Chickens, Eggs, and Spirits

I’ve thought for many years that Jung was onto something with his idea of a collective unconscious, a subterranean movement of thought and sentiment that affects many people at once and may produce similar manifestations simultaneously in different places. There are a number of examples of this in the history of science and mathematics, the most famous being the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Two recent and very different discussions here have me thinking about this phenomenon: the one about the role and power of materialist evolutionary thinking, and the one about the role played by the baby boom generation in various developments of the last forty years or so.

In the discussion of evolutionism (meaning a Dawkins- or Dennet-style commitment to materialistic evolution as an all-explaining paradigm), the question was raised as to whether a way of speaking based on material facts helped to form the way people thought, or whether the thought formed the language. No doubt this is an unanswerable question; we can assume a sort of feedback effect where each reinforced the other, but we can’t say where the germ was. And we really can’t say why it flourished at the time and place that it did. We can only fall back on statements like the time was ripe or the world was ready or it was an idea whose time had come.

It’s not that no one had ever thought this way before—some of the Greeks did, and I’m sure someone who knows more history than I do could supply more instances. Why did it catch on in the post-medieval West, to the point where it became a potent and even dominant cultural force? Of course we can come up with some answers to these questions, noting cultural movements that seemed to prepare the ground, and following lines of propagation. Advocates of materialism might say that people recognized its truth; opponents might say that it appealed to the ever-present human desire to escape the truth. But those are only more detailed versions of the world was ready. Why was it not ready in the time of Democritus?

Similarly, one of the most striking things about the youth movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was the way it took hold among people far removed from the centers of cultural ferment, such a hold that they felt compelled—the word is not too strong—to look and behave as much as possible like people in California and New York. You can say it was a fad or a fashion, and that would be true, but it was also a good deal more than that. I was one of those provincial imitators (or bandwagon-jumpers) and I remember vividly the sense that these were my people, that they represented something to which I belonged. The long hair and all the rest of the externals were fashions, yes, but also more than fashions: indicators of an identity entirely distinct from what we dismissively called the “straight” world, membership in a sort of quasi-religion.

Why did the specific form and content of this rebellion capture the souls of so many who first heard of it on television or in a magazine and were instantly and powerfully drawn, rather than repelled, as so many were, not only in our parents’ generation, but in our own? Say that we felt alienated—but why did this particular response compel our immediate assent? Again, advocates and opponents can present plausible good and bad reasons, but these only push the question back a little. In the end we fall back again on the catch-phrases: the time was ripe. But precisely why, at that moment, and in what respect, was it ripe? We can’t really say; the best we can do is come up with plausible contributing causes: affluence, alienation, and the like. From my perspective now I can say that, among other things, it was the moment of dispersal into mass culture of ways of thinking that had been developing in the West since at least the early 19^th century. But that, again, only pushes the question back a little further.

I’m certain that there is far more to the world and to human life than we know, probably more than we can know. Jung’s “collective unconscious” may or may not exist, but it’s really a pretty thin idea, a vaguely scientific way of stating a conjecture about a mysterious phenomenon. C. S. Lewis had a more specific conjecture. In a poem called “Infatuation,” which I would quote if I could find my copy of the book, he suggests that we may often be the unknowing objects of direction or manipulation by spiritual beings—by angels and demons, to put it bluntly. (“Reined and ridden” is the phrase I remember. Lewis clearly was referring in the poem to dark spirits, and presumably would not have described angelic influence as compulsion.) From the Christian point of view, this is perfectly plausible, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t operate on groups as well as individuals. That’s a somewhat disturbing thought, to be sure; thank God we have a rock on which to stand, and a touchstone with which to prove any shiny thing offered to us as gold—even if reading the result is not always perfectly straightforward.