Prometheus rebound: An inquiry into technological growth and psychological change

TECHNOLOGICAL

FORECASTING

AND SOCIAL CHANGE 9,241-258

241

(1976)

Prometheus Rebound: An Inquiry into Technological Growth and Psychological Change* JEAN HOUSTON

ABSTRACT Western Man’s philosophy of power over nature has led to the present excesses of technology. The technological environment in turn, has had profound and questionable influence on the human physiological and psychological organism-resulting frequently in both personal and social breakdown. The body-mind needs a new kind of nurturing and educational process involving the potentiation of latent human capacities if it is to successfully withstand and recreate the technological process, as well as facilitate a more humane use of human beings.

The Ancient Roots of The Problem The origins of the problem of technological growth and psychological change lie deep in the western psyche, and specifically, in its religious roots. In the first chapter of Genesis, God is not consonant with His Creation. It is a “handiwork” which He declares “Good”. In many other myths and scriptures of the beginning times, the god is implicit in the creation, is often indistinguishable from it. He or She is the Sky or the Earth, the Primal Waters or a Shooting Star. In the Judeo-Christian story there is an immediate distancing between Creator and creation, an I-it objectification of reality. The world and all that lies within is manufactured from without and so is “other”. And the being created in the image of God, man, is similarly authorized to be dominant and removed from the subhuman world. Social historians such as Lynn White have found these scriptural attitudes providing the basis for an aberrant technology, one that exploits and manipulates the world, and leads inevitably to ecological disaster. In Genesis, it can be suggested are already sown the seeds of the current fixation on the GNP and the excesses of the multi-national corporation. This trans-historical whimsy is not as curious as it first appears but has a continuous tradition in the history of western production. White has noted, for example, that Frank&h calenders “show men coercing the world around them-plowing, harvesting, chopping trees and butchering pigs. Man and nature are two things, and man is master”

[Il. *Invited Paper Delivered at “Limits to Growth ‘75”. the first Biennial Assessment of Alternatives to Growth, The Woodlands, Texas, Oct. 21, 1975. Sponsored by The Club of Rome, University of Houston, and the Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation. DR. HOUSTON is Director of the Foundation for Mind Research, Pomona, N.Y. 0 1975 by Jean Houston. This paper will appear in the forthcoming Growth (edited by Robert E. Sweeney and Dennis L. Meadows).

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At a time when western Europe was a small primitive outpost on the great centers of civilization, western peasants and artisans were technologically precocious. By the year 1000 A.D. they were applying water power to industrial processes other than the milling of grain, and shortly thereafter with inventions such as the stirrup and the horse plow, were gaining a sense of manipulative power over nature virtually unique in the history of human cultures [2]. “By mid-thirteenth century,” White has written, “a considerable group of active minds, stimulated not only by the technological successes of recent generations but also led on by the will-o’-the-wisp of perpetual motion, were beginning to generalize the concept of mechanical power. They were coming to think of the cosmos as a vast reservoir of energies to be tapped and used according to human intentions. They were power conscious to the point of fantasy” [3]. By the middle of the 14th century these fantasies prompted the inventions of all kinds of mechanical contraptions and laid the ground-work for the galaxy of technological effects that followed in the wake of Gutenberg. The pace accelerated so that in the year 1444, a visitor from another culture (one could almost say another planet), a highly cultured Greek ecclesiastic, Bessarion, visited Italy and suffered from an early version of future shock. He encountered a vast display of ingenious mechanical devices, witnessed the superiority of Italian ships, arms, textiles, glass, and was astonished by the vision of water wheels sawing timbers and pumping the bellows of blast furnaces. Succeeding centuries saw a steady acceleration of the extension of “the empire of man over things”. The genius of Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, served to deepen the estrangement of man and nature; nature now seen as a measureable, mechanistic function, to be interrogated with power. Bacon perhaps, was the principal architect of this process for it was he who gave to the western mind-set the most thorough justification for the principle of domination, affirming that “the command over things natural-over bodies, medicine, mechanical powers, and infinite others of this kind-is the one proper and ultimate end of true natural philosophy” [4]. It was Bacon too who jointed his New Philosophy to technology and mechanical innovation assuring us that men would go on to create “a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity”. The ecological critique was announced by the poet John Donne, a contemporary of Bacon who sounded an alarm that was to become prophetic for the events of the 20th century: And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this world’s spent. ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation. [5]

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The spending of the world’s substance and the loss of supply and relation were not perceived by the technological heirs of Francis Bacon. They insisted on maintaining Bacon’s illusion of unlimited power and unlimited progress, which in turn led to illusions which prolonged the dualistic agony of man separate from nature. If power, the dictum went, then the world outside of one can continue to be mastered; and if unlimited power, then unlimited mastery. The fact that many are suspecting for either ecological or political reasons that the power is no longer readily at hand, has the effect of deepening

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the trauma of technological man and plunging many into a too hasty retreat of simplistic solutions, withdrawal psychologies, and a tendency to polarize technology as THE ENEMY or THE FRIEND. The Nineteenth Century As Pandora’s Box Prometheus, so the legend goes, had a brother, Epimetheus, a fey, benighted fellow whose name means “Afterthought”. Zeus, furious over Prometheus’ giving of fire to mankind (and thus some measure of control over the powers of nature), sent Pandora to be Epimetheus’ bride, complete with a dowery of the famous box. It is interesting to note that late Renaissance thinkers identified strongly with the figure of Prometheus, but only in so far as he was the agent of new knowledge and new power, not as he was ultimately responsible for the bride of Afterthought, and the unleashing of an unimagined series of woes. Pandora’s box, given in the 17th century, was not really fully opened until the 19th century with its radical acceleration and extension of industrial and technological change in all avenues of life. The industrial revolution compelled a destruction and transformation of all the traditional ways of being, knowing, having, living. It was perhaps the most intense assault the world has ever seen on he traditional image of man and the notion of what it means to be human [6]. Cumulatively, the number of changes resulting from the growth of population, expansion of industrialization, the birth of many new sciences and modes of investigation, the revolution in social, familial, and value structure, constituted a quantum jump in the whole fabric of human existence, as well as in the psychodynamics of human experience. It was especially in the arena of economic change that the most drastic effects on human self-understanding occurred: “The social effects of the Industrial Revolution markedly transformed the lives and actions of individuals in Europe, especially by the mid-nineteenth century. For example, the emergence of the concept of “factors of production” (land, labor, and capital) had revolutionary implications for the Western image of humankind. Humans (the labor component) were no longer a part of the organic whole of society; rather, the person, the laborer, became an objectified and standardized component of the production process. The tendency to see people as mere units in the production process, bought in an impersonal market place and forced to submit to the dictates of the factory in order to survive, was reinforced by the post-mercantilist socioeconomic ideology of laissez-faire, which discouraged government intervention in economic activities. The image inherent in this setting could reasonably be described as “economic man”: rationalistic (able to calculate what was in his own self-interest), mechanistic (a factor of production), individualistic (with great responsibility to take care of himself,), and materialistic (with economic forces acting as primary if not exclusive reward and control mechanisms)” [ 71.

Such an objectification of human personality and needs in terms of factors of production served to discourage the search for a subtler and more organic guiding process for the industrial era. Again, it was the larger sensibility of the poet and novelist who detected the greater ills to come. Here for example, is a passage from The Duke’s Children in which novelist Anthony Trollope describes a group of aristocratic fox hunters discussing the perils of hunting “in these modern days”. The passage was written in 1880: “ . . . not the perils of broken

necks and crushed ribs. . . but the perils from outsiders, the perils from new-fangled prejudices, the perils from more modern sports, the perils from over-cultivation, the perils from extended population, the perils from increasing railroads, the perils from indifferent magnates. . and that peril of perils, the peril of decrease of funds and increase of expenditures!”

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This late Victorian scenario proved predictive of the kinds of problems that were soon to plague the 20th century. On the following page we find a table of selected successed and associated problems of the present technological rea prepared by the Stanford Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Social Policy. The table is contained in their brilliant study, Changing Images of Man. It is a telling realization and compounding of the fears of the 19th century social critics. The Syndrome of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice With the implications of this table we come to full term in the ancient but constant state of objectifying and dominating nature. Rooted in scripture, reinforced by medieval fantasies of power, given philosophical and mechanical force by the Promethean men of the late Renaissance and early modern period, proliferating everywhere in the last century, it is now, finally, laden with the near apocalyptic results of excessive success. It is an enactment on the field of history of the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The apprentice, understanding almost nothing of the subtle dynamics of the powers he is dealing with, and of himself in relation to these powers, is overwhelmed by his evocation of the automated brooms. He is nearly done in by the sheer excess of his success. What had been lacking in the apprentice and in the history of western technological success was a sense of the vital ecology that links inner and outer worlds. The dominant social paradigm of reality perceived largely in economic and technological terms is deficient in that it is bound only by the objective, “outer” dimension of things, and thus contains no internal limiting factor. But the outer environment is itself strictly limited in its resources, and so each solution yields ten new problems. Lacking the full complement of Nature in all its parts, technology and its step-child, Materialism, is frankly un-worldly. One could almost say it is not only un-worldly, but is in fact un-worlding. The singular present drama of ecological, social, political, and psychological breakdown, much of which is owing to the doings of the technological apprentice, is as powerful a drama of the un-worlding of a world as one could ever see. Why are we un-worlding ourselves at such a catastrophic rate? Why are our successes such failures? A great deal of blame lies with our psychological inadequacy and abuse of success. As has been seen, the natural continuum of man and nature as well as the richness of human psychological and spiritual process was ignored and derided during the recent reign of quantity. The premises of technology proved archaic and hurtful of human personality, based as they were on 19th century attitudes and principles which were psychologically naieve, linear, insular and exploitative. As E. F. Schumacher has noted, “The economics of giantism and automation is a left-over of nineteenth century conditions and nineteenth century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the real problems of today” [9]. Then, too, we have the fact that the glorification of demonstrable proof led to the structuring of the more humanistic disciplines such as psychology and social science in terms of the operational mechanisms of 19th century science. Shaped and manipulated by the technological environment, modified and treated by education, social plans, and therapies still based for the most part on obsolete mechanistic models, many people have come to think of themselves as prosthetic extensions of the technological process, instead of technology being a prosthesis of the human process. Thus, Ernst Jiinger’s powerful statement that technology is the real metaphysics of the 20th century.

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REBOUND S. R. I. Table of Selected Successes and Associated the Technological/Industrial Era

infant rates

and adult

Highly developed technology

science and

Machine replacement and routine labor Advances in transportation

Efficient Affluence,

Satisfaction

Expanded choice

of manual

communication and

production material

systems growth

of basic needs

power

of

Problems Resulting from Being “Too Successful”

“Successes” Reducing mortality

Problems

of human

Expanded wealth of developed nations; pockets of affluence

Regional overpopulation; the aged

problems

of

Hazard of mass destruction through nuclear and biological weapons; vulerability of specialization; threats to privacy and freedoms (e.g., survcillance technology, bioengineering) Exacerbated

unemployment

Increasing air, noise, and land pollution; “information overload;” vulnerability of a complex society to breakdown; disruption of human biological rhythms. Dehumanization

of ordinary

work

Increased per capita consumption of energy and goods, leading to pollution and depletion of the earth’s resources Worldwide revolutions of “rising expectations”; rebellion against non-meaningful work Unanticipated consequence of technological applications; management breakdown as regards control of these Increasing gap between “have” and “have-not” nations; frustration of the revolutions of rising expectations; exploitation; pockets of poverty

Technology and the Pathology of Space and Time Much has been studied and written about the effect on man of the technological environment. To research this literature is to wrestle with darkness. It is to review a literature filled largely with futile visions, negative scenarios, the death of hope. Be they the scholarly reflections of a Mumford or an Ellul, or the print-outs of the well-programmed computer, they share a consensus of despair and depletion. However, much of what has been written may be misleading in that it is ideologically determined or programmed by one or another economic, political, or psychological position, many of

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which are themselves determined by the dogmatics implicit in technological method. Almost no attempt is found that makes an holistic examination of the impact of the new environments on consciousness and the human nervous system, or on the body-mind generally. We know that in modern environments there are factors unique in the experience of the human race, factors for which nothing in human evolution has prepared us. Stripped of his biorhythmic roots in nature, and surrounded instead by a new vibratory pollution of noise, frequency, amps, ergs, volts, and accelerating change, man has lost the physiological sureties of !ris ancestral tempo and ancestral space. As Jacques Ellul has written: “Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world” [lo].

The two major constructs of human experience are those inherent in the structural dynamics of space and time. Let us review some of the psychological effects occasioned by the interaction of technology with space and time. To begin with, technology joined to space interrupts the critical succession of events necessary to the process of symbiosis. The natural ecology of life demands an adaptive and nurturing interchange between man and environment. The ancestral way was largely one of affinity to the symbiotic process. It was only with the technological transformation of the environment that symbiosis in many of its forms became a casualty of modern civilization. Under this rubric, for example, skill (techne) becomes equated with technique and with the technological mastery of machines, losing thereby its ancient meaning rooted in the relationship and symbiosis with other living material processes. Herein, the switch becomes the dominant mode of interacting with one’s environment, the dominant form of making a decision. To throw the switch is to radically modify and operate upon one’s world. The existential implications of this are profound. The world becomes not weather, wind, and trees, but mundus machina, a macro-artifact set into motion by an arbitrary throwing of a switch. A gap of ignorance lies wide between the operated switch and the operating world. One is not only ignorant of the process contained in the gap, one is also removed several times from the environment which the machine operates upon. One becomes observer with little or no social or spatial responsibility, and little if any contact with wood or iron or wool. Again, one is unworldly. One is the ignorant slave of Abstraction, blind to process, a mechanic with little knowledge of his material. The abstraction process is stepped up in the world of the technologically based white collar worker. Here there is a tendency to diffuse and confuse the power base. Bosses give way to managers. Decision-making becomes an arcane method of identifying the proper response in a programmed situation that is forever changing its program. There is frequently a pervasive quality present reminiscent of the novels of Kafka and the Theatre of the Absurd as one loses the sense of contact with the decisions and deciders affecting one’s life. The abstraction mode also allows people to project into the process all of the negatives of their lives. When something is so unknown by so many on so many levels as technology is, then it becomes a convenient receptacle for devils. The fact that the technology of defense and offense have assumed mythic proportions since W.W. II furthers this de-

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monizing tendency. This has led to the widely observed penchant of regarding ourselves in our technological mode, i.e., when using powerful machines and automobiles, as semi-satanic, full of libidinous power drives and energized naughtiness. This also permits one to use the powerful machine as a convenient compensatory device, acting out repression and pathology without ever having to come to terms with these until they take a serious psychological toll. In these ways technological abstraction has served to more thoroughly distance ourself from our self. In the western world the abstraction process reaches its most ominous level in that it has helped to create that huge, vacant space between the government or corporationwhich controls and maintains production-and the isolated consumer, who increases his rate and quantity of consumption in proportion to his isolation. As one thoughtful critic has put it: “Western society is on the brink of collapse-not into crime, violence, madness or redeeming revolution, as many would believe-but into withdrawal. Withdrawal from the whole system of values and obligations that has historically been the basis of public, community and family life. Western societies are collapsing not from an assault on their most cherished values, but from a voluntary, almost enthusiastic abandonment of them by people who are learning to live private lives of an unprecendented completeness with the aid of the momentum of a technology which is evolving more and more into a pattern of socially atomizing appliances” [ 111.

The demands by ecologists and others that we put limits to our growth and voluntary curbs to our rate of consumption runs foul of the deep psychological pattern of consumer life-style in the technological age. Consumption and affluence and the maintenance of these are virtually the inevitable results of the distancing and isolation of man from nature, man from government and the processes of production, and most importantly, man from himself. To successfully set a limits to growth is to first effect a critical growth process in the human use of human beings. This will be further discussed in the concluding pages of this paper. Technology wedded to problems of spatial distance has created the mobility phenomenon. Radical mobility has outmoded the nature of boundaries-be they political, environmental, or conceptual. Consider the fact that for thousands of years in western consciousness K6e Journey, and especially The Journey to the East and back was one of the major symbolic themes of growth and self-discovery. From the Mediterranean wanderings of Ulysses, to the travels of the Crusaders, through pilgrim’s Progress, to even Hermann Hesse’s metaphysical jaunts, The Journey-difficult, profound, and immensely enriching was the way of knowledge as one moved from one loaded spatial constellation to another. Nowadays, owing to mobile technology, The Journey has been replaced by footlooseness, a state of being “on the road” for no particular reason. The consequent lack of rootedness has produced drop-outs who become wanderers-picking up and trucking on whenever their minimal efforts to find a place for themselves fails. In poor countries mobility produces mass migration into cities from the rural areas and resulting catastrophic famine. In both rich and poor areas mobility has contributed greatly to crime, alienation, and the diminishiment of personal and family support of larger social structures. World travellers find everywhere wandering bands of Americans. (Lately, however, the ancient reasons may be reasserting themselves, and one discovers among these bands many persons again on 7’he Journey, looking for “truth” or “meaning” or a place, a style, a person who will make it all make sense again). The fluidity of spatial life abrogates the traditional form of roots, but it may also be that this apparent rootlessness is hiding a more pervasive unity of humankind and a new

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and deeper rooting. The new mobility, after all, allows for the rapid gathering together of people who share similar loyalties and moral concerns-witness the thousands who came from everywhere to join the peace marches, or groups petitioning for equal rights. Mobility has given us the global village, and a larger sense of the union of the human community. With this comes a larger scale of moral concern, and a responsive resonance to the needs of peoples and countries wherever they may be. It is in the context of the stressful, over-crowded urban environments that technology has generated a spatial milieu which, undoubtedly has had the most profound effects upon the human nervous system. The nature of urban and technological stress as Hans Selye has shown is pan-systemic and is not limited to the booming, buzzing confusion of our problem cities. Provoked by chronic environmental conditions of a deleterious nature, stress results in prolonged changes in body and mind. Selye has designated stress as the general syndrome of bodily adaptations designed to terminate or overcome evocative stimuli called stressors. The cumulative effects of these adaptations results in great changes in the neuroendocrine systems. It is important to note that the stress syndrome follows a characteristic adaptive pattern which Selye calls the General-Adaptation-syndrome. There are three stages to this syndrome: (1) an alarm reaction, including the initial shock phase and a countershock phase, in which the body’s defense system begins to work; (2) a stage of resistance, in which the organism offers the most optimal adaptive response and defense; and (3) a stage ofexhaustion, marking the loss of acquired adaptation [ 121. These adaptive stress reactions have always been true of the human being. What is unique in the situation of modern man is masses of people living in a state of chronic adaptation to the stress syndrome, resulting, it is thought, in more or less permanent damage to the body-mind. In our cities particularly, we see the results of the maintenance and exhaustion of this adaptation. The senses react by reducing the perceptual field on the one hand, and by demanding more and more intense forms of stimulation on the other. It becomes necessary to protect oneself by perceiving less and less of the sounds, smells and sights that are actually present. Thus, the reduction of sensory acuity in “civilized” man compared to the exercise of those capacities in so called “primitive” groups. Thus too, the numbed senses demand stronger stimulation-louder sounds, more vivid colors, brighter lights, more intense sexual expressions, in order that the organism feel alive, and the person feel himself and his world to be real. The stress syndrome of everyday life both demand withdrawal and also create the demand for artificial extremes. Changes in the nervous systems of younger people are naturally the more pronounced, so that their alienation from the everyday world is more complete, and so that the stimulations demanded by their senses are more extreme. What is pleasureable, or evocative of a “tang” of reality for many of the young is actually unbearable for many older people, and this to an extent that probably has not been seen before in history. It is as if the technological environment is spawning a new nervous system which will, in turn, generate still further changes in the environment and in the technology required to satisfy the new needs. We are seeing too, that many young people are coming very early to a state of being overwhelmed by the intensity of the sensations they have sought and experienced. The experience of young users of psychedelic drugs over the past 15 years is a case in point. This leads to a rejection of the source of stimulation and a flight away from it “back to the land,” or even a strange nostalgia for a past which belongs not to their experience but

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to that of their parents and grandparents, a past that is only imagined and which corresponds more or less with what was the actuality. The success of such television programs as The Waltons, points to the nostalgia for a sterner, simpler ethic and way of life, as well as a longing for the less ambiguous demands of a frontier psychology. It is a mode of television viewing that serves as a stress adaptation. Sensory and existential overload primes the exhaustion phase of the syndrome, and the brain, overburdened with ideas and images and inundations of data sooner or later loses its capacity to cope. A good many of these brains simply give up, rejecting knowledge, rejecting the society that inflicts such overabundance. In the event of such rejection, there may be rage, bewilderment, loss of ability to adequately distinguish between what is real and unreal, apathy and a sense of impotence. The macrocosm of society becomes too much for people to handle, and so the microcosms begin to form-people trying to find and create special interest groups, sub-cultures, communes. Overwhelmed by the “too-muchness” of modern life, many are moving into little worlds that they share with others, but which are largely incomprehensible to membeis in good standing of the macrocosm In any event, the move towards sub-cultures is a move towards creating a manageable consensus reality, albeit with the consequent cutting of lines of communication to the outside world or other sub-groups. It is an ironic demonstration of the principle that the more technology “enriches” the society, the more impossible it becomes to have the kind of unity that the society needs to survive. The over stressful environment also generates a turning inward, a preoccupation with interior states of consciousness, and with traditional eastern and western disciplines of self-knowledge. Certaintly, too, the widespread use of psychedelics was for many a use of modern chemistry to escape the outer world and leap into an equally kaleidoscopic subjective reality [ 131 . The current widespread interest in both scientific and experiential circles in altered states of consciousness is indicative of a sensibility that arises in times of ontological breakdown-be it pre-Alexandrian Greece, second and third century Rome, post World War I Germany, or even today. When many of the structural and formal underpinnings of society break down, then psychological energy which had been bound to these social structures moves inwards, breaching the unconscious, activating archaic and symbolic, as well as irrational psychic contents. In these eras, and today is no exception, consciousness escapes inwards and there arises an extensive fascination with the arcane, the occult and with interior states of consciousness. A sensibility emerges that believes that in internal states lie eternal verities, and the tapping of some mystical or psychological process that can give a new reality consensus and bring order out of chaos. There is in these times a hope that in the return to subjective realities-to the green world within that belies the wasteland without-there would come a remythologizing, a revisioning of the world so that it would make sense again [ 141. Such are the products-for good or ill-of the pathologizing of space. Technology joined to time is equally bizarre in that it is tending to involve one in the peculiar time zone of the radical Now. The tyranny of clock time and the rule of the machine over the rhythms of our daily life have served to fragment and dissociate the flow of living time and natural rhythms. “Abstract time became a new milieu, a new framework of existence”. It is a framework that aids efficiency but brings an accompanying loss of a sense of past and future. With abstraction of space and time, and with the loss of a sense of the stages in any operational process, comes inevitably, a loss of a sense of duration. When the rule of life is “no sooner said than done”, then the whole temporal fabric of existence becomes warped. Warped too, becomes the necessary lag in duration

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between wants and the satisfaction of those wants. Recent studies indicate that over the past 20 years many people, especially adolescents, have become less future oriented, less able to defer gratification of their wants, indicating a loss of the sense of duration and of the time flow necessary to make critical choices. The recent widely noted diminishment in attention span may also be attributed to this. The ultimate negative form of this phenomenon may be in depriving language of meaning and value since so much of grammatical experience and the logic of language is grounded in the inter-relationship of grammar, logic and duration. Alice said it, of course. It keeps on getting curiouser and curiouser. And the most curious effects of technology on human personality are from radio and television. Radio offers an adaptive mechanism for stress in that in providing an aural environment it affords an exaggerated response to the high threshold of noise in our lives. It serves up in regular doses, quasi sacraments; music which does not amuse but mythologizes, and a liturgy of patter which is just that-noises from space, a torrent of sounds which have strangely changed their content. Witness the post-verbal fervor of a Detroit disc jockey: “Hey baby! This is me! Rockin Robbie D! I’m so bad I make flowers die I make babies cry I take candy from babies and give dogs rabies and if that ain’t bad the rain don’t fall and that ain’t all-biscuits ain’t bread.” The effects of this on constant listener may be the decline of speech, the inhibition of words with sound, and the triumph of stream of consciousness over considered language. One apologist for this phenomenon has suggested that “Words, in an age of immediate electronic communications, may not be able to hold their own: they may become increasingly part of larger patterns, expressions which are predominantly non-verbal, in a word, synergetic. Whereas the power of words once lay in precision, the power of the new synergetic expression will be a uniting of subjectivities, a communion of spirit and sensibilities” [ 161 . This is a fascinating idea and provides another example of the interiorization tendency but does nothing to explain the use of radio in the 20th century to achieve an of spirit and sensibilities” with dictators and extraordinarily successful “communion vocally charismatic totalitarian types. With television we have another conundrum unique in human experience. No one is yet able to ascertain the effects of the exposure of children from very early ages to prolonged television viewing. But surely, the watching for hours on end of the thousands of pulsing strobes which make up the television picture cannot fail to have some effect on the neurological system. Television is a completely novel situationfor the nervous system and especially for the formative stages of psycho-physical development. And then there is the problem of content. After 2000 years we still wag our heads knowingly about the brutish and violent public entertainments of the Roman Empire, and speak virtuously about the decline and fall. And yet we persist in simulating equally vicious and brutish events every day in the living rooms of millions. Bread and circuses were never like this. But apart from these obvious follies, television may be affecting our perceptual and psychological structures in subtler and more far reaching ways, causing us to learn to transcend the usual boundaries of space, time, inner and outer. In both television and motion pictures perspective becomes a relative event; there is almost instantaneous change of perspective on an event: up close, far away, sky-view, ground-view, and even point of view. This constellation of perspectives cannot help but give a richer environmental sense, a deepening awareness of all that the environment contains. It may not be an

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exaggeration to suggest that the global sensibility, the deepening moral concern for people half a world away, as well as the growing ecological concern, is in part a response to the multiple perspective which television encourages as well as to the breadth of information which it affords. Television also renders diaphanous the division between objective and subjective realities. The switch gives you at one moment “hard” news of earthquakes, murders, and assasination attempts, and, at the next, the doings of federal agents on other star systems. The blend and flow of fantasy and fact is so swift that consciousness loses its sense of absolute determination of what is real and what is imaginal and does it make any difference. The video environment may be making people more susceptible to entering into altered states of consciousness as well as giving them more fluid notions of the nature of reality. If this proves so, then the psychopathology of one generation becomes the extended reality of the next. Or as one eminent social scientist said to me recently, “I am quite prepared to accept that there are 20 separate realities going on in this room right now .” What, If Anything, Does It All Mean? Technology is an environment, and an environment plays a critical role in shaping the human condition. Of itself, technology is neither good nor evil, neither beneficial nor harmful, it is what the human being makes of it-it is an extension and reflection of man. Its aberrations are in part the aberrations of man’s philosophy of nature and objectification psychology. A different philosophy, a different attitude to world and environment might well have produced a different kind of technology. But as it is now, technology is among the most potent of man’s prosthetic extensions and the uses made of it can alter man himself, and as we have tried to show, is doing just that. The alteration is probably producing neither grotesque nor angel. It may however, be producing some of the alternative life styles that could evolve from these alterations. I would like in these remaining pages to investigate briefly several possible scenarios that are emerging or have already emerged in our time as a result of the changes wrought in the human being. I will suggest both negative and possitive effects as they appear to me. Some Negative Effects Many of these have already been discussed in previous pages, but I would like to explore further several of the more insidious possibilities. First, is the possibility that the technological environment may be functioning to diminish several critical mental and physical capacities. Whether one talks with teachers or publishers, or for that matter with anyone concerned with human communication, there is considerable unanimity about the growing breakdown in the communications process itself that extends into thinking and attention, learning and the capacity for expression generally. The evidence that this sort of decline is found in all classes of people indicates a pervasive problem that is no respector of persons and which evidently does not respond well to panaceas involving doles of money and social services. Whether the apparent decline of these capacities is owing to any of the factors mentioned above or to toxic stress from pollution and bad nutrition [ 171 , a general decline in the capacity to communicate is a spectre that we should be exerting every effort to remove. In some of our studies of human capacities at The Foundation for Mind Research we are beginning to gather data which suggests that the man/machine interface as it exists

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presently may be detrimental to thinking and communication. The body-mind needs a certain sensuous as well as conceptual involvement with the unfolding process of any operation in order for there to occur the healthy development of language, logic, the sustaining of thought processes, attention span, and communication generally. The switch phenomenon may interfere significantly in the formative years with neural connections being made and body learning taking place. A study of the early years of highly intelligent people indicates with many a sensory involvment with materials and a sequential learning of the methods involved in the transformations of those materials. Our own studies corroborate some of Piaget’s hypotheses of intellectual development in this area. One of the most intelligent and realized people that I have ever known or studied is Margaret Mead. The chronicle of her childhood is one in which she was encouraged to understand and participate in the beginning, middle and end of all processes, be they weaving, the putting together of mechanical devices, or the use of building materials. I feel that this was a major determinant in the development of her remarkable intellect, keen use of her senses, and analogical way of relating things, and explains the thoroughness of much of her work and the lucidity of her communications. What all this suggests is that we clearly need educational environments that allow young children a vital participation in learning how things work, how they become, how materials are transformed. This may do much to offset the effects of abstraction, as well as setting a basis in brain and behavior for better communication skills. Educational technology should be prevailed upon to create inexpensive learning environments that surround the child with engaging opportunities to immerse himself in process. Another negative is one that looms in times in which society is going through a profound crisis in consciousness, as well as an ontological breakdown. I have spoken earlier of the rising of the depths as characteristic of these times, but one could also speak today of the overwhelming multiplicity of choice, the confusion of values, and the exacerbation of these symptoms by the technological environment generally. Historically, this kind of crisis has often led to chaos, bloody conflict, and the destruction of the society through disintegration. Frequently, a reinstitution of order occurred through the coming of a dictator who promises to bring reality into manageable proportions. After the excesses of an age of crisis there arc many who are only too ready to fall into the totalitarian embrace. When people are so confused and bewildered, patriarchical dictates comes initially as a great relief. It is like having Daddy back, one gets to regress and start all over again, with values and schedules all laid out, and most answers given. Technology is brought under control, limited and adapted into the goals of the leadership, and superfluities are eliminated. But then comes the awful denouement. As I have said elsewhere [18], the reinstitution of order in society by a dictator is accomplished by psychological ploys which serve to contract the mass consciousness, imposing more limited norms of what is permissible to consciousness than those preceding the crisis, a consensus on a narrower and narrower reality, a constricted reality unable or unwilling to tolerate any deviation. Such a narrowing consensus is maintained by limiting and monotonizing stimuli of all sorts. The press is controlled, only permissible ideas are allowed diseemination, works of art are rigorously censored, architecture becomes monolithic (witness modern Peking or Speer’s plan for Germania), and modes of dress are limited. Color, form, esthetic modalities’-the entire spectrum of sensory and ideational input-are severely limited. It amounts to the politicization of brain function. Brain function is restricted, stabilized, and maintained by a complex array of devices drastically limiting both inputs and outputs. Technology becomes a principle channel of control and limitation of human experience.

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I do not think that there is much likelihood in the forseeable future of western societies falling into this kind of political totalitarianism. We of the 20th century are too close to horrendous examples of this to repeat the syndrome. Hopefully we are inoculated against it, but still must maintain constant vigilance that it doesn’t happen again. What could happen, I feel, is a variation of this involving a form of techno-psychological imperialism (compared to which most imperialisms would probably pale by contrast). This imperialism is already prepared for in the growing phenomenon of privatization. As Martin Pawley has described it the private citizen of the west is beginning to be enmeshed in a “willfully sustained system of therapeutic deceptions” [ 191 . Technology and media simulate personal fantasies and provide constant divertissements away from present and future crises. There is a growing primacy of secondary realities; styles of clothes and fashions offer fantasy identities, media and advertising flood the mind with dreams so that the technology of secondary reality has become central to marketing, to production, to economic health itself. Studies of production-line workers reveal that much of their time is spent in fantasy. (It could not be otherwise, since so many of their leisure hours are spent being bombarded by fantasy). Here is the self-description of one line worker “There are nine men all told who work on our line, and each one is a character, an individual in his own right. My work comes to me in a completely automatic way, in the gestures of automation. With a rag wrapped around my eyes I could still do it, and could do dozens before I realized that I had done any at all. But underneath all this may mind never stops working. It lives by itself. Some call it dreaming, and if so, I am dreaming all day long, five days a week. The whole bench dreams like this. It is a galley of automatons locked in dreams” [20].

It is not difficult to imagine how a dictatorship of psycho-technology could orchestrate a society of bliss ninnies. By giving sanction to the great divorce between sensation and action, by governing dreams and images, and offering frequent rewards of taped delight, the psycho-technologist could quite literally run the show Thus western man’s removal from nature becomes complete in the epiphany of the happy cyborg. Some Positive Scenarios I do not choose to believe in the above fancy though the prophets of science fiction and the doom-sayers of social critique say it could be so. I do not believe it because I think that the sheer intensity of present reality has caused us to turn a corner. We are living, I suspect, in a time when the convergence of complexity with crisis is creating a tertium quid, a whole new mind-set on how we know and deal with our reality. Times in which the dominant paradigm or way of understanding shifts have been called times of “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche); hierarchical re-structuring” (Platt); “conceptual metamorphoses” (Thompson); “cultural mutations” (Bois and White); and “new-system functions” (Korzybski). We may now be in the early stages of a qualitative and quantitative departure from the dominant technological paradigms. There are signs, this conference and its concerns are one, that we are finally moving out of the objectifying, manipulating philosophy of power which reigned for too long. The ecological crisis alone is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done: it is challenging us to a realization of a new humanity and a new way of dealing and working with our world. A holistic perspective and understanding is emerging as is an ecological ethic in which the human acts in concert and in partnership with nature to bring about more symbiotic ecological relationships and in establishing needed recycling processes. The ecological ethic also aids in achieving a necessary synergy between individual and organizational micro-decisions, providing a healthier basis for the macro-decision to emerge. It provides too an organic basis for inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural coordination. It is an ethic which is found in

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the program of intermediate technology of Schumacher and others. This technology with a human face is “vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time (is) much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology” [21]. It puts hands and brains back into the production process, restores man’s relationship with nature, and generally corrects the pathologizing of space and time which occurs in regular technology. Although being developed chiefly for the Third World, it will undoubtedly find its way into more extensive use in western countries, if only out of psychological necessity. It is enormously significant that the current crisis in consciousness, the loss of a sense of reality felt by so many, the rising tides of alienation occurs concomitantly with the ecological destruction of the planet by technological means. We are forced into the awareness that man is not encapsulated bag of skin. Rather man is organism-environment. And this fact brings us to the momentous point in human history where we have no choice if we are to survive but to reverse the ecological and technological plunder, and that will mean discovering new forms of consciousness and fulfillment apart from the traditional ones of consumption, control, aggrandizement, and manipulation. It is time to take off of the psychological shelf all those potentials lying dormant there that were not immediately necessary to man in his role as Promethean Man-Over-Nantre. The problem of human survival when you come right down to it, is the problem of elevating the quality of mind and body of the human race. Most of us, for example, are raised to have the experiential intake faculties of a much more limited and bounded culture and our technology is ambivalent in its effects on these already archaic faculties. We have not educated our conscious receptors to take in the amount of information and multiple levels of knowing that we need for modern decisions making. We are still being educated for the demands of the early 19th century. We use but a fraction of our capacities-perhaps ten percent of our physical capacity, and five percent of our mental potential. What would happen if human beings generally could learn to use twelve percent, or fifteen? Surely we would have a very different situation-a different human being, a different technology, different societies, and so on. It has to be our hope that the difference would also mean improvement-both in the humane use of human beings, and in our modes of problem solving. It is my belief, based on many kinds of evidence and sixteen years of research in the field, that we can definitely give human beings the capacity to use much more of their potentials than all but a few can use presently. We can do this both by preventing what does us active damage and by eliciting and developing potentials which now remain latent in most persons. Before discussing some of these potentials we should first look at some of the active damage that needs to be remedied if the human being is to finally come into his own. One very basic and important area where much work urgently needs to be done is that of human nutrition. There is surprisingly little support for research in nutrition and there are few real authorities. Seeking advice from physicians is often not very helpful, since they receive no adequate training in this matter fundamental to human health. Because of our ignorance it is not unlikely that some degree of malnutrition is almost universal. In recognized cases, we find that under- or improper nourishment during the first two years of one’s life results in some form of brain damage. The practical effects are impairment of all intellectual functions, and also emotional impairments extending into interpersonal relationships. Later in life, dietary deficiencies appear to be factors in many varieties of mental illness. Only now has the new orthomolecular psychiatry begun to come to terms

PROMETHEUSREBOUND with the factc221.But again,the recognized cases are the ones where disturbance severe. There must be many other cases, doubtless millions, where the functioning significantly affected, but the fact is not recognized,

255 is is

Equallybasicaresuchmattersasposture and movement. In a study conducted for the World Health Organization, it was determined that in Europe, Britain, the United States, and Australia, neither physicians nor physical educators were able to recognize faulty Postureor many otherphysical defects except for the very gross distortions [23]. And Yet the ktmwn effects of faulty posture and movement include impaired mental and emotional functioning, various diseases, premature aging and doubtless premature death. In movement is included breathing, a vital function that becomes impaired in the great majority of persons. When posture and movement are significantly improved, there is found to an accompanying improvement in sensory acuity, thinking and feeling functions, and overall awareness. Again, the need for much more research and dissemination of knowledge is urgent. In making possible a greater use of the self and a more completely human experience, there is one tool of the greatest importance that needs to be described as it is relatively unknown by the general public. That is the method of neural reeducation created in its most sohpisticated form by an Israeli physicist, Moshe Feldenkrais, with antecedents in the work of the late F. Matthias Alexander. Alexander’s work is carried on principally by Dr. and Mrs. Wilfred Barlow at the Alexander Institute in London and was the subject recently of a Nobel Prize acceptance speech by Nikolaas Tinbergen. From these men comes the knowledge that sensing, thinking, feeling, and movement are functions so interrelated in the human being that all can be drastically affected by work with any one of them. (And as we have seen in our study of the effects of technology on these functions, the impairment of one readily spreads to an impairment of the other functions). On the therapeutic side, Feldenkrais, with an unrivalled knowledge of body mechanics, developed an elaborate series of exercises by means of which, first of all, the human frame may be virtually rebuilt. But more, he reeducates the kinesthetic sense, completes the body image to produce a much expanded body awareness,and so affects the nervous system as to in fact improve thinking, feeling, and alleviate many symptoms of “physical, ” “mental,” and “emotional” disorders [24] . Our Foundation’s research-first-hand observation and study of the work of Feldenkrais and of the Barlows, has confirmed these claims and findings, which I am certain some will find to be extravagant. I might note that the late John Dewey was of the opinion, expressed in many books, that Alexander’s discoveries were perhaps the most important in the history of 20th century science. In our own work we attempt to join these psychophysical reeducational methods to an investigation of the capacities of consciousness and perception. In doing the latter we explore experimentally with research subjects the immediate experiential and other values of altered and expanded states of consciousness, alternative cognitive modes, acceleration of mental process, the creative process-fertilized by a variety of experimental techniques and devices, the programming and use of dreams, the physiological control of internal and involuntary states and many other varieties of human capacity which tend to be inhibited in the ordinary person. Among these are the experimental investigation of imagistic thinking. Almost all children have some capacity to think with visual images as well as with words. Because no encouragement is given this potential in the dominant educational schema with its emphasis on verbal, linear thinking, it becomes lost for all practical purposes, typically re-emerging only in the dream life or when the consciousness is altered

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’ hypnosis

or

drugs,

or in

some pathological cases when illness changes the brain however, that the access to visual and sometimes other sensory imageries (auditory, kinesthetic), is retained by a statistically large numbers of Persons deemed unusually intelligent or creative. This may be in part because of the evidence which indicates that by thinking in images, solutions can be found and ideas expressed that are not possible when the thinking is purely verbal. Thinking in imagery is more given to patterns, to symbolic processes, to more organic constructs. More information then is likely to be condensed in the dynamics inherent in the matrices of the symbolic image. Our studies of the creative process indicate that the process is one in which there frequently occurs a kind of interior visual dialogue and orchestration between these larger patterns of information which are art of the imaginal, symbolic process. What would happen if we preserved this natural capacity by including its cultivation and application in the schools? At Marburg, Germany, before World War II, just such an experiment was undertaken, under the direction of the Jaensch brothers. Different groups of children were encouraged, throughout their school years to apply visual imagery to learning, thinking, and creative expression. The results were most encouraging. Children, taught to use the image thought process were, by the time they reached their teens, more creative, retained the capacity to paint and draw, and scored higher on intelligence tests than the control group of children whose imagery was inhibited by educational processes too oriented to the verbal. To the researcher in human potentials, the result is not surprising. And we would expect, in addition, a more complete personality development, since there has been no inhibition or failure to use such a potent natural capacity. Through educational techniques we should be able to facilitate thinking in images as well as in words, so as to keep both verbal and imagistic faculties potentiated in children. And, as our research indicates, it is not difficult to evoke this inhibited capacity in adults. People then have access to both verbal and visual thought processes. They are able to extend their perspective on issues, to consider more alternatives, more solutions, and in general, to think more effectively and more creatively. In this era of pluralities of choice, this kind of multilevelled thinking comes as a considerable boon. Our work with adults also suggests that gaining access to the various internal imageries tends to increase the acuity of the corresponding senses in their perception of the external world. Many subjects also report increased energy, less stress and tension, and a sense of being better able to deal with problems. As a large proportion of these subjects have been urbanites and living within the conditions of stress described earlier, it would seem that these programs of reeducation in the extended use of body and mind, serves to make them less vulnerable and more prepared to receive, contain, and deal with the overloads of our technological era. It would seem to be a general principle that the greater use we make of our physical and mental capacities, if it is done in an intelligent way, the more will there manifest a tendency to growth, a rich unfolding of the self. Among the capacities contributing to such unblocking and unfolding are all of the sensory imageries, but also the uses of subjective time and the acceleration of thought processes, cross-sensing, self regulation of pleasure and pain, and the establishment of voluntary control over some of the autonomic functions by means of biofeedback and autogenic training. Individuals are enabled to experience states of consciousness not ordinarily accessible to them, and they are encouraged to find productive applications of those various states. Research subjects may learn to work with dream content, how to chemistry.

It is significant,

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better concentrate and to remember. There is a tapping of the automatisms of the creative process, and an experiencing of those levels of the psyche where the images are archetypal, mythological, and possibly transpersonal. To do these things is to restore the ecological balance of inner and outer worlds, it is to gain a wider use of the self and a larger measure of self-knowing. It is to move beyond the conditionings and cul de sacs and diminishments which our technological environment imposes on us. It is to extend the frontier of inner space, which, unlike outer space, has inexhaustible resources. From this kind of research and experiments emerges the conviction that most people, given the opportunity, given education, can realize more of their potentials in varying degrees. They can learn to think, feel, and know, in new, or unaccustomed ways, have wider horizons, and aspire within realistic limits to a multi-dimensional awareness. It is not especially hard to effect such changes if we are willing to emancipate ourselves from the anxieties and inhibitions of new kinds of experience; experience which does not seem to move us directly towards goals we are accustomed to regarding as the only ones possible or worthwhile. Once we understand the generally unrecognized limits we impose on ourselves by a myriad of false concepts, shrunken aspirations and taboos, we become able to achieve a larger freedom to think, to dream, to aspire, and to experience so that we open up possibilities for authentically new ways of being [25] . Technology has its origins in power. Potentia has its origins in man. Somehow, somewhere, because survival is the issue, psychological capacity will grow and technological power will change. References and Notes 1. Lynn White, Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science CLB 1203-07 (March 10, 1967). 2. Lynn White, Jr. St. Francis and the Ecologic Backlash, Horizon IX 42-47. 3. Lynn White, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 133-134. 4. Francis Bacon. Sphinx, or Science, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. VI, London: Longmans, 1870, p. 40. 5. John Donne, An Anatomie of the World: The First Anniversary, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, (Charles M. Coffin, Ed.) New York: Modern Library, 1952, p. 191. 6. A discerning discussion of this especially as it affected human values is found in J. B. Schneewind, Looking Backward: Technology, ways of living, and values in 19th century England, in Values and the Future, (Kurt Baier and Nicholas Rescher, Eds.) New York: The Free Press, 1971, pp. 110-132. 7. Changing Images of Man, a report of the Center for the Study of Social Policy, 0. W. Markley, Project Director. Stanford Research Institution, Menlo Park, 1973, p. 54. (The Table appears on p. 7.) 8. Quoted in Schneewind, p. 110. 9. E. F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, p. 70. 10. Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1964, p. 325. 11. Martin Pawley. Z%e Private Future. New York: Random House, 1974, p. 8. 12. Hans Selye. The Stress ofLife. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956. 13. R. Masters and J. Houston. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. 14. I discuss this at some length in my article “Myth, Consciousness, and Psychic Research, in Psychic Exploration: A Challenge For Science (Edgar D. Mitchell and John White, Eds.) New York: G.P. Putnam’s and Son, 1974, pp. 518-596. 15. For a profound discussion of the effects of technology on the sense of duration see Enrico Castelli’s study II Tempo Esaurito. Roma: Bussola, 1947. A remarkable long term experiment describing changes over a 15 year period in delinquent teen agers’ attitude towards time and

JEAN HOUSTON

258 gratification

is found

Psychology, Vol84,

in the

article

by

Anthony

Davids

and

Bradley

Falkoff

in J. Abnormal

No. 6.

16. This statement is found in a curious but brilliant Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1969, p. 94.

little volume

by William

Kuhns.

Environmenfal

17. As an example of this we find that in recent years a growing number of children with hyperactivity symptoms are becoming a serious problem for the schools. Treated with daily doses of ritalin, many of these children grow into adolescense without ever knowing what their non-drug personalities are like. Now, we find that apparently many of these children were hyper-active because they were being poisoned by various chemical preservatives and artifical colorings found in their daily diets. In many cases, according to Dr. Ben Feingold of the Kaiser Medical Center, the symptoms of hyperactivity cease when the children stop eating these foods and then return when they go back on their old diets. We can be sure that this is not the only instance of widespread poisoning of the general population. 18. Jean Houston. Myth, Consciousness and Psychic Research, pp. 586-589. 19. Pawley, Ibid, p. 185. 20. Quoted in Pawley, p. 190. 21. Schumacher, p. 145. 22. See for example the articles in Orthomolecular Psychiatry, (David Hawkins and Linus Pauling, Eds.) San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973. 23. This report is discussed in Wilfred Barlow. The Alexander Technique. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973, p. 73. 24. Moshe Feldenkrais. Awareness Through Movement. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. 25. For a fuller discussion of some of our work see Jean Houston, The Psychenaut Program: An Exploration Into Some Human Potentials, in The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 7, No. 4, Fourth Quarter, 1973, pp. 253-278.

Received October 1975