9

CONTROL OF SYMBOLS

According to the Book of Genesis our ancestor fell from a state of natural innocence when he ate the ambiguous fruit. To attain knowledge of good and evil is still the god-defying and distinctive goal of human beings. And always we find ourselves unable to bear the knowledge, and always erecting filters to protect the idea of our own interior innocence. One such filter is the strong resistance made by many scholars to the very notion of social determinants of belief. They would rather think of beliefs floating free in an autonomous vacuum, developing according to their own internal logic, bumping into other ideas by the chance of historical contact and being modified by new insights. This is an inverted materialism. In the name of the primacy of mind over matter, its adherents evade their own responsibility for choosing the circumstances for their intellectual freedom. To ensure autonomy of mind we should first recognize the restrictions imposed by material existence. This leads back to our original programme.

We have identified distinctive social patterns and the theory of justification that goes with each and sustains it. Two tasks remain. One is to distinguish what is said from what is not said in each world view. Each theory has its hidden implications. These are its unspoken assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality. They are unspoken because they are taken for granted. There is no need to make them explicit because this is the common basis of experience. Such shared assumptions underlie any discourse, even the elaborated speech code which is developed to inspect them. They are the foundations on which social reality is constituted, as the phenomenologists point out. Yet so far, though it is agreed that reality is a social construct (Berger and Luck-mann, 1971), no convincing order has been discerned in all the multiple kinds of reality construable. To find what is implicit in each cosmology we shall follow the same thread that has unravelled the rest of the argument, the relation of self to society. By this thread we shall find how the grand building blocks of the cosmos are balanced together and so fathom the gaps between them. The unspoken assumptions betray how the social bond is constituted in the secret consciousness of individuals. With that exposed, the scene is set for the last task, the relation between the media and the society whose visible substance they are.

Each social form and its accompanying style of thought restricts the self-knowledge of the individual in one way or another. With strong grid and group, there is the tendency to take the intellectual categories which the fixed social categories require as if they were God-given eternal truths. The mind is tied hand and foot, so to speak, bound by the socially generated categories of culture. No other alternative view of reality seems possible. A small shift in the definitions is anathema and worth protecting with bloodshed. Anomaly is abhorrent. In such a system, the purity code has set up a strong distinction between the private and the public, and its wider implications are irresistible. Here the eruption of the organic into the social domain is most dangerous, to be purified with ritual. The individual in transition from one social status to another is like matter out of place, impure and to be ritually re-integrated. Rituals have the function of celebrating the transcendance of the whole over the part.

By contrast, still in the right-hand quadrant, any position near zero is less impressed by the purity rule and its meanings. But charming though its world view is, and rosy its concept of human nature, it is a temporary resting place which turns barren for the long-term resident. All opportunities of individual development are limited by the lack of organization. The range and quality of personal interaction are restricted. The possibilities of knowing the self are reduced by the limited contact with other selves. Intellectually it is as null as it is ineffective in organization.

Second, the closed community with its intolerance of imperfections: its focus on an impossible good is limiting in another way. The failure to confront the menacing idea of evil is as complete here as in the first case. At zero point evil is implicitly ignored, here it is explicitly shunned and rejected. Thus both systems allow the individual to cherish an inadequate view of the self and its capacities and dangers.

Third, the strong grid: this society allows all the possibilities of large-scale organization to be taken, but at the expense of personal relationships. Again, in the extreme form, there is a sterile exaltation of the self in isolation from other selves. Other persons are treated as things, instruments, pawns in a game. So the individual caught up in this system is incapable of reflecting on the nature of the self, or of symbolizing it as a complex agent. Here we have an equal impoverishment of the symbolic life and deadening of metaphysical curiosity.

If we turn to the quadrant of social structures (diagram 4, p. 64) we can now draw out some general characters, some elementary types of cosmology. Take first the effects of group boundedness. To the left of zero, on the horizontal axis of control, the cosmos is seen as if dominated by impersonal powers and principles. Anthropomorphism in these religions is weak. In so far as demons or gods are considered to be at all influential, they are only faintly drawn in the human image. They tend to be bizarre, dislocated or diffuse in their presence. Recall the idea of the forest as a cosmic force in the religion of Ituri pygmies, the various confused refractions through which the Nuer God is manifested, the animal spirits of the Plains Indians, to realize the extent to which anthropomorphism can be diminished. At the same time these religions are not moral regulators. They hold out no system of rewards and punishment, neither in this world nor in the next. At top left, the principles which govern the universe act as multipliers of human success or failure. It is a system of positive feedback which offers total escalation to those who are strong enough to play by the rules. And total degradation to those who fail. No techniques of re-integration and reconciliation are provided, since there is no conception of offence against the community, only of failure. There are no over-arching doctrines of sin and atonement. In these societies, the idea of the self is free from social constraint. The self is valued uniquely for its own sake, not for any contribution it can make to the whole.

Diagram 6 From impersonal to personal

On the other side of the vertical line, where group is strong, we find the opposite holds good. The powers that control the universe are modelled on human figures. Either they are the spirits of dead fathers and grandfathers, or culture heroes like big brothers, or a creator god, the most ancestral figure of them all. Or they are actual, real human beings, free men with powers to bless and curse, or witches and sorcerers with their own armoury of ill-doing. On this side, where group is strong, social control is built into the cosmos. These humans and human-like powers are activated by moral situations. Ancestors punish and reward; curses avenge moral wrong; even witches only strike when provoked by neglect or rudeness. The idea of the self is surrounded with prickly moral contexts in which it has to operate.

Now to consider the vertical axis. Here we have a very different set of discriminations. Diminishing grid gives a pattern for increasingly ascetic behaviour. Where grid is strong the external manifestations of life are positively valued. Wealth and pomp are justified as symbolic expressions or as good in themselves. There is no feeling of guilt about spending; the outward expressions of society and self are not despised or feared – the world, society, the Church, organization as such and all its signs are affirmed. As we approach zero, there are two kinds of asceticism. With strong group, ascetic attitudes express the rejection of what is external, the husk, the empty shell, the contamination of the senses. Strict controls are set on bodily enjoyment and on the gateways of sensual experience. Moving towards the zero of the horizontal line, another form of asceticism results from valuing human fellowship above material things. Those who belong in this sector are usually aware of other ways of living, both more arduous and more richly rewarded in material wealth. Their culture is often seen as a choice, a preference for the simple life. Thus the Mbuti pygmies, after a period of lush living in the Bantu village, scamper back gleefully to the forest in the spirit of children repairing to their holiday camping to enjoy candlelight and sausages. Thus the reaction against the American middle class consciously prides itself on embracing poverty.

In their personal life-style, their aesthetic sense, many in the Movement reject affluence and its associated symbols. The ambition to escape from poverty is no spur to action in their lives, . . . their parents’ desire to own, to accumulate, to achieve the status and prestige which go with material wealth, are meaningless goals to them...

(Jacobs and Landau, 1967: 15–16)

Then again, escaping more completely from social life and coming even nearer to zero, we hear Thoreau preaching the beauty of nature from his hermitage at Walden. If the active society listens to the hermit, our diagram's rules will shift him out from zero to the bottom left with the other voices in the wilderness which cry out and are heeded. Then the range between society and renunciation becomes more than a passive scale of measurement. A dialogue involves two sectors of society, the renouncers reproaching the celebrators with the vanity of their ways. The whole diagram becomes too complicated when the precepts of the renouncers are accepted by society at large and come to control the idiom of public classification. Just such a competitive dialogue is analysed between the Brahmans and the renouncing sects of India by Louis Dumont (1966) who traces to it the root ideas of Hinduism. A parallel dialogue between Rome and the succession of desert dwellers, anchorites and poor friars has complicated our own culture. We cannot but be aware of the ascetic tradition.

Diagram 7 From asceticism to affirmation

Already the comparison of world views has led to life-styles. I have started the second task which is to relate the media of expression to cosmology and social structure. Without more ado, we are ready to answer our questions about the social conditions in which ritual comes into contempt. We took ritual to signify fixed forms of communication which acquire magical efficacy. The top half of diagram 4 represents the main body of society. The further away from zero in all directions upwards, the stronger the belief in efficacious signs; the closer to zero the less the demand for communication, and the less the tendency to vest symbols with something more than an expressive function. Magicality is a product of social control. To insist that the symbols are efficacious is to threaten blasphemy and sacrilege with automatic danger and to promise the reverent automatic blessing. Magicality is an instrument of mutual coercion which only works when common consent upholds the system. It is useless for a witch doctor to invest a fetish with magic power by the sole authority of his charisma. Magic derives its potency from the legitimacy of the system in which this kind of communication is being made. Like the notices which warn against contact with high-voltage electric wires, it protects the media of communication. As consent withdraws from the system of control, leaders lose their credibility, and so does their magic. This is as true of the society organized by strong grid and group as the one spread on both sides of the diagram, where Big Men exert pressure on a long chain of followers. For the magic which in the first case invests the established institutions in the second case invests the individual leader. If his success departs from him, so does his own belief in the potency of his charms and spiritual helpers waver. Magicality is a barometer of political legitimacy. From this the rest follows. Small groups, with a minimum of classification and only one strong outer boundary that they wish to preserve, protect that boundary with magic. Rituals are for social interaction. Nearer to zero, people are uninterested in magic. Here it is inner experience, contemplation and the internal evolution of the self that counts. This is the picture in static terms. Lack of interest in ritual is not anti-ritualism. But inevitably social change must be expressed in a revolt against ritual. Ritual and anti-ritual are the idiom which natural systems of symbols afford for acting out theories of society.

Anyone who finds himself living in a new social condition must, by the logic of all we have seen, find that the cosmology he used in his old habitat no longer works. We should try to think of cosmology as a set of categories that are in use. It is like lenses which bring into focus and make bearable the manifold challenge of experience. It is not a hard carapace which the tortoise has to carry for ever, but something very flexible and easily disjointed. Spare parts can be fitted and adjustments made without much trouble. Occasionally a major overhaul is necessary to bring the obsolete set of views into focus with new times and new company. This is conversion. But most of the time adjustments are made so smoothly that one is hardly aware of the shifts of angle until they have developed an obvious disharmony between past and present. Then a gradual conversion that has been slowly taking place has to be recognized. Inevitably this recognition of a new viewpoint produces a revulsion against dead ritual. Whichever way a person has moved (unless it is out of and away from the zero position), there is a burden of old, irrelevant rituals to be laid aside. They no longer have meaning because the social action in which they inhered no longer attracts. By a paradox which becomes very understandable, every conversion generates some anti-ritual feeling, even if (as is often the case) it is a conversion to a ritualist belief. So the more social change, the more radical revision of cosmologies, the more conversion phenomena, and the more denigration of ritual. Could St Augustine have chosen any creed more materially hidebound and magical than Manicheeism in his youthful revolt against the African Christianity of the sixth century? But he chose it as an act of emancipation. It offered him intellectual freedom relative to the dried-up teachings of local Christianity. What he selected in Manicheean teaching was the promise of immediate knowledge, direct access to divine mysteries without mediating authority or respect for external institutions:

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Augustine should have adopted a religion which claimed to slough off any beliefs that threatened the independence of his very active mind. For as a Manichee, Augustine had been able to rid himself, immediately, of ideas that cluttered up the religion of the conventional Christian. He was possessed of a vivid certainty:

‘I have known my soul and the body that lies upon it

That they have been enemies since the creation of the worlds.’

There was no need to ‘water down’ so intimate an awareness, to obscure it with the clumsy scaffolding of Hebrew prophecies that the Catholic Church had erected around the simple truth. The Manichee did not need to be ordered to believe. He could grasp, for himself, the essence of religion. Immediacy was what counted most. The crucifixion of Christ spoke directly to such a man of the sufferings of his own soul. His hero was Doubting Thomas, a man whose yearning for a direct immediate contact with the divine secrets had not been spurned by Christ.

(Brown, 1967: 49)

It is curious that it could mean such different things to the fringe followers and to the central figures of the cult. For the initiated Manicheean teachers themselves seem to have developed from the same doctrine a typical sectarian cosmology. Their small, tightly organized group maintained its identity by elaborate rituals, ruthless rejection of the bad outside and affirmation by symbolic means of the purity of the group and of their inner selves. To most of their educated followers they offered an intellectual freedom which they themselves did not enjoy, since they were bound by the authority of Mani. But their system of moral control and bodily asceticism offered a technique for achieving mastery over the self.

Finally, there is another source of anti-ritualism. The subject followers of distant leaders in the strong grid system find themselves weakly related to other people. Their social categories are barely defined, their contracts with other people fragile and unreliable. They are in a universe dominated by principles. It is as if things, not people, determine their lot. And, as with principles and things, there is no arguing with these people in charge, no appeal to compassion. This is the subjection which is hardest to bear. The impersonal controls of weather and tides, however cruel, do not produce the sense of injustice which is aroused when people behave as if they and those they control are objects, not persons. A violent source of anti-ritualism is opened up when persons are perceived to be behind the principles, or benefiting from them.

The unsuccessful may find themselves forced to move from leader to leader in the attempt to get a better deal and as they move they break their social ties. Or they find themselves unable to move, located with other people who also would like to move but cannot, and with whom they form an undifferentiated mass. The delicate differentiations by which they structure their relations with each other are of no significance to the people who operate the rules against them. Although they themselves discriminate the claims of age, sex, relationship, these distinctions make no difference to the impersonal principles which ruthlessly separate them or force them to huddle together. What they experience is a failure of other people to recognize their claims as persons. Persons in control behave to them mechanically and treat them as if they were objects. This, I suggest, is the experience which has always predisposed to the millennial cult, which wipes out existing rituals.

Anti-ritualism is therefore the idiom of revolt. It must be so, and it must inevitably press the case by decrying not only meaningless rituals, but all rituals as such. Even when the case demands more articulate communication, even when more meaningful rituals are needed, anti-ritualism is undiscriminating in its sweeping condemnation of formality. Here we come to Durkheim's insight that the shared experience of society structures the internal consciousness of the private person to match that of the collectivity. The public symbolic system which has been set up by social intercourse puts its controlling stamp on individual perception and restricts understanding to the possibilities admitted in its own construction of the universe. In the small group a man is caught searching under his bed for witches when he might learn more by searching his own heart. With strong grid and group, the sources of innovation are squeezed out and despised for their incompatibility with the given categories. And yet such a society may desperately be seeking new solutions to its problems. If compensation theory were valid, the masses who experience control by objects would in reaction seek to differentiate more effectively. But instead they rush to adopt symbols of non-differentiation and so accentuate the condition from which they suffer. This is the dangerous backlash in symbolic experience of which we should beware. The man who has been raised up seeks symbols of his high estate; the one who has been degraded seeks symbols of debasement. After T. E. Lawrence had suffered humiliation he could only bear a social life to match his sense of degradation. He sought to make true in the sight of other people what he felt in himself.

From henceforward my way will lie with these fellows [in the RAF] here degrading myself (for in their eyes and your eyes and Winterton's eyes I see that it is a degradation) in the hope that some day I will really feel degraded, be degraded, to their level. I long for people to look down on me and despise me, and I'm too shy to take the filthy steps which would publicly shame me, and put me into their contempt.

(Knightley and Simpson, 1969: 255)

Thus we should expect that those who have the sense of living without meaningful categories, and who suffer from being treated as an undifferentiated, insignificant mass, will seek to express themselves by inarticulate, undifferentiated symbols.

They should react strongly against non-differentiation and seek to establish clear categories and distinctions which the oppressors would be forced to recognize. They should get organized. This would involve them in hierarchical discriminations. But expressive action is easier, more satisfying and may possibly have some instrumental value. So they use marches and mass protests as expressions of revolt. These may indeed be the most effective instrument for calling attention to affliction. But insidiously the symbolic mode seduces the intellect to its own estate. The drive to achieve consonance between social and physical and emotional experience envelops the mind also in its sweep. Hence the failure of revolutionary millennialists to write a programme that in any way matches the strength of their case. Hence the apparent flippancy or unserious abandon with which they pronounce their diagnosis and their remedies. It is as if the symbolic mode has overwhelmed the freedom of the mind to grapple with reality.

The cosmology which goes with the experience of mass, of undifferentiated human solidarity has a fatal attraction for those who most vehemently wish to remedy its failures. They find themselves behaving like revivalists in the effervescent stage of a new religion. They reject social differentiation and propose programmes to enhance the sense of individual worth, human warmth and spontaneity. They pay tribute to these values, announce their ultimate triumph. But so far from doing something to realize them, in past history they have led their followers into symbolic marches and crusades, usually with dire results.

In this short space I cannot elaborately document the argument. I can sum it up and illustrate it. Where grid is oppressively exerted from afar a further weakening of the delicate relationships can turn the passive cosmology into revolutionary millennialism. Norman Cohn (1957) has listed the precipitating causes of millennialism in medieval Europe. Disparate though they seem (Cohn, 1962), ranging from sexual frustration to cosmic anxiety, they all stem from an aggravation of the weakness of the social structure.

But in the most populous and economically advanced areas of Europe there existed numbers of poor folk who had no such organization behind them: in the countryside landless peasants and farm hands, in the towns journeymen (who were forbidden to organize), unskilled workers (who had no guilds) and a floating population of beggars and unemployed. It was such people as these that provided the revolutionary prophets with their following.

(Cohn, 1962: 39)

Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe: e.g. the famines and plagues which preceded several popular crusades and similar movements; the massacres which preceded the mass movements of dispersed Jews towards Jerusalem.

(ibid.: 40)

The areas which saw the rise of popular crusades were always those areas north of the Alps that had a relatively dense population including landless peasants; Flanders, northern France, and the Rhine valley.... It is significant that at the time of the First Crusade of 1095 the areas which were swept by mass enthusiasm had for ten years been afflicted by famine and drought and for five years by plague, while the crusades of 1146, 1309 and 1320 were all preluded by famines.

(ibid.: 34)

That millennial fervour emerges with weakness of classification is amply demonstrated in the same volume from Brazilian and Indonesian movements (Thrupp, 1962: 55–69; 80–121 and especially 80, 88, 92–3).

For our own contemporary experiences of this kind, it is not dif-ficult to find comparable expressions of millennial fervour. The focus is on poverty, class and race discrimination, colonialism, and student unrest. The spokesmen in each case pin-point the same symptoms: control by humans as if by things, non-differentiation, rootlessness.

The writer of one of the most thoughtful books on the Paris riots of May and June 1968, under the pseudonym of Epistemon, asks why university students in the mid-twentieth century should have taken over the role of revolutionary spearhead from the working class. For answer he gives a cogent account of the revolutionary ideas on which the universities have been fed, giving particular praise and prominence to the philosophical work of Sartre. He traces very skilfully the breakup of form in drama, in literature and philosophy down to the final undermining of confidence in knowledge, as such. Although he gives a typically Gallic priority to the evolution of ideas, and only second place to the evolution of the social structures in which they are developed, he ably discusses the rootless, marginal character of the university students’ social world. This would perfectly fit my analysis if only the priority were reversed. I have already hinted how Sartre's own biography fits the diagnosis. The whole history of ideas should be reviewed in the light of the power of social structures to generate symbols of their own. These symbols deceivingly commend themselves as spiritual truths unconnected with fleshly processes of conception, thus obeying the purity rule.

The poor of America in the 1960s are ‘victims of a bureaucratically enforced rootlessness’ due to evictions from slums; the social workers are bureaucratized, hostile, dehumanized (Harrington, 1962: 157, 120). Subject colonial peoples are discerned ‘only as an indistinct mass’ (Fanon, 1967: 34) and they know that this is what they are:

Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred – or everyone will be saved.

(ibid.: 37)

The men whom the growing population of the country districts and colonial expropriation have brought to desert their family holdings circle tirelessly round the different towns hoping that one day or another they will be allowed inside. It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpen-proletariat that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead.

(ibid.: 103)

The leaders of the movement for Negro emancipation find their enemies inhuman:

. . . the driver of the pick-up truck pulled up alongside. He had a face from central casting, like all the faces I had watched in newsreels spitting on little girls in Little Rock and unleashing snarling police dogs in Birmingham.

(Newfield, 1966: 92)

The New Radicals

are saying that the whole society – from the academy to the anti-poverty programme – has become too bureaucratized and must be decentralized and humanized.

(ibid.: 204)

Students, too, protest against bureaucracy, against exaggerated compartmentalism of study, discontinuous and truncated understanding and loss of personal attachment to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise (ibid.: 163).

This is the evidence I take that the wide-spread revolt of the left is indeed a revolt, as it says it is, against control by humans as if by objects. So much for the underlying social experience. It receives expression in the common ritual style. It relies on the symbolic expression of the state they deplore, as a means of remedy. Their intellectual stance is a rejection of categories of all kinds, including both symbolic and functional discriminations. Harrington writes scathingly of ‘the definition-makers’ (ibid.: 137). The students, feeling themselves subject to an undiscriminating, mindless bureaucratic machine, reject differentiation as such.

The tragedy of millennial movements, as Norman Cohn has pointed out, is that they do not usually lead to a better society. No one would wish reform to produce an explosion which creates more misery and oppression than that which provoked the movement. Such unfruitful outcomes result from the backlash of the symbolic system. Anyone who tries to correct the unfeelingness of the bureaucratic machine with a revolution of feeling gives up control of the situation to natural symbols. After attacking definition as such, differentiation as such, ritual as such, it is very difficult to turn about and seek the new definitions, differentiations and rituals which will remedy the case. In the period of the Crusades, beggars and orphaned children set out to take the Holy Land from the Turks by the very power of their meekness and poverty. Contemporary observers thought that they might succeed and that a golden age would begin. But the crusaders fell into the sea and were drowned or were captured by Barbary pirates. Today, our clergy, our poor and our youth unite to take the great places by demonstrating their helplessness in non-violent parades.

This is the last source of contemporary anti-ritualism. It is clear that its protest against symbols is only against rituals of differentiation. Its social experience is as much restricted by its own symbolic forms as those other three I have already indicated. It follows that the solution to grave problems of social organization can rarely come from those who experience them. For they inevitably can only think according to the cosmological type in which their social life is cast. Therefore it behoves others to identify and resist the allurements of zero.

The millennialist is optimistic about human nature (once freed from the external machine) and about the outcome of his policies. He fuses disparate problems together and resists attempts to define and distinguish. For his single problem, overthrow of the evil system, he advocates a simple solution, usually symbolic and expected to have magical effect. He has low respect for technical processes or special knowledge. Like the fundamentalist sects, he has contempt for learning and for academic (or clerical) specialization. His organization can only work in spasmodic bursts because he rejects specialized roles as such. The time span of his thinking is erratic; the millennium will come soon and suddenly; differentiation in time is as difficult for him to envisage as other kinds of differentiation.

Millennialism is to be taken very seriously, in all its forms. The solution to the problems which provoke it is not to join the stampede. To throw overboard differentiating doctrines and differentiating rituals is to reach for the poison that symbolizes the ill. Anti-ritualists around us who feel this excitement in the air, rather than yield, should feel more practical compassion for the rootlessness and helplessness that inspire it. Then, instead of sweeping away little rituals, such as Friday abstinence, which shore up a sense of belonging and of roots, and instead of belittling the magic of priesthood and sacraments, they would turn their attention to repairing the defences of grid and group.

How to humanize the machine is the problem, not how to symbolize its dehumanizing effects. When bureaucrats hear the catchword ‘equality’ (a symbol of non-differentiation) they should beware, for equality, like symmetry, is a mechanical principle in its operation. It chops the human diversity of need into its own pre-ordained regularities. The way to humanize the system is to cherish particular categories. The institution which runs by strict adherence to general rules gives up its own autonomy. If it tries to adopt equality or seniority or alphabetical order or any other hard and fast principle for promotion and admission, it is bound to override the hard case. Furthermore, it is bound to abandon its traditions and so its identity and its original, special purposes. For these humanizing influences depend upon a continuity with the past, benevolent forms of nepotism, irregular charity, extraordinary promotions, freedom to pioneer in the tradition of the founders, whoever they were. Instead of anti-ritualism it would be more practical to experiment with more flexible institutional forms and to seek to develop their ritual expression.

But this would mean going into the world, mixing with corruption and sin, dirtying oneself with externals, having some truck with the despised forms, instead of worshipping the sacred mysteries of pure zero. The theologians who should be providing for us more precise and original categories of thought are busy demolishing meaningless rituals and employing the theological tool chest to meet the demands of anti-ritualists. Yet the diagram of grid and group suggests that to go where the tide sweeps them can hardly be their proper calling.