All Along the Watchtower
by longsword at 04:00PM (CST) on February 10, 2005
In Bob Dylan's semi-apocalyptic song All Along the Watchtower, two riders are seen approaching the castle in which the princes and their servants are keeping view. At their approach a wildcat growls in the distance as a howling storm gathers.
Lately, however, the newest reports from the watchtower have announced that there actually appear to be four riders approaching, and it is not just reports from the looney fringe of the Christian "end times" mob, but from serious and reflective historians and social scientists.
The four riders of the Revelation of St. John are four symbolic forms of social death, and they are four for good reason -- a reason that relates as well to William Blake's "fourfold vision" , to the quadrilateral logic of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, to the four elements of classical cosmology (earth, air, fire, water), to the four arms of the Christian cross, and to the four spiritual directions North, South, East, and West of the Sioux Sacred Hoop, to the four circulatory systems of the human body -- metabolic, nervous, respiratory, and fluid. This same fourfold pattern appears in the guise of the "four enemies of the man of knowledge" -- fear, clarity, power, and old age -- in Carlos Castaneda's books. And, for reasons given below, they are now also being made explicit and visible in the alarms being sounded about the state of modern society by not a few social observers.
The four riders of the apocalypse are war, famine, disease, and death (or decadence). The total victory of any one of these alone would be the end of society. These threats are ever present. There is nothing unique about their historical occurrence. Societies and civilisations in the past have always been assaulted by one or more of these "riders". To be beset by all four would be truly catastrophic. Yet it has not been unknown to happen as nations and civilisations have disappeared throughout history.
In one form or another, these four riders appear in other guises but wearing similar masks in other interpretative systems. Being the powers of Chaos, they are the various forms of enduring and always present threats to human life and societies everywhere, often emerging from one of the four directions of space and time, attacking society from the inside or outside, or from the future or the past. They represent various forms of the effort to dismantle one or more of the time and space fronts of society, and they are present as well in the Norse apocalyptic myth of the Doom of the Powers and the Twilight of the Gods at the end of history.
It is the "speech thinker" Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy who has paid particular attention to these four "enemies" of society, identifying them as the social diseases of war, revolution, decadence, and anarchy (chaos). War attacks the social order from the outside; anarchy attacks the social order from the inside; revolution attacks the past; and decadence attacks the future. It is the enduring role of grammatical speech -- dialogical speech -- to overcome these destructive powers. Without speech, humankind would indeed have cause for despair and would truly exist in a Hobbesian state of nature. It is the purpose of speech to establish peace (truce, truth, trust are all related words) between the times and spaces of life. In the absence of sincere dialogical speech between societies or individuals, or between the generations within one society, the diseases of war, revolution, decadence or anarchy must have their way. They are, therefore, "speech diseases", and the purpose and function of a genuine social science is the perpetual balancing and rebalancing of the four social fronts of social time (future and past) and social space (inner and outer). Our reality is fourfold, therefore, and it is the function of grammatical speech to unify, reconcile, and integrate these four contradictory fronts of past and future times, and inner and outward spaces in order to effect the harmonious balance of the whole, without which society would soon disintegrate (which it is now doing) just as any individual can disintegrate and "fall to pieces" (as "Prozac Nation" is now doing as well).
To effect this end, societies have evolved four institutions, which are four special or formal modes of speech, as guardians of one of the four fronts of time and space. State and Church, (or politics and religion), address the future and past respectively. They correspond to destiny and origin, or anticipation and memory. Art and Science, (or song (poetry) and mathematics), address the inward and outward spatial fronts, the fronts the point toward the Soul or toward Nature. The decay of any one of these institutions can imperil society, by opening the door to one or more of the four enemies. Today, all of these institutions are extraordinarily weak and in various stages of dissolution, and much of this situation is the result of the pernicious blowback effects of the abuse of speech, particularly in the form of propaganda and the language of the "forked tongue".
That this fourfold situation is open to the identical consciousness of all branches of humanity I have already examined in earlier posts. The Sioux Sacred Hoop, with its four directions, and Rosenstock-Huessy's "cross of reality", with its four fronts of space and time, are very similar. Likewise, Rosenstock-Huessy's emphasis on the power of integrating and healing speech is identical to the Sioux notion of the man or woman who "speaks from the centre of the voice". Moreover, Rosenstock-Huessy's identification of the real harm done by propaganda and the abuse of language is found equally in the Sioux conception of the opposite of the one who "speaks from the centre of the voice", ie, he or she who speaks with a "forked tongue", for the "forked tongue", the untruthful and insincere tongue, breaks the integrity of the hoop. By contrast the one who "speaks from the centre of the voice" restores the integrity of the hoop and the balance of the four directions. And just as the Sacred Hoop is in language, so Rosenstock-Huessy spoke of the "cross of grammar" and "the grammar of the cross".
The correspondence of this understanding of the fourfold within these two very different traditions is remarkable.
Wittingly or unwittingly, many of the social observers who have commented on the growing decadence of society and have warned of a potential Dark Age ahead of us, have, in fact, followed precisely a fourfold model. This is notable given that the modern mind has been largely schooled in the dualist thinking that reality expresses itself in only two directions -- as subject and object, inner and outer space. When I brought to the attention of one of these writers that he had been actually following a fourfold model in his diagnosis of our situation, he expressed surprise. It had not even occurred to him. It was, however, the case. By his lapse, however, he demonstrated that language will always attempt to maintain the proper order and balance of the times and spaces despite the deficiencies of our logic or the weaknesses of our consciousness. Despite our self-interest and the weaknesses of the individual ego, language, as transcendent power, will always attempt to compensate for our deficiencies.
It is with that in mind that I now want to explore briefly the work of one of these authors, who has followed a fourfold model, in order to demonstrate how it does indeed map to the space-time model of the Sacred Hoop or Rosenstock-Huessy's quadrilateral method.
Historian Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture also foresees an impending Dark Age, which he identifies as the result of four dynamics at work in American society, but which are equally four factors prominent in the collapse of all societies which undergo them:
First, accelerating social and economic inequalities.
Second, increasing loss of entitlements, or "declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems".
Third, decreasing intellectual abilities, or "rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness".
Fourth, spiritual death, that is to say "the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas -- kitsch, in short".
A little reflection will demonstrate that, taken together, these four form a pattern, and that pattern is a crucial or cruciform one that maps to the four space and time fronts of Rosenstock-Huessy's quadrilateral cross of reality.
Firstly, growing social inequality pertains to the inner front of society. It is the disease of anarchy. Everyone is trying to grab more than his or her share. It is the state of "everyman for himself". It is the liberal's pursuit of "self-interest" pushed to its extreme conclusion and which now runs amok. Examples in the US are Enron and WorldComm, and a dozen or more others. But the disease largely grips the majority who start "looking out for number 1", ie, "me". It is the disease of "me-ism" and it dismantles society from within. Instead of unanimity (ie, unus animus or "one soul"), there is fragmentation.
Switching now to the symptom of the "decreasing intellectual abilities", this attacks the outward front of society. It is illustrated by the oft commented "loss of reality" and the existence of "bubbles" of various sorts -- the so-called "New Economy Bubble", the so-called "Housing Bubble", or George Soros's "Bubble of American Supremacy". The intellect is the intermediary. This is what the word "intellect" actually means -- the go between or "inter-connector" that coordinates the concept with the percept and the subject space with the object space, (or soul with nature). A properly functioning intellect is what keeps us from mistaking wolves for dogs, snakes for ropes, or confusing fictions with non-fictions, fantasies with realities. Decreasing intellectual abilities means loss of or miscontrual of reality, and therefore increasing vulnerability to threats to survival emanating from the outside world. It is confusion. The counsels of reason are lying.
Lack of unanimity (eg. "culture war") on the one hand, and confusion about reality on the other, are two diseases of social space, one inner and the other outer. It points to the collapse of the subject-object duality and contradiction that lies at the heart of modern Newtonian-Cartesian logic.
Turning now to the other two, it wouldn't be surprising if, in terms of the fourfold model, we were to discover that these are diseases of social time rather than space -- that one signals an attack on the past, and another an attack on the future. "Loss of entitlements" does, in fact, represent an attack on the past. The inheritance of the people is squandered, for entitlement is what is handed down from generation to generation as its birthright. Entitlements, like rights, are the inheritance from previous generations who established and founded such entitlements and rights often through bloody war and revolution. They represent the last will and testament of one or more previous generations to its successors. A revolutionary programme seeks to annul these. Loss of entitlements is like soul amputation.
"Spiritual death" is the the image of Nietzsche's "Last Man". It represents the disease of decadence. Spiritual death means to be unable to reach the future, to lack the will or the faith or the energy to reach the future. More than anything, "spiritual death" is the meaning of Fukuyama's "End of History". It implies exhaustion, atrophy of imagination, loss of passion and the end of creativity. It is, in fact, what I have largely focussed on in these pages. Spiritual death is the equivalent of infantilisation. The temporal process leading to maturation and fulfillment is obstructed or occluded. It is similar to the Freudian fixation and the inability to rise above or transcend the present. The slacker, the eternal adolescent, "tittytainment", the Peter Pans and Wendys of the world represent this truncation of spiritual growth.
"Loss of entitlement" and "spiritual death" are two diseases of time -- of past and future time, one destroys the past while the other prevents the future and full maturity from being attained. On the one hand, origin is abolished, on the other, destiny and fulfillment are prevented.
In Rosenstock-Huessy's terms, lack of unanimity of the inner, deficient power or reason in relation to the outer, lack of faith or inspiration in relation to the future, and lack of respect or memory in relation to the past represent four forms of social death. All these are evident in Berman's own diagnosis, and all map to Rosenstock-Huessy's model as well as the wisdom represented in the Sioux Sacred Hoop. They all represent "speechless" situations, and for Rosenstock-Huessy, speechless conditions in society led inevitably to violence.
This is the shape of our reality, following the images of the Sacred Hoop and Rosenstock-Huessy's cross of reality. It is an image I will be referring to often in later posts. The vertical or North-South axis represents space (inner and outer, subject and object). The horizontal or East-West axis represents time (past and future, origin and destiny). The circle acknowledges Nature and nature's cyclicity, but denies that the spirit is in any way constrained by that cyclicity or fatalism. We are not fish forever trapped in a fishbowl. The arms of the cross, therefore, extend beyond the confines of the circle. It denies the image of time as either a cycle or an arrow, but as a dynamic which stretches forwards as well as backwards. It is not a relativistic model so much as a relational one. It is, therefore, ecological in orientation and so, I believe, a major contribution to any social science of the future in which ecological (holistic and relational) thinking must have the central role. This is of crucial importance to remember as we explore the cruciform nature of reality in the future, and why the collapse of this quadrilateral reality portends Dark Age.
http://www.darkage.ca/blog/_archives/2005/2/10/313364.html