manifest destiny III
|
there she stood in the doorway
I heard the mission bell and I was thinking to myself this could be heaven, this could be hell... eagles At the edge of the Pacific Ocean, in hot-tubs high above the surf of Big Sur, the new New Age was conceived. There was an older New Age to which the new one is connected in myriad ways, many of which will unfold as we proceed. Indeed, the idea of a New Age has been quite popular with human beings for... well, simply ages. For instance, though not going quite that far back, at the dawn of the 20th century there was a magazine called The New Age, edited for some time by one A.R. Orage, a longtime pal of G.I. Gurdjieff (in those days, people just went by their initials). As Paul Beekman Taylor writes in Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (pp. 11-12): The marvelous mix in The New Age of new writing, economical and political commentary, and cultural criticism... produced a journal his public appreciated as both "lively and eccentric." Orage had his doubters then, however, just as he has them now. There are three journalistic issues on which Orage has been questioned. The first is the anti-semitic strain in The New Age. A recent critic accuses Orage's vision of a "better world, an anti-semitic one" and adds that Orage himself is "known for anti-semitism" along with Yeats, Elliot, and Lawrence. Another commentator replies that, while Pound and [Clifford Hugh] Douglas drifted toward anti-semitism, Orage and The New Age stood against usury, not Jews. Uh-huh. But of course this doesn't prove anything. I'm just saying... And while I'm at it, how about this?
Just a passing thought. Never mind that. We're getting ahead of our story already, which at this point involves what I think of as Manifest Destinies I through III. Manifest Destiny I long preceded the western expansion of the United States. It manifested first in the form of an intuition of the Creator's plan for a pure white America...
Although that was written toward the close of the 19th century, the stance it reflects goes way back. And as Ahlstrom -- whose 1200 pages of American religious history won the National Book award in 1973 -- points out, these were not the sentiments of some street-corner punk. Strong was "the general secretary of the Evangelical Society... quoting in large part from Our Country, the book that had made him famous eight years before." Hold that thought. The location of Esalen at the far Western reach of the North American continent is significant. The hidden motor of Manifest Destiny I, as expressed above, drove settlers and adventurers, bounty hunters and religious communitarians from sea to shining sea, as is said. Chicasaw, Choctaw, Blackfoot, Crow, Navaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux -- anyone who got in the way of God's big plan for Anglo-Saxons got processed by this jingoistic fever until they either saw the Light or stopped blocking it. As GE's Jack Welch once said: lead, follow, or get out of the way. That was Manifest Destiny II -- the one we usually associate with the phrase. Colonialism, pure and simple. Don't leave home without it.
The colonial imperative that had driven Americans like droves of Lemmings toward the Western ocean, finally drove them out of... no, actually into their heads. Colonizing the mind -- Manifest Destiny III -- became, as one psycho-spiritually out-there '60s author called it without apparent irony, The Master Game. Any number can play -- long as you the right color, baby, and you got the bling. Now hold that whole collection of thoughts for a minute, if you'd be so kind. The next part may seem oddly unrelated at first, but it's not. I'll bring us back around in a bit, you'll see. And this next part is what I like to refer to as... 
So one evening a long time ago this insignificant two-bit psychologist named Maslow is driving along the coastal highway, going somewhere, don't ask, who knows. Suddenly, his head grows heavy and his sight grows dim -- he has to stop for the night. Nothing else being handy, he pulls into this place looks like maybe it might put him up. But as he's trying to check in -- turns out it's not exactly a lodging -- something funny happens. Some people who work there are unpacking these boxes of books, and as he looks closer he notices they're his books. "Hey," he says (or words to that effect), "I wrote those. What are you doing with so many copies of my books?" As it transpires, he's dropped in to Esalen Institute, and when they find out he's the great Abraham H. Maslow, well didn't they have a good time then. And what a time it was, oh yeah! Abe and Esalen, a perfect match. Livin it up at the Hotel California. Now the thing about Abe is this. He was taken early on with alpha male Macaques -- those being apes of the sort you would find in, say, any decent primate research laboratory. One of his early promoters, Richard Lowry, says you could tell when Maslow talked about them that he really admired these dominant males. And how do I know this, you ask? By tracking down an out-of-print copy of this: Dominance, Self-esteem, Self-actualization: Germinal Papers of A. H. Maslow Richard J. Lowry, Editor Brooks/Cole Publishing Company (1973)And another thing about Abe? It seems, as you can see from the above (though it's really only hinted at there), he equated -- as in x=y -- dominance with self-esteem. He got this exceeding strange notion in a primate research laboratory run by the deservedly famous, but not famous enough, Harry Harlow -- the guy who drove a stake into the heart of the then-ruling paradigm of behaviorism by proving that monkeys love their moms, and that it isn't about milk as reinforcement in some cockamamie operant conditioning scheme. In fact, the primate laboratory where Maslow picked up his odd idea about dominance equaling self-esteem was was one of the only (if not the only, I'll have to check) such labs in the U.S. at the time, where Maslow was Harlow's first graduate student. And how do I know all that? By perusing in the first case, and actually reading in the second, these:
And now we're ready for the one more thing about Abe that'll wrap this puppy up, at least for tonight. It's this. In that book of Germinal Papers I cited above, Maslow has a piece dated 1942 (I think; this is from memory, so I'll need to dig the damn book out and make sure) called The Totalitarian Mind, or something close. In the first page or two, he says the big clue, you might say, about this mindset is that it likes to construct pyramidal hierarchies. Which is just too weirdly ironic, since Maslow's later "hierarchy of needs" is perhaps the most famous such pyramid in all of psychology.
But wait, it gets better. Only affluent cultures will be able to achieve "peak experiences" and "self-actualization" on any scale, Maslow says, for obvious reasons: poor people have no time for anything but filling their bellies. But then what happens is a pack of ne'er-do-well hippies go off in search of spiritual enlightenment -- to the very poorest of the poor living in remote regions of the globe where shamanism and drug abuse flourish, practiced by people who, if they're lucky, might just bag a parrot for supper!
~ affluent Anglo-Saxons actualizing their selfs ~
|
 |
for the chapter:
Manifest Destiny of the Third Kind
I hope you have enjoyed this bookish little journey from the ridiculous to the sublime and back. ~the author |
||||||
And when this impulse could push men no further (the women were too busy cookin and shootin Injuns), when the ocean stopped further Western momentum, this quintessentially American influenza was bottled up in pathological frustration. All dressed up and nowhere left to go, it finally went psychedelically postal with a little help from the potent new neurochemical elixirs that started hitting the West Coast in the 1960s. It went, as Americans left to themselves always have: religious.
The subtitle of the book on the left is "The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism." The the book on the right takes a somewhat shallower cut at the problem. We'll encounter the unintentionally ironic Mr. Dyer again in the chapter on New Thought.
posted by Christopher Locke at #
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
<< Home