9 minute read
The Illusion of Separation
review by Fred Dennehy
There is an old Chinese proverb saying that “in times of great winds, some build bunkers and others build windmills.” Giles Hutchins, with this proverb in mind, tells us that the decision makers of today, threatened with “an epic storm of economic, social, psychological and environmental catastrophe,” are frantically searching for quick fixes instead of looking for root causes. The symptoms of catastrophe are undeniable. From the social and psychological perspective, more and more people are caught in an economic net of unending debt, while fewer and fewer are able to afford even the basic care their bodies need. This predicament is even now forcing some to choose who in the family lives and who dies. Systemic racism eases life for the many by sacrificing the few. The use of anti-depressants and opioids skyrockets, and despair lies hidden behind casual chatter until its release in the strangled cry of a suicide. From the global perspective, our time on Earth is fast approaching a “century of hell” as our carbon debt comes due. We are left to face the prospect of cities disappearing under rising seas, apocalyptic heat waves, sudden outbreaks of disease, raging fires, monster hurricanes, global scale migrations, and much more. The vast majority of species on the planet are quietly being destroyed. Our oceans are accumulating islands of plastic the size of countries. We know all this, but we can’t muster enough will to stop it or even slow it down. The storm is “epic” because of what it augurs for the future. Things will get worse. It turns out not only that catastrophe has been written into the program of the Western paradigm, but that the program accelerates at a faster speed than anyone had foreseen. That is, assuming that anyone had been looking.
Mr. Hutchins is a British business organizations specialist, a consultant to corporations struggling to navigate the challenges posed by such a future. Early on, he recognized that traditional modes of organizational learning and leadership development were inadequate to the emerging environment. He understood that rather than the application of classical or modern business principles and methods, what was needed was an entirely new cognitive capacity, not only for sensing the future, but for embodying and enacting it. He saw that in order to cultivate such an “extended epistemology,” it would be necessary for us not so much to acquire new skills as to transform ourselves. His own business model accordingly changed from advice and consultation to consciousness raising, “deepdive” nature immersions and working with indigenous embodiment practices in order to “become human.”
In The Illusion of Separation, Hutchins hopes to transfer his insights from contemporary business practices to the much larger theater of Western civilization. Just as he had found the traditional modes of business learning inadequate for helping organizations looking toward the future, he sees the monetary and technological fixes applied to today’s social problems as ineffectual if not outright counterproductive. Society’s ills are deeprooted, and implementing “downstream” solutions with measures rooted in the same paradigm as “upstream” systemic causes, actually exacerbates those problems. In Part One, Hutchins examines today’s problems beginning with those nearest at hand, and then moving progressively “upstream” to more profoundly rooted causes, until he arrives at the primal source, “the delusion of separation.” In Part Two he proposes to pierce the veil of this delusion in order to glimpse a deeper reality, and in Part Three to find new ways of embracing life within that reality.
Hutchins begins with the everyday scrimmage of consumerism. The artificial inflation of desire is the corporate vehicle of choice here for growing debt and keeping demand constantly ahead of supply. At the same time, the gratifying illusion of self-determination is brandished for the public ego to feast on. It becomes increasingly rare for anyone to follow an authentic calling. The only jobs that pay well enough are those tendering their employees roles scripted narrowly for the consumerist culture. And it is not just the minor players who are being manipulated. The principals are being driven to act out their tyrannies through a passively imbibed diet of hyper-competitive impulses.
The source of our systemic competition, in the author’s view, is the evolutionary paradigm that finds its most militant expression in Neo-Darwinism, and signally in the writings of Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, life at any level, whether gene or species, is invariably one of competitive struggle. Though it may be played out at times in partnerships of convenience, the “motive” (to default, as Neo-Darwinism invariably does, to an anthropomorphic metaphor) cannot be other than selfish exploitation. Hutchins disagrees; if such behavior were the rule, nature would not be “fit” to “survive.” Unremitting competition must end in a community where diversity is destroyed, biological resilience is subverted, and evolutionary potential is undermined. “The cancer ends up destroying itself.”
If the necessity of antagonistic competitiveness is one pillar of Neo-Darwinism, chance variation is the other. The invocation of “chance” or “randomness” or “radical contingency” as a scientific term is so ingrained in our discourse that we sometimes forget that the very purpose of a hypothesis is to rescue us from the refuge of “chance” as an explanation. Chance, to put it plainly, is not a hypothesis. But the lure of a self-contained evolutionary mechanism is so hypnotic that, to invoke the wit of Owen Barfield,
But Hutchins’s strongest case for abandoning the Neo-Darwinian picture of “selfish ascendance” and “oneway adaptation” is based on observation rather than argument. He draws from what he calls “Nature’s wisdom”— what we become aware of when we open to the inner and outer depths of the natural world around us, through, for example, Goethe’s “active seeing.” The attunement we find in the flocking of birds, the shoaling of fish and the swarming of bees; the natural diversity and complex webs of interconnection in microbial soil communities; and the astonishing resilience of nature’s regenerative cycles, contribute to a picture very different from the meaningless void that Dawkins and others call home. As Hutchins points out elsewhere, an oak tree in an English forest, using Darwinian logic, should be “interested” only in the acorn, its own genetic offspring. But through radioactive tracings, we find it is sharing nutrients with the genetically unrelated holly sapling in a different part of the forest. Areas rich in minerals are sharing with areas poor in minerals. Neo-Darwinism is led to devise increasingly convoluted ways to explain away such non-selfish behaviors, which we see everywhere once we look. These tortuous exemptions from the rule of self-interest are reminiscent of the epicycles of medieval astronomy, which, while they may have saved the appearances for the moment, were warnings of a coming paradigmatic shift.
As Hutchins continues his “upstream” journey in time, he traces the Neo-Darwinian separation of organism from environment back to the formational Cartesian worldview of “content separable from context,”—an “inner,” meaning-bestowing human psyche radically divorced from a meaningless, purposeless, “outside” world. Hutchins explores the origins of Western dualism, with welcome attention to Pierre Gassendi. It was Gassendi who was largely responsible for the catabasis of the idea of God in Western imaginings from a loving, if occasionally angry, Father, into a dour, reclusive watchmaker. Hutchins goes on to pursue the etiology of the twentieth century’s ruling idea of positivism back to the shift from medievalism to modernism, and the eventual eviction of the spirit from philosophical discourse.
The farther “upstream” he navigates, the more Hutchins sees the unfolding of a recurring pattern in the West’s “logic of separation.” A convenient “working hypothesis” is employed for a limited practical purpose, and then left untended in the intellectual landscape. There it metastasizes from a heuristic model to a generalized concept, convincing enough to take the field one day as a new reality. Owen Barfield, in Saving The Appearances, named this habit of mind “idolatry.”
Hutchins is strongest here, in Part One of The Illusion of Separation, when he speaks to the dangers of the modern Western paradigm. He draws a convincing connection between today’s “epic storm” of societal dangers, and reductionism’s shrinking of humanity to peripheral islands of awareness vainly seeking meaning in an accidental universe. His call for a change in consciousness resonates not so much from the cogency of his argument as from his own unmistakable vibrancy with the world around him. Hutchins tells us of wide harmonies between human and nonhuman systems, usually unnoticed, and foretells an authentic awakening to what is creative and loving within us. The thin reasoning of reductionism, which once had the cache of a lone bravery in the face of nothingness, seems strikingly unequal to the richness of Hutchins’s canvas.
But when Hutchins, in Parts Two and Three, turns to the explication of new modes of consciousness and new ways of embracing life, there is a falling off. While he casts a wide net for thinkers from antireductionist movements that have surfaced and resurfaced in our time, he betrays an unwillingness to explore their work with sufficiently close attention. He refers us enthusiastically to Jungian psychology, ecopsychology, anthropology, phenomenology, a smorgasbord of abstruse twentieth century philosophies, meditation, the imaginal realm of Henry Corbin, indigenous wisdom, the quantum void, string theory, the Black Hole Principle, and Alan Rayner’s perceptual philosophy of “natural inclusion.” But in surveying these disciplines and movements to find allies, Hutchins has opted for inclusiveness over informed, hard won insights. What he gains in breadth he loses in depth.
For instance, in a chapter largely devoted to Owen Barfield’s Saving The Appearances, Hutchins falls victim to the very oversimplifications he finds endemic to reductionist logic. He presents Saving The Appearances as a rather straightforward chronicle of civilization’s long honeymoon with the “embodied experience” of participation, followed by its gradual estrangement through rationalism in the form of “alpha thinking,” and culminating in a prodigal’s chastened return to “final participation.” In picking and choosing terms for his immediate purposes, he misses the subtleties. And he ignores Barfield’s complex and minutely nuanced philosophy of polarity, which could have served as a foundational thought structure for the awakened consciousness he dreams of for our future.
Hutchins (not an anthroposophist) has a tendency to enlist a thinker as a laborer in the vineyard of his new reality so long as there is anything in that thinker’s work that questions the old paradigm. In addition to the modern anthroposophical writers Owen Barfield, Henri Bortoft, and Otto Scharmer, Hutchins invokes Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, but for little more than to mark their enlistment in his camp. A chapter devoted to a thorough and inclusive consideration of any of these thinkers would have given the latter part of the book some of the sharp edges that it lacks. This problem is by no means peculiar to Hutchins, whose book should be a source of both enlightenment and encouragement to anthroposophists. We find here what we likely already know. It is one thing to chronicle the passing of an old paradigm, and quite another to render an account of a new one.
Frederick Dennehy (fred.dennehy9@gmail.com) is Associate Editor of being human, a Class Holder of the School for Spiritual Science, actor, and retired lawyer.
