When Rod wrote yesterday about the lecture he'd attended by cosmologist John Barrow and the idea that in science, as well as in religion and other aspects of human life, the simple and the complex are in conflict with each other and that neither alone possesses the full truth, I kept thinking that this notion, as well as Rod's discussion of how this tension between simplicity and complexity plays out in our various social and moral debates, sounded oddly familiar.
As I realized later (and wrote in the comments) the familiarity was coming from our discussions on this blog of Pitirim Sorokin's The Crisis of our Age, and his categorizing of human cultures into three basic and distinct groups: the Ideational, which is focused on ideas about God (or gods; Sorokin includes pre-Christian cultures too), on man's relationship with the Divine, and what this relationship means for the rest of man's social interactions; the Sensate, which loses its interest in non-material reality and focuses instead on the physical world, empiricism, and man's own experiences; and the Idealistic, which is balanced between the other two, creating a sort of synthesis between the Divine and the human, between transcendent, spiritual reality and human, rational reality.
Placing these cultural states in the terms used by John Barrow, the Ideational state is a state of relative simplicity, the Sensate of relative complexity, and the Idealistic is the equilibrium both end up pointing toward, but neither can long maintain.
In the Ideational state, everything is relatively simple. Morality is simply doing what God wants--no questions asked. Art is primitive; it does not represent the natural world faithfully and doesn't strive to do so--its purpose is symbolic, and it usually is religious. Music, too, is relatively simple, geared toward worship; the rational sciences are considered as unimportant as the physical world, which is of secondary importance to the abode of the Divine.
In the Sensate state, everything is relatively complex. Morality and ethics flow from different ideas of religion and philosophy and consensus is not a given; art is either strictly representational, or has moved beyond representation in search of a freer aesthetic which self-consciously seeks to shake off form and convention; music is melodic, composed and performed on complex instruments, or again seeks a self-conscious and "artificial" simplicity of beat and noise; the sciences are at the forefront of knowledge, and when science collides with ethics it is ethics that must step aside, as "truth" means only what can be empirically proven--though eventually, according to Sorokin, that very tendency leads to science's downfall, as citizens of a sensate culture reject empiricism the same way they have rejected form and convention in art and music.
The Idealistic has advantages over both other cultures, as it takes the best elements of each. Striving to incorporate man's natural longing for the spiritual, transcendent and immortal with the physical, natural and earthly, the Idealistic culture produces in many ways the most balanced sort of society for people to enjoy. Yet its flaw is still a serious one: it does not last. Whether it comes between the Ideational and Sensate, or precedes or follows either in a given historical period, it always declines into one of the other two forms relatively quickly, while each of the other two types of culture can exist for many more centuries than this state of relative balance.
Why is that? Why is the cultural equivalent of a state of balance so hard to maintain?
More after the jump:
Anyone who believes that man is composed of a body and a soul (or spirit) can understand the situation this way: man himself is in a state of tension between his physical, corporal, bodily life, and his non-physical, non-corporal, life of what for reference I'll call the soul, but you could also think of it as the mind, complete with memory, intellect, will, imagination and emotion, or some combination of these non-physical things which nonetheless impact our existence, and make us different in many ways from the creatures who share this earth with us.
The Ideational state puts all its eggs, so to speak, in the soul/spirit basket. What man is to eat, what he is to wear, how he is to conduct himself is of surpassing unimportance compared to his quest for unity with the Divine or with transcendent reality. Though this cultural phase describes much of early Christianity, it also describes early Buddhism and other non-Christian belief systems as well, so this is not a phenomenon distinct to the history of Christianity; there have been many cultures for which this is true, and for whom, moreover, the nearest gods were the priests at the temple who were seen as having the right to direct people's earthly lives absolutely; the earthly life was brief, and comparably worthless in the grand scheme of things.
The Sensate state, on the contrary, throws the soul/spirit basket and all its eggs in the trash--or at the most keeps the basket around as a primitive artifact, a well-made curiosity of the past. The soul may not even be, says the sensate man, but the body most definitely is, and thus anything which does not tend toward the betterment of one's physical existence is mere pipe-dreaming. It is supremely important what man eats, what he wears, how he lives; this may be altruistic, in that he may care how these things may affect others, or it may be supremely selfish, in that he may accumulate physical goods only for himself; but there is no sure guiding cultural force to tell him which of these attitudes is superior, nor to judge the non-altruistic as selfish, or the altruistic as noble. Carpe diem is one of the mantras of the culture, and even higher pursuits such as scientific knowledge are reduced to both utility and profit much of the time.
What I think happens on a cultural level is that both the Ideational and the Sensate cultures are trying to solve the problem of the tension between man's physical and spiritual realities by simply ignoring, or at least deemphasizing to the point of denial, one or the other of these two human realities. Doing so may cause their respective cultures either to pass quickly or to unravel very, very slowly, but neither culture can remain forever; history shows them passing in cycles, as man either neglects his body, or forgets his soul.
The Idealistic society does its best to see man as he actually is, body and spirit; to seek knowledge, but deepen faith; to create art and music both sacred and secular; to insist on the worship of God, but also on the fellowship of men. When such a society of balance is achieved, it may, and often does, produce profound thought, deep writing, great art and music, and so on--but it also falls, because in some ways the absolute knowledge that he is an immortal being presently residing in a mortal body is one of the heaviest burdens a human being can bear; all his actions are fraught with eternal significance, all his neighbors will be alive forever (whether in a state of joy or punishment, which conundrum itself causes heavy pondering), and all his hopes and dreams and desires may be either good, or evil, or, in our fallen state, more likely a sad and puzzling mixture of the two.
So the citizen of the Idealistic culture finds himself caught between two sets of desires: the desire for greater and greater purity, subjugation of the physical and its often base desires to the will of God, and striving for eternity so much that the present may be safely forgotten--and the desire for the joys of the flesh without concern for their effects upon the soul he'd like to forget, the desire for greater and greater autonomy without reference to the will of a God he may pay, at best, lip service to, and the hope that there is no eternity, or at least, none he will be consciously aware of, as the safe refuge from any eternal consequences to anything he might do. Yet once a culture has made the slow transition from one form to another, it does not remain at rest: for the Idealistic man cannot forget his physical nature, and the Sensate man cannot forget his own mortality.
We are, Sorokin thought, presently at the end of a long sensate phase of the culture; it may be a few more generations before the cultural shift begins in earnest, but begin, it will, if he is correct--and I think he is. This side of Heaven, for those of us who believe in such a thing, it isn't possible for man to come completely to terms with both his physical reality and the spirit he may deny is within him; his cultures will thus shift back and forth between the simplicity of the Ideational and the complexity of the Sensate with a few periods of peaceful equilibrium in the Idealistic, as he grapples with the questions men have faced for untold millennia: Who and what am I? Why do I live? Why must I die?
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[9:06 am was me]
Cecilia, I find it interesting that he considered the Soviet Union his prime example of sensate culture, both because of the underlying culture of the Russian people and because the government of the Soviet Union was highly dogmatic, an approach that is antithetical to empiricism.
Freelunch - In Crisis of Our Age he states that he thinks the last 600 years of western civilization has been characterized by sensate culture - including the west. His notions on sensate do include totalitarianism as ineveitable hence the USSR as a prime example of the sensate culture.
He published Crisis in 1942 and the book is an apocolyptical description of the coming collapse of western civilization ( the emergence of big band swing music being one of the many symptoms of collapse he lists). It is interesting to me that he discounted the importance of preservation of capital - Parsons would clearly see a society which fails to do preserve capital as being on the edge of collapse but Sorokin is less concerned with this. This seems relevant to me given the current times.
Geoff G - I too find the 5th to 15th C ad most interesting in part because there are several of those "which way will things go" moments. I wonder what our world would be like if the results of the Synod of Whitby had been different. If Harold had survived Hastings would the peoples of the British Isles have been spared the predatory form of feudalism William brings and would we then have seen democratic institutions flourish earlier? I agree re: the lack of information especially as regards the lives of women, but on the basis of what is known, it is clear that the issue of weather and population growth and fall seems a more relevant factor in determining what goes on in a society than Sorokin's thesis. I do think what he effectively captures in Crisis is that sense of impending doom which seems so prevalent in contemporary society and that tinkering with reform of a failing social order is worhtless.
I agree re: the lack of information especially as regards the lives of women, but on the basis of what is known, it is clear that the issue of weather and population growth and fall seems a more relevant factor in determining what goes on in a society than Sorokin's thesis.
You know, I've noticed this as well. I'm suspicious of the decline at roughly the same time of both the Han dynasty in China and the Roman Empire, and am inclined to believe that a slight global climatic change may be responsible for both (reducing the productivity of agriculture, thus reducing the number of people who can be supported doing things other than farming, thus reducing urban culture in general. In addition, such changes could also provoke increased aggression and mobility among barbarians and driven them to invade). But I have no definitive proof one way or the other, and the idea remains just a simple hypothesis.
Empiricism's greatest flaw is that it cannot tell a man how he ought to live--and it is useless in preparing him for the reality of his own death; it can tell him nothing more than the physical details of that event.
That's exactly the point I made earlier:
What Sorokin does effectively demonstrate is some religious people can not comprehend that some materialists can be equally devoted to godly ideals (as they relate to the physical) absent a belief in God and/or an immortal soul.
Admit it. You think it is impossible to rationally construct a coherent, benevolent morality relying only upon our intellect, symapthy, emapthy, and experience. More importantly, you doubt the very existence of such people even though the walk among us.
Geoff - Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Forget the author but he discusses the role of climate change, environmental degradation, urban over population etc. Very long book. He applies what he sees as the lessons of the collapse of the Roman imperium to conditions today. Interesting book.
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