phenomena without control-
ling for or considering the effect of population densities might lead one to
conclude that other factors structure phenomena like the frequency of LULUs.
Also, it is possible that, while environmental hazards are usually sited in large
counties, rather than poor or minority counties, within large counties the place-
ment of facilities is structured by race and class (see Cutter, Holm, and Clark
1996). In the example illustrated here (Louisiana), there is mixed evidence in
support of environmental justice. A more refined measurement of racial popu-
lation (i.e. the census tract/ block level) might lead to defmitive conclusions.

Another mitigafing factor alluded to in the Louisiana example is the role of
history. Unless data are available over time for localities, it may not be pos-
sible to establish the causal order between the ethnic and racial composition of
a geographic area and the occurrence of environmental hazards. A correlation
observed at one point in time may not necessarily be causal, but instead be the
spurious product of some third factor. In our Louisiana example, the coinci-
dence of historic black populations in rural areas and toxic releases may be
related to the ties of both agriculture and the petrochemical industry to water.
In this particular instance GIS helps to identify this alternative explanation,
which has bearing on the question of whether the observation of an environ-
mental outcome is the product of an intentional discriminatory act (and there-
fore covered by the Civil Rights Act), or instead the result of an intervening
factor.

From a methodological standpoint, the application of GIS can therefore
lead to validity threats in the form of accepting spurious relationships as causal.
This leads to type I errors: rejecting the null hypotheses (no relationship) when
it is true. The analyst also faces another, related dilemma: if the level of aggre-
gation washes out potential relationships between hazards and instances of
environmental exposure or health damage, then the potential exists to commit
a type II error: accepting the null hypothesis when it is false. This is especially
important in the application of GIS to environmental justice issues. If the envi-

112

Ronald Keith Gaddie, Russel Keith Johnson, and John K. Wildgen

ronmental justice argument is supported, then there is a scientific basis for
crafting poUcy through legislation or litigation to redress grievances. If, how-
ever, there is a spuiiousness problem or other problem that leads to a type I
error through the application of GIS, then parties and firms not liable for social
damage could nonetheless be held legally and financially responsible. A simi-
lar problem exists if, due to geographic aggregation, a false null hypothesis is
accepted. Paities could evade responsibility for their actions.

Final Thoughts

The geographic information system has emerged as a powerful tool
for the examination of political, public health, and environmental policy prob-
lems. These problems, which are often transient in nature, require the use of
tools that can amass data and present it in an easily interpretable fashion for
analysts and decisionmakers. The GIS fills this role by quickly marshaling
data and creating readily interpreted pictures, rather than relying on a level of
statistical sophistication and the patience to interpret large amounts of numeric
data. There are limits to the application of GIS. While GIS is a powerful dem-
onstration and analytic tool, it is constrained by the quality of the data entered
into the system. The validity of the relationships demonstrated using GIS are
subject to the same levels of analysis problems confronted in any statistical
analysis. For decisionmakers, it is important to treat the results of GIS with the
same skepticism directed toward other analytic tools: decisions based on the
information provided by GIS must be made in the broader context of history,
political constraints, and an understanding of the scientific theory underlying
the phenomenon. The degree to which the results of the GIS analysis are ac-
cepted, however, are limited by the perceptions of validity by policy-makers,
constituent interests, and the ability of policy makers and researchers to apply
the tool while avoiding potentially serious conceptual errors.

As social science finds new opportunities in addressing socio-environmen-
tal problems, opportunities abound to expand the scope of social science in the
next century. The expansion of social science is in part a product of the devel-
opment of new technologies, such as GIS. Another part of this expansion is the
relevance of social science to public health and environmental concerns. This
combination of new technology and new opportunities does come with poten-
tial costs. Researchers must endeavor to be aware of the potential errors that
can arise from accepting the output of technology like GIS, and therefore ac-
cept limits to the application of results derived from technologies like GIS.

113

Geographic Information Systems in Social Policy Formation

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Clarke, Keith C. 1997. Getting Started With Geographic Information Systems.
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ISBN: 1-883199-C