The Epiphany of the Other 4
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 03.4
Finding homo
Without underestimating the value of psychoanalysis, we rather think that the key to unleash our caged potential lies buried under the dust of the socio-political arena. Take Jung for instance: while Freud would search for the human subconscious between the words of his patients laid down in his office, Jung set out to the most disparate regions of the uncivilized world, journeyed the indigenous Mexico and lived for a while with the aboriginal Kenyans, to directly approach the humanity of the ancient cultures; Instead of interpreting the other cultures from the perspective of the West, he tried to reach the eternal homo on the ground; and instead of defining the subconscious’ dynamics under the lens of the civilized conscience, to transform it, by bringing it back to the source where it came from:
to the mythical anthropos,
who subtends the many branches of humanity as a germinating rhizome.
The anthropos deploys itself in history through some main ordering principles, the archetypes, that give structure to our imagination and drive our unconscious instincts towards a set of well-defined goals. The upheavals of civilization, for Jung, weren’t so far profound enough to alter the archetypes, but only the imaginative media.
Also technological fantasies are driven by the archetypes. In the light of analytic psychology, for example, we realize that the scientists on the A-bomb’s development team were obsessed with the apocalyptic archetype, that dominated their psychic energy and, under the guise of scientific neutrality, aroused the destructive might of the will to power inside their minds, long before being manifested as mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.
To support this interpretation, I’ll report two authentic episodes.
The supervisor to the project, Oppenheimer, recounted that just after the test-bomb exploded in the desert around Los Alamos, the 17th of July 1945, came to his mind the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita:
“Now I am become death,
the destroyer of the worlds”.
General Thomas Farrel recalls the “awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty”. To hide the true nature of this blasphemous impulse was, once again, the censorship of the Super-Ego. A month before, the committee listing the 4 scientists (Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence and Compton: the top intellects for the time, three of them Nobel prize winners) appointed from president Truman to express the final verdict on the use of the bomb against Japan, stated on June 16, 1945:
“We recognize the duty, in front of our nation, to use the weapon in order to save American lives”.
Not human lives, american lives. The dismay that traumatized their conscience a month later, in front of the nuclear experiment, was quickly reabsorbed within the ethnocentric paradigm, that intimately biased even those intelligent men.
Western culture rested on the ‘will to power’ complex, that enforced, as every good complex does, a tyrannical monopoly over the other energies, the other possible principles of identity.
The truth emerging from the theory of Jungian archetypes isn’t, in my opinion, the collocation of the universal homo in the archaeological depths of the ego. The universal human, anthropos, is a normative idea that presides at the cyclical evolution of the species, and this ‘originative archetype’ is to be rather intended as an
eschaton, the vanishing point on the future horizon.
It’s true indeed that our unexpressed potential has left many colorful traces along the rhizomatic journey that took us so far, but the vital sense of the human odyssey is not carved in the secret caves of the mandala, it lives ahead, on every shore where humanity, today, is awaiting for its future.
Each tribe used to demonize the stranger, since the stranger awakens the latent personalities secluded in the backroom of the conscious mind by the prevailing cultural model: would they emerge altogether, the conventional identity would crumble. In the anthropological myths, as the evangelical tales, the recurring obsession is the outbreak of the repressed selves in the spaces left unattended by the hegemonic character, the one endorsed by the tradition. The so-called primitives employed shamans and sorcerers to exorcise the intruder. Modern Civilization used its military might and its set of self-regulatory and incentive mechanisms to impose its identity over all the others, scattered around the Earth. But this plan has failed, and civilization has gradually become schizophrenic, unable to deal with the dissociated personalities fighting in its subconscious.
The West’s collective identity crumbled and has become dissociated, the human tribes have awaken, and these days their drums and chants are audible all around the earth.
Their words are irreverent and free. They carry with them all the indignation withheld in centuries of slavery, but also (above all) the fervent desire for a common earth, and widespread resentment against that culture that farther than any other pursued the delusion of the “I will”, the rat-race to power. Meanwhile, a significant demographic contraction is wearing down the biological resources of the West, and the Southern tribes are moving at the steady rhythm of a continental drift.
The last gift of the Modocs
If we abandon ourselves for a second to an unconditional hope in humanity, we should be able to visualize this image: the native cultures coming toward us with the gift we desperately need. They bring us the chance of discovering the human essence lying deep inside ourselves, the living seed that glows beneath every single determined cultural manifestation. In fact, a culture that rejects reciprocity is condemning itself to infertility. At its most enlightened peaks, the western culture intended to flood the world with its gifts. “Our indigenous politics – said General Sarraut in Hanoi, Vietnam, 1917 – is based on the declaration of human rights as explained by St. Vincent de’ Paoli. The missionaries were committed to a goal that was ‘civilizer pour evangelizer’. The Marxists would export the revolutionary theories, certain that the local cultures were too primitive to elaborate by themselves the strategies for their liberation. Missionaries, Markets, Marxists (the three M) would go around with the hands full of presents, without realizing that
the unilateral gift is really the most subtle form of domination.
A common development requires the mutuality of the gift.
Marcel Mauss, while studying the primitive customs of Melanesia, found the tribes’ cohesive rituals to be exemplified in the exchange of gifts, with the conviction that along with the material object, the gift would carry with it the spiritual substance of the donor. The mutual exchange was a social duty made necessary by the need for a common coexistence. He who gives but doesn’t receive, or receives but doesn’t give, is sentencing his own isolation, and death.
The new era is asking the West to accept the gifts coming from far away, from those regions of the Earth where humanity preserved the treasures of the infinite fecundity of the species; This gifts hold an immense heritage of wisdom, exactly what we need to find the answers that currently elude our conventional knowledge. Tolerance, an illuministic virtue, is not enough today: we need a dynamic approach able to promote the birth of what is waiting to be born.
Writes Levi-Strauss:
“We must listen to the wheat growing, encourage secret potentialities, awaken all the vocations to live together that history holds in reserve.
One must also be ready to consider without surprise, repulsion, or revolt whatever unusual aspect all these new social forms of expression cannot fail to present”.
The new mode of relationship between cultures has to be founded on a planetary humanism, on a common cosmopolitan civilization integrating together all the locally-determined cultural aspects. I’m defining as ‘civilization’ the set of material and mental instruments that have become shared in the current web of exchanges. And as ‘culture’ the anthropological model emerged from any given practice of perceiving and interpreting the physical and historical reality. Civilization is the collection of material, institutional and psychical objects that can be exported to some extent. Culture is the conceptual system that each group uses to express and preserve its identity. Civilization is transmitted, culture is communicated. The West was enriched by the contributions of the other civilizations, as the Chinese, the Hindu, the Islamic (think of mathematics, or medicine), and even by the various indigenous populations, but without allowing those gifts to compromise its own cultural isolation. Modernity claimed to impose one civilization hegemonically on the whole world, thanks to its acquired economic and technological might.
It turns out this claim was wrong all along.
“I’m only a man,
– said Captain Jack, of the Modoc tribe, on the 3rd of October, 1873, just before his public hanging –
I am the voice of my people. I wanted to be a human being. You have denied me this right”.
It is a cry that rises from the abyss of our past. It is a message that announces the possibility of the most radical, the most necessary of all human revolutions.
