the myth of canada · 2017. 7. 21. · ceremony, not abruptly chucked on the dust heap of history....

THE MYTH OF CANADA

56 © Michael Hollinshead 2017

CHAPTER 4

THE PROCESS OF MYTHOLOGICAL CHANGE

On Changing Mythologies

Myths change very infrequently, but they do change, and when they do, societies are transformed.

Think of the changes in England in the 17th century when it moved from a mythology based on the

Divine Right of Kings to one based on the sovereignty of an elected Parliament which governed by

consent of the governed. There was a Revolution which left no part of the society untouched, and

indeed, changed the course of every other society. We are all autonomous individuals with rights

because of the English Revolution of 1640. It created all the main elements of the modern world.

Myths change because the environment changes sufficiently for the myth to become divorced from

reality and therefore dysfunctional. When the dysfunctionality becomes sufficiently disruptive, either

the mythology has to change or the society starts to come unglued. At the extreme it can disintegrate.

When the glue of Leninism and the Brotherhood of Man dissolved in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia

and Yugoslavia, those societies came apart.

There are debates now in Canada over the functionality of the Two Nation and individuality myths

because our environment has changed. This is no longer a world of European colonization and

hegemony, the history from which our Two Nation Myth came. It is a world in which a bewildering

multiplicity of races, cultures and nations exist in nominal equality in a web of multilateral international

institutions under a Pax Americana. This multiplicity has been mirrored in the ethnic makeup of

Canadian immigrants for thirty years now and it has quite altered our ethnic demographics. Two Nations

may have historical reality but it no longer describes the contemporary demographic situation.1 As to

individuality, the world economy has altered drastically and some argue that we need a more American

version of the myth of the individual in order to compete. Their argument has been given point by the

failure of collective societies such as the Soviet Union and the successful attack on the Welfare State led

by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Others point to studies of highly successful businesses which

suggest that it is a combination of treating people as creative individuals within a highly collaborative,

team framework which is the key to their success, that is, individualism harnessed to a

common=communal=community, purpose.

Myths are, for the most part, held subconsciously. This is what makes them so very efficient at holding

societies together. It means they inform our every thought and act, without any need for conscious

thought or debate. It is like being on social autopilot. However, it also means that we are mostly

unaware of them and so don’t monitor how good a job they are really doing, that is, how well they really

fit the times and circumstances in which we live. So our attention is only drawn to them when they

become severely dysfunctional. As a result, we do not recognize the need to change them until we are in

a crisis. It also means that they are difficult to change, because, being held subconsciously, they become

part of who people are. This presents an enormous emotional barrier to change. Changing myths is not

like changing rules and regulations, or even policies. One can have a more or less rational discussion

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about the latter. With myths we have to deal with deep emotional attachments which tend to be

impervious to rational argument.

Consequently, as a society we cannot approach the changing of myth the way we approach changes in

public policy, that is, with the exchange of factual information and rational debate in the House of

Commons. Changing myths involves rethinking who we are and who we have been in the context of

changed realities. It involves paying attention to different things in our history. It involves challenging

people’s sense of identity. It requires us to be sensitive to the need in people for the emotional safety

that myth-created belonging creates. One cannot simply say, for example, as some have done, that

Canada is no longer two founding nations and Quebeckers have to smarten up and join the

contemporary world. On the other hand, neither is it a good idea to tender Distinct Society to

Quebeckers, assuring them that it is substantive, while telling non-Quebeckers that it truly is a fig leaf.

Such action honours neither Quebeckers nor non-Quebeckers. You cannot deal with myth changes by

sleight of political hand; the trickery will dwell in people’s minds for generations like Drogheda and the

Battle of the Boyne do in the collective unconscious of the Irish, to pop up in the most inconvenient

places and times for centuries in the future. The mythological past has to be honoured with healing

ceremony, not abruptly chucked on the dust heap of history. It is a much broader process of change –

societal change – and requires much broader, supportive discourse than mere policy change.

Heresy, Mythology and Modernism

To suggest changing a myth is regarded by society as heresy, that is, it is regarded as a contradiction of

orthodox belief. It is more than mere contradiction in the logical sense; it is a challenge to a society’s

fundamental beliefs and therefore of the society itself, for it is those beliefs, as we have discussed,

which hold a society together and prevent it fragmenting. This why heretics are usually dealt with in a

very severe way, with banishment, imprisonment, torture and execution.

But the fundamental hysteria and deep welling anger with which heretics are met by their orthodox

fellow citizens, and the extremely cruel treatment usually meted out to them, like racking, crucifixion

and burning at the stake, cannot be wholly explained in this way. Orthodoxy meets a fundamental

somatic (bodily) need for safety and comfort. To attack the orthodox is therefore to threaten people’s

sense of security at a very deep physical level. To understand why this should be so is to go to the very

roots of mythologizing and spirituality.

To mythologise, to tell stories, there has to be a conscious ‘I’ to tell them, that begins at the beginning,

unfolds the middle next and puts the conclusion at the end. That is, we have to be conscious of

ourselves as separate from other things and people, and we have to be conscious of the passage of time,

of what comes before what, in order to tell a story (to narratize as the psychologists say). We also have

to have speech and language with which to communicate the story to others. When we look at our

closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes we either don’t see these qualities at all or in only very

primitive form (chimpanzees can be taught to read and associate specific words with what they describe

and can even put simple sentences together but there is no chimp equivalent of the Raven and Coyote

stories of native peoples or of the Iliad or Hamlet, in which the chimp philosophizes on the meaning of

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chimpness and his relationship with the cosmos). Yet if evolutionary theory is accepted then once we

were like them – unconscious and without language or speech. To get at the roots of myth we have to

understand how we got from where they are to where we are now.

At some point or points we developed spoken language and consciousness. How ? Why ? It is not

entirely clear. Linguists tend to believe that it occurred very early in our evolution, probably coincident

with the emergence of the very earliest men like homo habilis almost two million years ago and that it

emerged out of a need to coordinate hunting activities. Others like the psychologist Julian Jaynes are not

so sure and believe it is a quite recent phenomenon, emerging only 4000 years ago.

The possession of spoken language does not automatically lead to interiority, a strong sense of ‘I’ness.

Most traditional societies have a very weak sense of the ‘I’ though they all possess language. Similarly,

‘I’ness in the West submerged socially to a considerable degree between about 100 A.D and 1100 AD

(Berman). Nonetheless, you can’t have consciousness without it. The philosophers would say that it is a

necessary condition though not a sufficient one.

Moreover one can be conscious and rationalize without language. Hunters are silent as they hunt,

operating with hand signals or according to a prearranged plan which can also be laid out with hand

signals as much as by spoken language. William McNeill suggests that early hunters communicated

through dance. As psychologist Julian Jaynes points out, consciousness is not necessary for a variety of

important things which we normally associate with it – concepts, learning, thinking and reasoning.

Words stand for concepts, not the other way round, they attach a sound to something we already know

and have conceptualized. When people learn through conditioning (remember Pavlov’s dog ?) they are

quite unaware that they are doing so. Jaynes gives the example of an experiment in which a light is

repeatedly shone in someone’s eye followed by a puff of air. The eyelid at first responds to the puff of

air, closing to protect the eye. After a while it closes at the flash of light. It learns that the light is

associated with a threat to the eye, but the subject is totally unconscious that the learning has taken

place. It is the same with skills. Jaynes suggests taking a coin in each hand and simultaneously tossing

them to the opposite hand and then asking yourself, after you have learned how to do it reliably,

whether you were really conscious of how you learned it. Similarly with learning to ride a bicycle, does

anyone ever talk to themselves as they do so, correcting errors and giving instructions ? No, you get on

the bike, push off and wobble around and fall and repeat until, suddenly, wonder of wonders, you stay

upright and mobile. In more complex learning like finding a solution to a problem or a path to a goal,

unconscious learning occurs too. My friend Scotty Gardiner tells of a university class which had been

told about unconscious learning and training and trained a professor to walk out the classroom door by

paying rapt attention and laughing at his jokes when he moved to the door side of the lectern and

showing disinterest and not laughing when he moved to the other side. In regards to thinking, consider

the making of judgements, like telling which of two objects is heavier – the solution is not conscious, it is

simply given to you in some way by your nervous system. You don’t think about it. Similarly with that

psychologist’s favourite, word association – the associations occur far too fast for thought. A

contemporary parallel is drawing mind maps, graphical representations of everything you know about a

subject. The whole point is to draw so fast as to leave conscious thought behind. The usual reaction to

the result is amazement that one knew so much and at the logical rigour of the relationships between

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subject areas in the drawing ! Yet there is no conscious thought at all. As to reasoning, studies of the

creative process, for example scientific discoveries, reveal clearly that they typically come as a sudden

flash of what is usually characterized as insight. The overall process seems to consist of consciously

defining a problem (although this need not be so, but can be an inchoate sense of something one cannot

quite put one’s finger on), immersing oneself in the problem (collecting data, observing, calculating,

doing mathematics, or simply musing without a sense of direction etc) and then, often after a

considerable period of time, unconsciously solving it, the solution erupting into the conscious like a flash

of light or a bolt of lightning. {7} One therefore has to question how necessary consciousness really is to

our competent functioning as individual human beings or as communities or societies. On the basis of

the evidence of this paragraph it is possible to conceive of highly evolved human societies or cultures

which are not conscious at all, and, moreover, it is possible to conceive that they they could have existed

until quite late in our history. This is, in fact, what Jaynes proposes.

Some clues about when consciousness first dawned can be obtained by looking at the earliest

documents we have – the Iliad, the Oddyssey, and fragments of other Greek poetry, the inscriptions of

the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Old Testament. What is very clear is that in the very earliest

documents there is no evidence of interiority, of a conscious ‘I’ which editorializes on what is being said

or that expresses intent, that is, there is no introspection. They are declamations of the simplest sort

and are very authoritative in tone. Then, in later documents, there is a shift and the ‘I’ appears. The

simplest way to experience this is to read some verses from the Book of Amos, believed to be the

earliest part of the Old Testament, and then some from Ezekiel, which came later.

Consciousness is, following Jaynes, a metaphorical model of reality. Words stand in for the reality in the

mental space we create in our minds of ourselves operating in the world. They are metaphors for

specific aspects of reality. The original physical manifestation resonates through the word into the

emotional effect it has through its associations, as in babbling brook, or blanket of snow. To explain the

origin of consciousness it is necessary to ask why we ever needed this facility.

In the Iliad, the actions of the heroes are always prompted by a suggestion or invocation or instruction

from a god. In Jaynes’s words they ‘pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips.’

Jaynes points to the parallel with the voices mystics hear (like Joan of Arc seeing a vision and hearing a

voice telling her to save France from the English) or epileptics and schizophrenics. With epileptics and

schizophrenics they are usually referred to as hallucinations and can be located in specific areas of the

brain (Wernicke’s Area for the voices and the corresponding visual area on the other, right, side of the

brain, for visions, joined to one another by the anterior commisure). This suggests that the gods the

Ancient Greeks were hearing were in themselves, in specific complexes of nerve cells in the brain.{8}

They were tapping into a non-verbal consciousness of the kind we were discussing a few paragraphs ago

with verbal and visual hallucinations as the medium. Ancient Greek society was ordered by these voices.

What do these god-like voices giving instructions represent ? They represent the wishes of the leader of

the society. To know what to do in a given situation, you simply subconsciously tuned in to your leader

by listening to his voice hallucinated by your own brain.

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In a simple world of simple tasks and unvarying routine and relationships between humans and between

humans and their natural environment, this was a perfectly adequate form of social control. It is a static

solution to living in a static world. In terms of an important post modern terminology we will meet later

on, it is a state one model (I do not wish to explain it here, just to introduce it so that you will make the

connection later). But the life of the Ancient Greeks got suddenly more complicated. In fact it did so for

the entire human race, probably. There are two possible authors for this complication. Jaynes believes it

was the volcanic explosion of the Greek island of Thera which blew millions of tons of dust into the

atmosphere and caused the equivalent of nuclear winter. It set most, if not all, of the human race into

motion in search of warmth and food. That is a state one or KGN explanation – an external physical

event setting things in motion. The alternative is a sudden cooling of climate due to long cycles in the

way in which the earth spins in its orbit about the sun (see page …….), a factor which has been the cause

of human migrations throughout human history. It causes the moisture laden ocean winds which carry

rain to the continental interiors to fail and thus dries up the grass upon which nomadic humans depend

for their livestock. The subsequent out-migrations of these peoples in search of pasture is recorded in

history books as events like the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde and in the

Bible as the invasions of the Hittites etc. This is a dynamic explanation originating in interactions within

the system. It is a state three leading to a state four solution, that is, a period of chaos leading to a

bootstrapped solution (again, don’t worry what this means right now, just remember the terms and the

context in which they were used).

Whichever explanation satisfies you, the point is that huge migrations were set in motion and cultures

came into contact both with other cultures and with new natural environments. Meeting strangers must

have been a confusing experience. In any given situation, the odds are that the interior god of one

culture would have given a different instruction than that of another, so that strangers would have

behaved in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. No doubt these differences often sparked suspicion, fear

and violence. The Bible makes it clear that war and massacre were epidemic during these periods of

migration. But there must also have been some learning, some attempt to comprehend why the

behaviour of the strangers was different, some attempt to find a way to communicate. The migrants had

to learn to rationalize the differences between their own gods and the gods of other peoples. Exposure

to new natural environments, of which their gods had no previous experience, must have also led to a

learning experience. Whether confronted with strange people or strange environment, in order to cope

the migrants were forced to become gods themselves, that is, to work out for themselves what their

internal voices ought to say in the new circumstances. The discovery of consciousness was, in essence,

people becoming gods, realizing the god-like within themselves. It is a pattern we repeat, in the form

and process of heresy, every time we are seriously and systemically challenged as a society or culture,

even in our own time, as I explain in Chapter 11.

According to Jaynes, this shift from unconscious groupies to conscious individuals was marked by

changes in the meanings of words. The Greek words thumos, phrenes, noos, psyche, kradie and etor

which in The Iliad mean, respectively, physical movement indicating life, lungs, seeing, heart and belly,

come later to mean, mind, spirit or soul, words which describe the quintessence of ‘I’. What is

interesting, and a fact to which will be referred to later, is that these Greek words for the quintessence

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of the human ‘I’ – mind, spirit and soul – originally referred to the physical human body and its parts.

The shifts in meaning mark the watershed which was crossed when consciousness was extended from

the body to the mind.

Whether Jaynes is correct or not, the point is that we did become conscious at some point and that the

nature of human existence was changed enormously and irrevocably. Some sense of this can be gained

by reading Amos and Ezekiel side by side, but only some. In addition to the introspection made evident

by such a comparison, a conscious person is also able to act upon the world whereas a person who is not

conscious acts within it. That is, an unconscious person lives in the world, in intimate contact with it

through bodily sensations. It is therefore an intimate part of who he is and vice versa. A conscious

person, because he can see himself separately from the world and can analyze it and re-order it (within

the limits of his technology) is separable from it. He can therefore act upon it. ‘It’ness in fact becomes

possible for the first time.

This ability to separate self and non-self, is what the psychologists and philosophers call duality. It is the

notion that the world can be divided into two categories: ‘I’ and non-‘I’ or ‘It’. It is our modern tragedy

that this duality has been carried so far in the evolution of our consciousness that we are almost

completely divorced mentally from ‘it’ = nature. The healing or encompassing of that reality (in the

sense of an ability to see the divorce for what it is and maintain contact with nature even in the

presence of a separable consciousness, what Berman refers to as reflexivity, or what has been referred

to elsewhere in this book as the ability to distinguish the map from the territory – our mental map

versus our somatic connectedness to the world), is the greatest challenge for a post modern mythology.

This is because human populations are growing so fast and our technologies so powerful, that we are

rapidly eroding the planet’s capacity to sustain us. We can commit this self- destructive folly only

because we have no sense of connectedness to the ecosphere. We do not see it for what it is, the cradle

that supports us; we see it as a mere separable ‘it’, something which is not connected to us and which

we therefore think we can act upon with impunity. In order to reverse our self-destructive behaviour,

we have to solve the problem of separation.

It should be clear to the reader by now that the problems post modernism must solve are not

contemporary in their origins. They did not even arise in modern times. The Modern model of life and

consciousness was merely one historical solution to a long standing problem which we are facing once

more because the Modern solution no longer works. These problems have been integral to the human

experience from the time we became conscious. Changing policies etc (bailing out the boat) is thus a

solution ludicrously far removed from the real nature of the problems. Even changing paradigms, as

Berman points out, is insufficient. We need to be able to develop an ever present consciousness that we

are using a paradigm all the time and that it can fail and that we must always be sensitive to the need to

abandon the current one for a better. That is, we must be continually aware of what is the map and

what is the terrritory. This is societal learning of an entirely different order than we have ever

accomplished before. It requires a new consciousness or mentality, not a mere reordering of the one we

have.

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This will be difficult to accomplish because the social autopilot of the paradigm and its simple rules for

our behaviour have such powerful social advantages. New paradigms become internalized so quickly

they soon become social habits and quite unconscious. They keep societies together without the effort

of conscious thought. They conserve effort. They enable societies to function cohesively without having

to have a great debate or even think about what they are doing or where they are headed. Social habits,

like any other habits, are consequently hard to break.

Psychologist William James called habit ‘the enormous flywheel of society, it’s most precious

conservative agent : any sequence of mental actions which has been frequently repeated tends to

perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel or do what we have

been before accustomed to think, feel or do, under like circumstances without any consciously formed

purpose, or anticipation of results.’ Habit is the way human groups conserve what they learn from

experience.

Habits confer significant advantages on the user. Michael Young gives four. 1). ‘Habit increases the skill

with which actions can be performed.’ With skill comes efficiency. If we had to consciously reconceive

how we tie our shoelaces every morning or any other of the dozens of similar tasks we do in a day, we

would not get very much done. It is this aspect of habit which underlies the efficiencies which flow from

the specialization of labour, so beloved of economists since Adam Smith. 2). ‘Habit diminishes fatigue….

It economises on the effort put into the hum drum and foreseen.’ Learning a complex task such as

driving an automobile is very tiring because of the concentration required and the tension which doing

new and possibly risky things entails. Repeat it often enough for it to become routine and the fatigue

drops away. Without advantages 1 and 2 a complex life or society would not be possible. we would lack

the skills and the requisite stamina. 3). ‘It spares attention for the unforeseen.’ Because habit permits

accustomed activities to be accomplished with little effort and attention people are able to focus on

changes in the environment and the unforeseen. It has significant survival value. 4). It economizes

memory. If we didn’t have habits, the complex lives we lead would require prodigious feats of memory

every day – of who does what in an organization, and who reports to whom, and what Jones likes in her

coffee, and the sequence of motions by which a dashboard is put together, or what Canada does as a

nation when it’s standard of living is under threat (find another foreigner to finance digging holes in the

landscape, provide the technology and organizational skills required to do so and enter into a trade

agreement with them).

Habit, then, enables a society to be efficient, to cohere (in the sense that people always do what is

expected of them in concert), to be alert to the unexpected and to undertake complex social tasks.

Habits conserve what people learn from experience. However, habit also has it’s penalties, particularly

where societal learning is concerned. The whole point of habits is that they become ingrained in the

subconscious. They become autonomic. Becoming autonomic they become unquestioned. We do not

reflect upon them. So when the environment changes around us, or strangers appear suddenly in our

midst, or new elements emerge out of human activities, like inventions, making our existing habits

obsolete and ineffective, we don’t understand what is happening to The result is confusion,

frustration and anger. Advantage 3 doesn’t help much here, because the attention given to the

unexpected tends to resolve into making it fit existing habits of mind and using those habits to deal with

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it. We assume that the reason we are having problems is that we have become decadent and have

strayed away from the canon and that the solution is to rid our society of the heresies and the heretics.

Heretical individuals who draw the correct conclusions are unable to overcome the social inertia except

in exceptional circumstances. History amply demonstrates that the dissonance between act and

expected outcome has to be extended and severe to the point of a major social crisis before the penny

drops and enough people start to innovate new habits consistent with the new conditions. The initial

response to a challenge therefore is to deny that it exists and apply the old habits with increasing vigour

and increasingly disastrous results. As Ervin Laszlo puts it, people always delay reading the handwriting

on the wall until their backs are up against it, in which position the act is performed badly if at all. The

benefits of habit are so powerful that we give them up only under extreme duress.

One consequence of this is that societies learn in fits and starts. Along comes a challenge strong enough

to threaten the society’s survival and a period of intense and rapid learning occurs. Once accomplished,

we all go back to sleep again until the next challenge. However, as we have already discussed, the series

of challenges facing us now is so severe, that we have to learn a new habit – how to stay awake and

aware as a society so that learning is continuous and habits are discarded before they become

dysfunctional. The habits we have to unearth this time are deeper and more important than skills like

shoelace-tying or conducting reciprocity talks with the Americans. The deepest social habit of all, our

western world view, has become dysfunctional.

Healing the Separation

Every child revisits the epochal human experience of separation as it grows. The child begins, as all

humans have done, intimately linked to its environment, that is, to its mother’s body. Birth is the first

experience of separation. The child gains a first, bodily, sense of itself from the reaction it obtains from

its mother. In a sense, the mother acts as a mirror, in whose responses by facial and other gestures, the

infant starts to establish a sense of self. By the age of seven or eight, by which age a child has usually

seen itself in a reflecting mirror of some kind, it becomes truly conscious of its separateness, for in a

mirror it sees itself for the first time as others see it. From then on the image of self, at least in the West,

is predominantly a visual and intellectual experience. This is the age at which children first practice

deceit because they understand that they can hide their conscious thought and intentions from others.

Without a sense of ‘I’ deceit is impossible.

How we treat our children in relation to this experience of growing separation is thus central both to the

nature of a culture and to how the duality issue plays out in the society. In traditional societies the first

experience of separation, the trauma of birth, is muted by the infant being in contact with the body of

the mother almost continuously for the first two to three years. In Western societies we have magnified

it by the hospital birth and the teachings of behavioural psychologists (those creatures of Newtonian

thought), repeated by people like Doctor Spock (baby is kept separately in a crib and if she cries don’t

pick her up as that merely reinforces the crying behaviour, effectively teaching her to cry).

Societies suffering chronically from dualism are subject to all sorts of compulsive behaviours such as

drug addictions, aggression, religions and ideologies, which are attempts to either numb the pain of

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separation or to attempt to overcome it. Each of these compulsive behaviours differs from one society

to the next. Buddhism is not the same as Christianity. Alcohol dependency is not the same as opium

dependency. Nationalism is not the same as tribalism. And so on. Each society teaches its own unique

compulsive behaviours to its children. In how it treats infants and children it can exacerbate or reduce

the sense of separateness. At one end of the spectrum you have traditional societies in which individuals

are so integrated into nature and the human group that this existential angst is almost not there and in

which drug addiction and coercive religious and political ideologies are unknown and at the other you

have 20th century ‘developed’ societies which are totally dominated by them. It is in this kind of sense

that civilizations uniquely define themselves by how they deal with this primal experience of separation.

From very early on humans have tried to reconnect by deliberately suppressing mental consciousness

through the performance of various repetitive acts, such as breathing exercises, repetition of sounds

and so on, so as to return to the original body consciousness. Adepts throughout history have written

down what this body-conscious experience is like as well as passing it on in oral traditions of extremely

long-standing. People like Ken Wilber, who have studied both documents and oral traditions, have found

substantial commonality among the different traditions, for example, that there is a series of discrete

levels of body-experience, often referred to as levels of consciousness. They vary from five to nine, with

seven being the most common number. The third level corresponds to what is regarded in most

traditions as the soul and is also commonly regarded as having an existence separate from the body

after death. Moving from the first body states to the later ones in the sequence is commonly referred to

as ‘ascent’. At the highest level the practitioner achieves total union with other, a complete healing of

the separation, a reestablishment of the primal unity we experienced before we became mentally

conscious as a species.

More important, from the point of view of our subject of heresy, the practitioner experiences a sense of

the divine in the totality of the world including himself. It is this sense and expression of not only directly

experiencing divinity but experiencing the divinity in all things including the self which has historically so

upset the Christian church in its various manifestations. Morris Berman demonstrates pretty

conclusively, that every major Christian heresy – Gnosticism, Catharism, Scientism and even Nazism –

arose out of the use of these ‘ascent practices’, or, in the case of Nazism from accidental ascent

experience in the leader and the use of magic and autohypnosis. Moreover, it is quite evident that

ascent practices in the form of meditation, Hatha Yoga, Tai Chi etc are widespread amongst the

practitioners of the latest heresy – the ecologically attuned ‘New Age’ heresy against Scientism and of

ecologically attuned Catholic reformers like Thomas Berry and Mathew Fox. It is also quite evident that

it likely played a role in the development of the self- organizing heresy within science itself, as both

Heisenberg and Bohr, two of the more important actors in the development of the Quantum Theory

(the new, Post Modern Science), were both serious students of Eastern religions and philosophy in

which ascent practices play a central role.

Dance and Healing the Separation

One of the most important ascent practices has been dance. Dance has therefore been an important

component of societal learning and heresy. All of the radical protestant sects incorporated dance in their

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form of worship, for example. The Shakers are the best known for this, but all the others did it too. This

fact has been lost to sight because once the sects ‘matured’ into churches and sought social

respectability, the emotional ‘body’ aspects were dropped and regarded as an embarrassment, and

memory of them deliberately suppressed. Most people will be aware of the Whirling Dervishes, a Sufi

sect which still uses dance as the means to suppress mental consciousness in order to enter body

consciousness. The thing to grasp is that this behaviour is not eccentric; it has been normal human

behaviour for several thousand years. In terms of human history, it’s suppression in our own time is

actually abnormal and a cause for serious concern.

The historian William H. McNeill points out that one of the earliest representations of a human figure,

‘the Sorcerer’ found in the Trois Freres cave, appears to be of a man dancing, wearing an animal

disguise. McNeill thinks that dance preceded language and mental conciousness as the means by which

human groups achieved coherence in group activities like the hunt. He believes people danced the hunt

before they embarked upon it so the hunters learned their roles. In this way the hunt was made more

effective. As we know that Neanderthal man was a carnivore, it is likely that dance goes back before our

own species, Homo Sapiens.

As I pointed out above, all religions involve dance, at least, in their early days, whether they be

worshipers of Mithridates, Isis, or Muslim fundamentalists like the Dervishes or Christian

fundamentalists like the Quakers, the Shakers or the Mormons. The most famous Shaker hymn begins

‘Dance, dance, wherever you may be, For I am the Lord of the Dance, saith He.’ Dancing was part of

Christian divine service for about two hundred years after 200 A.D. until it was frowned upon by

Augustine as liable to induce sexual urges and suppressed (he was no doubt recalling his own licentious

youth). Dance is an ascent practice which enables the adherent to connect directly with God by closing

the primal separation. It survives in contemporary Christianity in swaying and clapping hands to hymn

singing, a notable feature of American negro churches, a practice that goes back to the Protestant

Reformation and came down through sects like the Moravians to the Methodists and other Evangelical

sects whose revival and camp meetings in the late 18th and early 19th centuries featured it. The

Mormons kept dance separate from worship but used it as a community builder well into the middle of

this century. It is a particular feature of contemporary Brazilian religions which cross Christianity with

Voodoo.

When people dance or sing together it is noticeable how enthusiastic they are. Switch to the religious

channel on your television and watch a gospel congregation sing and clap and sway together. Look at

the faces and the expressions they carry of ecstasy, inspiration and enthusiasm. The root of the Greek

word ekstasi means to ‘put out of place’ (ek ‘out’, stasi ‘to place’). In classical times it meant insanity and

bewilderment, to be put out of one’s mind, but in later usage it meant ‘withdrawal of the soul from the

body, mystic or prophetic trance’. As McNeill noted of his square bashing or military ‘two step’, dancing

together brings on euphoria and trance. Religious dance is supposed to bring on a mystical experience.

Inspiration means literally to breath in. When the writers of the Scriptures were said to be inspired, the

meaning is that they literally breathed in the word of God. As the hymn says ‘Breathe on me breath of

God, Breath on me life anew.’ People who are inspired by dancing and singing in unison literally are

drawing in the breath of God together. ‘Enthusiasm ‘ as Gyorgy Doczi has written, ‘is a word that literally

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means ‘god within,’ (in Greek, en, ‘in’ and theos ‘god’). Enthusiasm is sharing in an energy that is

conceived of as divine, as mana. {9} We find movements expressing similarly shared religious emotions

in countless other sacred dances ….’ (Doczi, 31) The unity of the people in the dance symbolizes the

unity of man and god or man and nature. Breathing exercises are body practices used to achieve

‘inspiration’, that is, higher states of consciousness or soul travel. Dancing is thus a form of communal

body practice and one of the earliest forms of communal worship.

In small communities of every age community dances are central to their existence. From earliest times

they were the means by which the community could directly experience community – literally dancing

together in harmony with the dance of the universe, and therefore with the cosmic order of things –

performing the same movements as everyone else at precisely the same time, synchronously,

harmoniously. Dance was a direct expression of community and a way of reinforcing ones awareness of

belonging to one. Community dancing builds a sense of community, of belonging. Catalans still perform

the sardar, their national dance, every Sunday in the public squares, as an expression of their

distinctiveness within the Spanish national state. In totalitarian states such as Imperial Germany,

Nationalist China, Nazi Germany and Japan after the Meiji Restoration, group calisthenics became the

community dance form of choice. Crowds swaying in time to Hitler’s rhythmic exhortations and

rhythmically shouting sieg heil and thrusting their arms out in the nazi salute explains a lot about how

Hitler was able to exert the hypnotic influence he had over the Germans. Even today, the first thing the

employees of large Japanese companies do on getting to work is mass calisthenics. The group which

swings together, works together and believes together.

In hierarchical agricultural and industrial societies, it became the permitted form of social protest on the

part of the have-nots towards the haves – a mild form of heresy. American negro slaves used dance in

this way to satirize their masters. The Roman Saturnalia and modern Carnivals served the same function.

The Ghost Dance of the Prairie Indians a hundred years ago was an attempt to use dance to restore

cohesion to a society in danger of breaking down. It was recognised for the heretical act it was by both

the American and Canadian Governments. They banned it to ensure the break down would occur so that

natives could be absorbed into white culture.

So while the origin of dance might lie in the coordination of the Paleolithic hunt, we continued to do it

after we ceased to depend on hunting and became agriculturalists and industrialists, because of its

power to heal the primal separation and connect us thereby with the gods or the spirit world. Dances

like the Hopi Corn Dance connect the shaman and the dancers to the spirit world through the trance

state, so that they can be communicated with and asked to ensure a good harvest. These fertility dances

are common to all agricultural peoples.

Dance took an odd and unrecognized turn in modern times. McNeill, in his book ‘Moving Together in

Time’, tells of how he was first attracted to the subject of dance and its role in human societies by his

experience of the ritual dance of the barrack square – ‘square bashing’ or military drill. He was amazed

at the condition of euphoria that it brought on and surmised that it was caused because the rhythm of

the drill mimicked the maternal heart beat heard by the fetus in the womb. I think he is right. That

rhythm facilitates a temporary closing of the primal separation and is akin to a religious experience – it

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returns a person to the womb, to the time before the separation. Hence the euphoria and the sense of

safety and security which drill creates. That, as much as the fear of the sergeant, is the reason why men

who fought in regimental square or line, as armies did from the 16th to the early 20th century, could

endure murderous close range fire by massed muskets and cannon. Not infrequently, whole regiments

died in square or line without breaking ranks, as the Buffs did at Albuera, earning themselves the

sobriquet, the Die Hards. Drill is just another form of dance.

Men who experience this joint euphoria induced by drill belong to a club to which civilians do not

belong, because they do not share the experience. This sense of belonging and the emotional security

that goes with it is universally reported by army veterans of modern times. To their dying day, despite

the horrors of war, men refer to their days in the army as the best days of their lives and what they

remember and treasure most is the comradeship (instilled by drilling together on the barrack square).

McNeill believes that it was drill which gave European armies a decisive edge over non European ones,

so that tiny European armies, such as those commanded by Clive and Wellesley in India in the 18th

century, could overcome non-European ones many times their size. And because the small military

community of the regiment gave a secure home to social misfits and outcasts, it was possible to secure

them for a pittance and thus control vast empires inexpensively. Most of the professional soldier’s

income was, in contemporary parlance, psychic (an assumption which still seems to be held by NDHQ in

Ottawa). In McNeill’s words ‘… it became safe to arm even the poorest classes, pay them a pittance, and

still expect and secure obedience. The emotional resonance of daily and prolonged close- order drill

created such an esprit de corps among the poverty stricken peasant recruits and urban outcasts who

came to constitute the rank and file of European armies, that the social ties faded to insignificance

among them. Such troops soon came to constitute a cheap, reliable instrument in the hands of

European statesmen and generals. Within two centuries they carried European power around the globe;

and in time of domestic disturbances, European soldiers were even willing to fire on their own kind ….’

On the continent of Europe, such armies enabled kings to exert autocratic control over their subjects. By

the middle of the 18th century representative institutions such as the Parlement of Paris and the

German Diet had ceased to meet. Only in England did this not happen. This was because once the

crowns of Scotland and England were united in 1605, there was no longer a land border which needed a

professional army to defend. Without a standing army the English kings could not impose absolutism on

their subjects. In England the reverse happened: it was the professional ‘New Model’ army, which

Cromwell trained for the representatives of the people in Parliament, which defeated Charles I’s ill

organized, amateur, feudal levies. This lack of an English standing army meant that England remained a

reasonably open democratic society in which there was representative government, social freedom and

mobility. It was in such conditions that early capitalism and individualism flourished and was therefore

one of the strategic reasons why the Industrial Revolution occurred in England and not anywhere else.

Well drilled armies are able to maintain their own drill rhythm and impose it on a battle, preventing an

opponent from maintaining his. Once a group of men lose their rhythm, they lose most of their

effectiveness. They lose their ability to manoevre and they lose the ability to concentrate fire power.

This was why Europeans like Clive and Wellesley were able to defeat enormous non-European armies

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with no more than a few hundred European troops – they imposed their rhythm on their battles,

causing their opponents to lose theirs (much as Pete Sampras does on the tennis court when he raises

his game). Frederick the Great and Napoleon were able to defeat other European armies because they

trained their regiments to dance to a faster beat, thus multiplying their effectiveness. Frederick was able

to wait until his enemy had committed himself to a manoevre and then, by superior marching speed

made possible by faster rhythm, march across the enemy’s front and strike him in flank before he could

change front again, rolling up his army in confusion. The weapons drill of his troops was tuned to such a

rapid rhythm that his troops could fire three times to his enemy’s once, making each one of his

regiments equivalent to three of his opponent’s. Nelson’s ships in the Napleonic Wars had a similar

advantage over the French. The rapid rhythm of the English cannon fire, tuned by constant drill,

overwhelmed the much slower rhythm of the French. Cuthbert Collingwood, one of Nelson’s captains at

Trafalgar, aimed, like Frederick, to achieve three broadsides to the enemy’s one. Essentially, the army or

navy which danced best and fastest won.

The more complex an organism or society, the more important rhythm becomes, for if all the parts are

not kept in synch, chaos ensues. That is why myth is so important – it ensures that the members of a

society act in synchrony, especially when threatened. Myths are the dancing masters or drill sergeants

of society.

According to McNeill ‘Euphoric response to keeping together in time is too deeply implanted in our

genes to be exorcized for long. It remains the most powerful way to create and sustain community that

we have at our command. And since we are social creatures, we need communities to guide our lives

and give them meaning.’ ‘… our contemporary neglect of these forms of sociality appears to be aberrant

from the human norm.’ Large and complex societies, in all probability, cannot maintain themselves

without such kinaesthetic undergirding. Ideas and ideals are not enough. Feelings matter too, and

feelings are inseparable from their gestural and muscular expression.’ ‘… an essential factor in stabilizing

industrialized urban society was a continued, massive influx of newcomers who had been nurtured to

adulthood in the age-old way by day long association with their parents in the countryside.’ A vital part

of this up bringing was community dancing which ‘relieved personal discontents and bound rural society

together ….’

There are two things to say about this. First, as McNeill points out, traditional village life is disappearing

because of the spread of the modern way of life and television even into the rural Third World, so that

this source of urban stability is under threat. Moreover, rural areas in the industrialized countries have

been declining in population for much of the industrial era, particularly since the Second World War.

Much of the stability in Canada’s industrial cities came from rural urban migration within Canada, a

source which is now pretty well exhausted, (when I came to Edmonton in 1969, most of the Canadians I

knew were born and bred on the farm or were only one generation removed) and from European

peasant societies before the Second World War. Second, the refreshing, stabilizing village influx in

Canada today comes principally from Asia, Latin America and the Carribean. Immigrants from these

regions have brought their ‘community dances’ with them, from the Dragon Boat races in Vancouver to

Carnival in Toronto and Montreal. The contribution that non-European immigrants make to Canada is

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thus far greater than people suppose in an area the importance of which escapes modern politicians. It

makes their contribution to the development of a new mythology all the more vital.

What is perhaps the most alarming trend of all, is that in modern times the other main source of

muscular bonding has been the one McNeill experienced – drill on the barrack square, preparatory to

going off to a world war. The two world wars in this century are what have brought this country

together as a nation more than anything else. It is chilling to think that war has become the modern

world’s way of bonding national communities.

The other important pattern to note is the fact that whenever social and economic and technical

upheaval has occurred in the past, leading to the break down of face-to-face community, in all cultures,

the response has been the development of grassroots religious movements, what McNeill calls ‘portable

congregational religions.’ The examples that stand out are the Cathars, which I suspect was a reaction to

the mediaeval industrialization of South Central France, the English Lollards who came with the

upheavals of the 14th century (caused by climatic cooling and the attendant outbreak of the plague), the

numerous protestant sects which came with the economic depression and political troubles of the early

17th century ( which are discussed in the next section), and the Evangelical sects which came with the

Industrial Revolution – the Methodists and Mormons etc. One suspects that the efflorescence of New

Age cults and the vigour of Evangelical Christianity in the United States are responses to the current

technological and economic gearshift. The Green or environmental movement has all the hallmarks of a

‘portable congregational religion.’ It is entirely possible that the social response to the drying up of the

inflow of village immigrants to the cities and the consequent need to find a substitute source of social

stability and belonging will be found in a new efflorescence of grassroots ‘portable congregational

religions.’

The importance of rhythm is recognised in contemporary management theory. Rule #7 in Competing on

the Edge (Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, Harvard Business School Press, 1998) is ‘Time pace

change. Keep a rhythm to the number of new products or service launches each year. Be careful about

managing the transitions between them so you don’t lose momentum.’ ‘These transitions have to be

choreographed to be effective.’ Just like Frederick the Great and Nelson, if you can achieve a greater

number of ‘product broadsides’ in business, you can throw your competitors off their rhythm, forcing

them to pick up their pace, lose their rhythm and introduce products which have been inadequately

prepared for launch. You may even cause them to drop a current product development and start a new

one in an attempt to get ahead, again spoiling their rhythm and seriously delaying product launch. This

was part of the secret of the Japanese auto makers: they were able to cut down the development time

of new models so much that they were able to introduce several new ones to Detroit’s one and cause

the American manufacturers to lose their rhythm in a desperate attempt to catch up.

Rhythm or moving together in time, as McNeill calls it, is thus extremely important in economics (though

unrecognized by economists, who all appear to have two left feet, professionally speaking). It was the

rhythm of the sailors, hauling and pulling together in time to shanties which enabled Europeans to

establish the sea supremacy on which their colonial empires and therefore their economies, depended.

It was the rhythmic marching and musket drill of Clive’s soldiers that gave the British the jewel in their

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imperial crown, India. It was the rhythm of the slave gangs on the sugar plantations, kept in time with

work songs, which provided the capital to finance the Industrial Revolution. It was and still is the

underlying principle of the specialization of labour, for the advantage of specialization lies in the rhythm

which the worker is able to attain because he or she sticks to one task. Synchronizing the rhythm of

specialized workers in factories, the production waltz, is what the Industrial Revolution was all about.

Just-in-time or lean manufacturing, the latest refinement of factory production, involves coordinating

not just the rhythm of workers in one plant but in all the plants in the supply chain. It is the latest

industrial dance, lean synchopation.

Drilling the components of a complex organization to death, like Frederick the Great did, (his soldiers so

feared the Prussian drill sergeants that they thought going to war was a holiday) will not work in a more

complex arena than an 18th century battlefield. As we saw in our discussion of the First World War, in a

highly complex situation, the winner exploits the flexibility and initiative of individuals and small units.

Overall coherence is achieved by means of a few simple rules – in the German Army it was the Infantry

Training Manual, in contemporary corporations it is the company vision and goals. Societies which

prosper in the 21st century will possess their equivalents – relevant myths.

Dance is central to religious practice in all ages because it heals the primal separation and induces a

trance in which the individual communicates directly with Other, with God. People who have been in

this state regularly report voices, that God spoke to them. Those voices frequently speak out loud from

the lips of the person in the dance-induced trance. This speaking out loud is still part of the Quaker form

of worship even though the practice of inducing it through dance has fallen into disuse. Julian Jaynes

theorizes that pre-mentally-conscious people were directed by voices of the gods emanating from their

right hemispheres, much as modern schizophrenics do. Dance would have evoked those voices.

Dance is an important component of heresy. It is an ascent practice and ascent practices, as we have

seen, lead to a direct personal experience of spirit or God. What ascent practitioners hear is not always

the company line, which makes them all potential heretics. That is why, once a religion has become

established, ascent practices become confined to the hierarchy or remote, hermetically sealed

communities like monasteries, or banned completely. It is also why, when we look at any period of great

social or cultural upheaval, such as the English Revolution of the 17th century, or the Cathar Heresy (see

next two sections), at the root of it you always find heretical ascent practices , of which dance is a major

form. It was the inherent heretical challenge of rock and roll dancing which caused the social hierarchy

of the 1950s and 1960s to react so negatively to it. The rock n’ rollers were ‘out of tune’ and ‘out of

(dance or drill) step.'{10}

Natural rhythms, such as the dance of the planets in the heavens, dictate the division of time by which

we set the rhythms of our lives – days weeks, and months – and have done so since the dawn of

civilization. Days are set by the periodicity of the earth’s orbit around the sun. The week is a little more

complicated. ‘Very early in Sumerian history, priests simplified the confusion of the spirit world by

discerning seven great gods who ruled the natural world and met together in council once a year to

decide what would happen in the next twelve months. Each god also ruled over a special domain: sky,

storm, sun, moon, fresh water, salt water, and earth. The seven great gods, in turn, matched up with the

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seven moveable lights of the firmament: sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and the

number seven also fitted almost exactly into the phases of the moon which defined the agricultural

calendar. These coincidences were enormously impressive, as indicated by the subsequent spread of the

seven day week to distant China by about 1400 B.C., and completely around the globe after 1500 A.D.’

(McNeill , Keeping Together, p 54). The month is set by the phases of the moon. All of this means that

even today, like the Elizabethan Englishman, though mentally quite unconsciously (our body-

consciousness may be another matter), we dance to the music of the spheres (planets), not only here in

Canada, but all over the globe.

the myth of canada · 2017. 7. 21. · ceremony, not abruptly chucked on the dust heap of history....

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