Archetypal Activism and Integral Culture

HEP at Work

List of Contents

1 Political Psychology – Archetypal Activism p.2

1.1 Archetypal/Political Distinctions p.2

1.2 Archetypal Activity in the World p.4

1.3 How is Archetypal Activity Accomplished? p.8

1.4 Archetypal Activist Tasks p.11

1.5 God’s Not On Our Side p.14

2 The Servant Leader – Integral Culture p.15

1 Political Psychology – Archetypal Activism

From April 12th – 14th, 2002, Pacifica Graduate Institute presented a conference entitled The World Behind the World – Reflection, Reconciliations and Renewal as a response to 9/11 and subsequent events, including the War on Terrorism. The conference presented an archetypal/mythological and psychodynamic perspective on the situation. The brochure for the conference presented the theme in this way. “The events of our recent past, still unfolding, have brought us all-individually and collectively-to a solemn turning point. What, at this juncture in time and place is life asking of us? Who, from our deepest sources calls us to respond? How do we embody the wisdom of our individual psyches, our collective imagination, our cultural mythologies, our living planet? From the wells of our soul’s deepest desires we yearn to heal our Selves, each Other, and the world. Where is our lifeline, our myth, the larger meaning for our time?”

At the conference the theme of “archetypal activism” emerged – how to be politically and culturally active in this time from an archetypal point of view. Archetypal activism presents a possibility for political action that draws on the archetypal, existential and psychodynamic models of human nature, individuality and culture. The following is an elaboration of material from the conference.

1.1 Archetypal/Political Distinctions

Robert Romanyshyn has pointed out a basic contradiction between the archetypal and activist themes. Archetypal implies metaphoric attunement, resonance, reverie, receptivity, reflection, understanding, depth, non-linearity, holism, dialectic complexity, tentativeness, a play of dark and light. Activism comes from political activism. Politics tends to be strongly solution oriented, definitive, linear, reductionist, forward looking, somewhat unreflective, leader oriented, authority based, legalistic. It idealizes bright, well lit places. It is sound bytes and slogans. The KISS directive (Keep It Simple Stupid) rules. James Carver’s “It’s the Economy Stupid” got Clinton elected. Politics sees the world in black and white, good guy/bad guy terms. In “The War on Terrorism”, fighting “the Axis of Evil”, “we will hunt them down and burn them out”. What is precisely missing is that complex archetypal reflective quality. Even in the counterculture, which is critical of mainstream politics, activist politics are still political, focalizing around polarization, protest, incidents, causes, idealism, bite size chunks. This linear action orientation is apparently antithetical to the archetypal reflective way of being. How we could make this polarity dialectic is a fundamental theme we must explore.

The archetypal/political polarity extends through a number of different cultural parameters. In terms of ways of understanding, archetypal prefers seeing symbolic connection through pattern and metaphor, drawing on history as depth illumination. Politics prefers factual reasons that provide cause and effect information, through which blame can be attributed, guilt determined, punishment meted out and solutions found. In the archetypal model, taking responsibility means showing understanding – it is self affirming and evolutionary. In politics taking responsibility means either self aggrandizing and glorifying or resignation in disgrace. In politics, emotions are stereotyped as position statements justifying action whereas, in an archetypal context, emotions are subjectively compelling. Politics clings to hope as an intensive care victim clings to life, while archetypalists live with doubt and faith. Politics values definitive action based on reasons, carried out with will power and determination, in which the actors original (usually simplistic) position does not change, but is tenaciously maintained until “he” (sic) prevails. Archetypalists value tentative action arising from non linear metaphoric thinking, feeling, intuition and complex, changing motivation holding the tension of opposites through dialectic attunment. Politics values achievement, success, triumph, attainment based on an idealistic platform. Archetypalists struggle with principles that are characteristic, rather than simplistic direct bases for action – principles of beauty, destiny, participation and connection, respect for failure and loss, holism, surrender, emergent self definition, context driven action. Politics is a legalistic mode of operation whereas archetypalists prefer justice as a principle. While politics promotes legalistic factual finding of guilt and consequent punishment, archetypalists prefer truth and reconciliation that encourages forgiveness.

Archetypalists understand and accept mistaken repetition rather than strive for decisive victory, so that the full details of unrecognized, forgotten identity emerge. Archetypalists understand how repetitious mistakes fully unfold and elaborate depth so that what is not mistaken can be seen, the gifts in the wound realized and the more robust health in the disease manifest. Politicians who wish to remember the past as the basis for creating a perfect future may be creating other problems – such as iatrogenic diseases (from medicine’s fascistic desire to control and eliminate disease and to protect against death) and the ecological crisis (from the culture’s desire to have an easy, secure world full of cheap fast food and consumerist recreational entertainment, with a nature that is contained and controlled). Archetypalist remembrance of the past takes us into the depths of understanding failure with forgiveness and provides a tendency to include the weak, the diseased, the malformed, the complainant – the alien other as the basis of an evolved, integrated, emergent, more complete sense of self.

These distinctions, of course, are not absolute. They provide an analytic and descriptive way to look at polarities. As archetypal activists we are called to be synthetic (i.e. dialectical) in order to facilitate bringing together the fragmented polarities of the culture in such a way that the existential tension of opposites is maintained while the opposites interact mutually, engaging without definitive dominance. In this way polarities may reflectively energize and activate each other, reflecting through distinction.

1.2 Archetypal Activity in the World

What then is an archetypal activity in the world? We must first recognize that the archetype itself is phenomenal – it is in the world, even as it points beyond itself to the world behind the world. What action might we say constellates around archetypal presence in the world?

Deep action, complex action, dialectic action, receptive action, action that affirms polarity and brings polarities into relationship, metaphoric action (action whose genesis is based in metaphoric understanding and whose activity reveals the metaphoric nature of life). In Michael Meade’s words archetypal action would speak the unspeakable and mourn openly – not simply as a means of returning to where we were before or as a genesis of vengeful retaliation. Archetypal activism would encourage the acceptance of the breaking in of tragedy, of the collapse into terror at the conflict within the culture, rather than simply enacting a War on Terrorism, out there, as a means of managing this inner conflict. Lionel Corbett focuses also on this deep ambivalence within American culture. Meade goes so far as to suggest America must look for evil within, and in its own actions, as also does Corbett.

Archetypal activism would find ways to bring acceptance of the profoundly changing identity of American (really Western) culture and recognize that “the centre cannot hold” and that to hysterically and rigidly attempt to shore it up by acting out will constellate only more extreme and unmanageable fragmentation and hinder a necessary evolution. Corbett suggests something is dying in North American culture even as the new struggles to be born. Grof’s perinatal images echoed this. It seems that the archetypal experience of birth/rebirth is inherently attended by experiences of dying, violence, brutal penetration, crushing, torture, imprisonment, poison and that, to accomplish emergence into a new world, we must accept this.

Meade and Corbett both speak of loss of innocence, specifically of the necessary and inevitable loss of innocence in a young, idealistic and self idealizing culture. Meade points out that the word noxious is the etymological core of innocent i.e. innocence is dialectically noxious.

A central motif of 9/11 is the collapse of the twin towers. Meade points out that the falling towers are a terrible, tragic lifting of the veil between the worlds, profoundly revealing the world behind the world. The fact that this revelation constellates as a terrifying “end of the world” event, rather than an inner experience of evolutionary terror, reflects the hard core rigidity of military industrial consumerist globalization and the cultural imperialism of the good guy world saviour Logos. Because of the loss of the mediating institutions of the mesocosm in this revelation, we stand raw against the macrocosm. Surely the second coming is at hand.

As Jung and Edinger point out, in Western culture (specifically, perhaps, North American culture), a humanization of God is taking place (has been especially so since the Renaissance, according to Tarnas) with an accompanying reification of the human capacity to create (e.g. the self created human and genetic engineering) and destroy (e.g. the atomic bomb and planetary ecological crisis). This is portentous, but dangerous and explosive. We have expected the end of the world momentarily since World War II – the slow apocalypse is upon us, in Meade’s words.

Chris Downing spoke of the uncanny – the unfamiliar in its frightening aspect of the return of something terrible that has been forgotten. This alien other is the very axis of evil, almost by definition. The uncanny is therefore threatening. But also promising, in that, in Lacan’s terms, it brings a return of the Real – the radically excluded original ground of being that we have forgotten in order to become who and what we are, in our world of everyday being and action. A coming home. A homecoming, however, that is also a death threat. In fact a terrible attack on our accomplished, successful sense of self. This is of course precisely the homecoming that Homeland Defense is supposed to defend against, psychologically.

We may reflect on the possibility that as activists, archetypalists are terrorists – not in the manner of blowing up people and buildings but in the manner of radically and terribly undermining and deconstructing the cultural ego. Returning us, in Meade’s words, to ground zero as a grounding in zero, with the concomitant grief, sadness, despair, shame, guilt and terror. According to Corbett the archetypal evolutionary task is to contain these emotions and not act out in narcissistic, infantile, fragmented and fragmenting rage. To contain the borderline tendency to moralistic vengeance and, instead, take the hit and collapse inward rather than acting outward.

Downing suggests that instead of asking “Why me?” we might ask, “Why not me?” This might enable us to reclaim the most profoundly unfamiliarly familiar, that which we are able to repress most of the time in order to be able to go on – the awareness of death, the precariousness of life, the mystery of being and non being.

Henrieka deVries quotes her World War II Resistance mother who explained why she risked her family’s safety to hide a Jewish woman in Holland. “Either we are all safe or not one of us is safe”. She also quoted Margaret Meade: “You can no longer save your family, you tribe, your nation. You can only save the world “.

She suggests a way to understand the events of 9/11 is through a critique of the patriarchal social structure in which terrorism would seem to be inevitable in a world based on male sibling rivalry and treachery (Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau), and father dominance (of sons, of women and of the other). She suggests however, that fundamentalists everywhere, East and West, want to reinstall the absolute dominance of the military industrial clerical father. In a world at war, in the midst of profound explosive economic and cultural change, the military industrial clerical father and his heroic sons “save the day”. Archetypally then, could we say that this father/son team are actually content to be in charge again? They, of course, are saddened and outraged at the tragic loss of life, the “unprovoked” attack. But now they have a mission and it is clear – at least to them. It is the age old war between ”good” and “evil”, and they are the good guys – on both sides.

I would like to suggest that it is precisely the war between good and evil that is the issue, not evil per se. What alternative is there to war on evil? A psychological perspective can suggest a self questioning that deliteralizes the view of evil and questions the location of evil in “the other”, in the enemy.

For now the enemy is no longer the enemy. The enemy now is enmity – non-relational, absolute, annihilating conflict on a global scale. The enemy now is the war itself. As the twentieth century has so brutally demonstrated we can no longer afford this dualistic Titanic global battle between “good” and “evil”. In what John Ralston Saul calls the Second Hundred Years War around 100 million people have died in the twentieth century (Voltaire’s Bastards – The Tyranny of Reason in the West). This war between good and evil threatens to destroy the biosphere – life as we know it on this planet. A new approach of reconciliation and integration, while maintaining dialectic differentiation, is called for.

This means moving from a dynamic of mechanistic, linear, controlling, idealistic duality to one of complex, emergent, pragmatic, dialectic aliveness. This means moving from a formalized, politicized, legalistic model of social relations to one of personal responsibility, freedom, negotiation and mediation. This means moving from politics and religion to psychology and spirituality. This means moving from ruthless competitiveness to cooperative competitiveness, from a politics of divide and conquer to a politics of differentiated inclusion and empowerment and from a model of striving for victory at all costs to one of accepting failure and mistakes as part of an evolution in which we share the gold. This means moving from a culture of moralistic conformity and oppression to one of liberation and freedom, from a culture of reductionist mechanism to one of holistic aliveness and from a culture of idealism and excellence to one of pragmatism and muddling through. This means moving from a military industrial, skill oriented educational model to a more individualistic, humanistic one oriented toward consciousness and creativity. This means moving from “living lives of quiet desperation”, adaptation and “getting by” to lives of existential intensity on the cutting edge, where creativity, resourcefulness, innovation and the Bodhisattva motif of “doing what needs to be done” prevail.

1.3 How is Archetypal Activism Accomplished?

According to deVries, because the origins of aggression are rooted in failure of connection, we have arrived at a moment of decision between a sibling rivalry, father domination tribal consciousness and an interconnected web consciousness. 9/11 is an emergency wake up call from Kali. The dark truth is that we are inseparable and must live in the world with anger, frustration and the broken grieving heart that our actions engender.

de Vries gives guidance as to how to accomplish the archetypal awareness she suggests is necessary. Listen to the wisdom of the body. Women must speak up. Listen to the world through dreams and oracular perceptions. In this time of darkness we may see mythically by utilizing a lunar consciousness, such as Psyche’s gathering of the golden fleece by the light of the moon while the aggressive rams sleep.

Downing counsels the acceptance of fateful inevitability through attuning to the meaning conveyed in repetition – “each assault is both new and old”. We remember (remember i.e. put the members of the body of knowledge back together) what we have forgotten. She resounds the question “What good are poets?” by way of recommending poets and poetry as a way of opening up the soul, in a way political rhetoric cannot. She suggests that through literature (by which we may also understand the arts in general, including music, media and movies) we can reflect myth back into its historical and political context. In the service of deconstructing American innocence she suggests the establishment of museums of perpetration as well as museums of victimization and liberation. Specifically she suggests a museum of the Native American genocide. Remember what we would like to forget.

Sobonfu Some suggests that the way tribal culture values elders could be deeply relevant. Elders carry that archetypal theme of listening and resonating, facilitating management of polarization and sitting with tension rather than acting out. They carry the wisdom of the past and of the depths.

From Corbett’s call for recognition of psychodynamic and archetypal themes in 9/11 comes an implied call for a public airing of these sentiments. Public discourse. Public debate. In newspapers, magazines. On tv and radio.