Shall we dance, Tarum tum tum. #1
Are we taking the right steps for a harmonious world?
The realization struck me quite late in the process of writing this post that I was struggling towards some sort of personal understanding of some part, at least, of the Dance of Life. Well, there’s little point in bothering about piddly issues, is there?
The problem is that my approach to writing is somewhat haphazard. Correction - my approach to writing is extremely haphazard. Which is to say, sometimes, when I start a piece, I have a goal in sight - a topic, a thought, an idea - but I do not know precisely where it is going. Often that’s why I write in the first place. To try to work things out. Such is the case with this piece.
It’s also the case that, since my teenage years, I have abhorred woo-woo - that is, stuff based on unknown or imaginary things rather than reason. I regard myself as a rationalist.
If one doesn’t know the answer to some basic question, as for example, “Was there anything before the universe started?” or “What is the meaning of life?”, it has always seemed entirely reasonable to me to reply, “I don’t know”. This is surely far more honest and accurate than jumping to some conclusion based upon magic, miracles or any other form of woo-woo?
It’s why, not least, I have always considered the claim that “Faith is a great gift” to be highly questionable. Doesn’t blind faith give people carte blanche to believe in anything?
And yet …
… as I look at the world now, I do wonder whether there may not be something in at least some of the loopiness.
Which is to say, maybe the statement attributed to writer G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) that runs counter to my above query does have some validity:
The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.1
We humans do seem to need a basic step-guide to show us how we might best perform the Dance of Life. (The dance steps image at the top, by the way, is from Shutterstock.)Absent this, or if a new dance plan is imposed, we seem to run a terrible risk of allowing disorder to come to the fore. Disorder that may result, at a minimum, in uncomfortable and painful treading on toes, or, at a maximum, outright kicking, screaming, rioting and worse.
It takes two to tango
Around two and a half thousand years ago something extraordinary happened:
Man, as we know him today, came into being … Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Leh-tsu and a host of others. India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers - Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato - of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any of these regions knowing of the others.2
This period, labelled The Axial Age and extending three or four hundred years either side of 500 BCE, was a major step along the pathway to Now.
This is obviously a huge topic but, here, I want to focus on just one aspect of it - the binary nature of our thinking in relation to knowledge and its application to human action. Well, okay, that’s two things, but you get the idea. And if you think it sounds abstruse, and even a bit lah-di-dah, bear with me because I hope to convince you that it is all highly relevant to the way we operate Society and Business this very day.
So, two and a half millennia ago, in both the Orient and the Occident, humans came up with dual interpretations of how we think of knowledge and its value and applicability. This was revolutionary stuff.
The Eastern group included Confucius and Laozi (a.k.a. Lao-tse, Lao Tzu), author of the Tao Te Ching …
Basically, for the Confucians, knowledge was about knowing what to say and how to say it in order to gain advancement and achieve worldly success.
Whereas, for the Taoists, knowledge was about achieving self-knowledge, personal enlightenment and wisdom.
And, over in the West, Protagoras and Socrates reached similar but subtly different conclusions …
For the followers of Protagoras, knowledge was about knowing what to say and how to say it, in his case resulting in the trivium of logic, grammar and rhetoric that became a basis of Western education.
Whereas, for the followers of Socrates, knowledge was about achieving self-knowledge to promote the intellectual, moral and spiritual growth of the individual.
So, in both instances, the dyadic split is between what we might term ‘the inner world’ and ‘the outer world’ or, as the Orient rather more elegantly describes it, the Yin (Moon, Darkness etc.) and the Yang (Sun, Light etc.).
An important point is that the yin and the yang are both interconnected and interpenetrative - which is to say, when one or the other is in its fullest expression, there, also, is its counterpoint, represented by the small circles within the larger shapes in the diagram. (The image, by the way, comes from an online search but I haven’t been able to identify the copyright owner.)
Interestingly, there was a further split: followers of the Eastern traditions opted to regard knowledge as equally balanced between the yin and the yang, but followers of the Western traditions focused more on applying their understandings to the wider world around them - arguably, a more yang approach.
On all occasions, the individual versus the group … but, in the West, a greater focus on group practical outcomes and scalability.
Now, just before sashaying forward in time, here’s an actual snippet from the Axial Age - although, here, in translation by Robert Fagles. The Oresteia by Aeschylus, apparently first performed in 458 BCE, is made up of three plays. The third, titled The Eumenides (The Furies), takes place at Delphi, at the Temple of Apollo. Here are the opening lines of this third play, delivered by the priestess:
First of the gods I honour in my prayer is Mother Earth,
the first of the gods to prophesy, and next I praise
Tradition, second to hold her Mother’s mantic seat,
so legend says … 3
And my point? Well, I think it fascinating that all that time ago there was clear recognition of the importance to humans of the planet, Gaia, and next in importance, Tradition. ‘Tradition’ is the literal translation of Themis, the Titaness whose province was established law and custom.
“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”
The cross-head is from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll).
Okay, now let’s come up to the present era.
Peter Drucker (1909-2005), high in the top echelon of 20th century management thinkers, made the argument that the Axial Age shift in thinking led, ultimately, in the West, to the specific form that Christianity took … which then shaped Society … which then led to the Industrial Revolution … and on to the specific approaches used by Business. So that, ultimately, Drucker could sum it up like this …
Within 150 years, from 1750 to 1900, capitalism and technology conquered the globe and created a world civilization.4
There we have it, “world civilization”! If you are a subscriber to Aargh! by David Pinder you may recall the recent post in which I noted the other term that became fashionable in the 1990s, “universal civilization”. (And if you’re not yet a subscriber, free or paid … Why not?!? … do, please, consider signing up now.)
You realize what this means? If this thinking is right, all of the Scientific and Business successes that enabled the West, among other things, to win the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century are ultimately consequences of a chain of events that was initiated two and a half thousand years ago.
Along the way, a major element of these changes to the Dance of Life plan happened in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century Europe when Martin Luther (1483-1546) promoted his view that salvation was not necessarily dependent upon the Roman Catholic church:
For the pope is not above but under the word of God.5
The shift at the heart of this European transformation was from belief in the absolute power of the medieval Christian Church to the revolutionary concept that humans, individually and in groups, using God-given ingenuity, could master the world in which we live.
And on we danced through time, although I get the impression that the Puritans weren’t great rhythm fans.
Whatever, for some second-half-of-the-20th-century Titans, the years 1990 and 1991 marked a momentous shift. They had won. They had won the hot war. They had won cold war. They had won the moral war … and the economic war … and the business war … and the social war. And, no question in their minds, it was winner takes all. For the titans, relabelled elites, the dream of global domination was fulfilled and was of course presented as right-think in every sense.
So, yes, for the elites at the start of the twenty-first century, their devoutly to be wished outcome of “world civilization” or “universal civilization” was at last available. And, because, to them, it was so self-evidently Good they were prepared to pursue it without necessarily observing any democratic norms. In fact, they were quite prepared to suppress those norms.
Trouble is, they forgot about the dyadic principle; they forgot about the wisdom of yin and yang.
Peter Drucker’s contribution to management thinking was huge. He was a great thinker and a lovely human being … but I think saying “capitalism and technology conquered the globe and created a world civilization” was a mis-step.
It depended upon the assumption that the economic function system could dominate all other considerations. It assumed that everyone would go along with it. It assumed that everyone would approve.
These were highly dubious assumptions.
It takes two
Two factors need to come to the fore:
A reminder that Tradition - that is, ‘the way we do things around here’ and established law and custom generally - has deep roots and any changes need to be thought about in context with the pathway to the present. In particular, it’s important to understand that all Year Zero attempts to date, which have set out to discard or destroy current traditions within a society, have a shockingly negative history, including extreme violence.
A reminder that all human action needs to take account of our binary nature - the macro and the micro, the group and the individual, the yin and the yang, the top-down and the bottom-up. In this context, we are already dancing on thin ice by minimizing or even ignoring the micro / individual / independent / bottom-up aspects of far too many situations in Society and Business.
One of the most outspoken critics of what is going on under the “world civilization” banner is Renaud Camus. He talks about the Great Replacement and Replacism in the West. Here’s part of the introduction to one of his books:
Replacism does not just denote demographic trends: it is the watchword of the epoch of global capitalism, in which everything - not only human beings but every element of reality, from products of human fabrication, such as automobiles and cities, to nature itself - is replaceable by its double and simulacrum. Both the countryside and the city are replaced by the “universal suburb” [or universal ghetto]; laboring men and women are replaced by machines; body parts are replaced by prostheses; mothers are replaced by surrogates; soldiers are replaced by drones; national cultures are replaced by global consumer culture; distinct human communities and their histories are replaced by “undifferentiated human matter.”6
Personally, I go along with much of Camus’ critique. And I believe that the way our modern-day Titans responded to the 1990-1991 victory of the West in the Cold War was massively hubristic. Themis does not take kindly to being so brutally excised.
This means that my answer to the question posed right at the top, “Are we taking the right steps for a harmonious world?” is “No!”
The modern-day Titans were, of course, able to stomp all over everything by leveraging technological advances. I’ll pick up on this, and the effects particularly on Business, in the very near future. And, in that piece, I’ll take up the point I started out with about our reliance upon a coherent narrative, rational or not, to underpin our activities.
In the meantime, do keep on dancing but just keep in mind …
One can have a dream, baby.
Two can make a dream so real.7
Thanks for reading.
Emile Cammaerts. Chesterton: The Laughing Prophet (1937)
Karl Jaspers. The Origin and Goal of History (1953)
Aeschylus. The Oresteia, The Eumenides (458 BCE)
Peter Drucker. Post-capitalist Society (1993)
From The Proceedings of Friar Martin Luther, Augustinian, with the Lord Apostolic Legate at Augsburg in Luther’s Works (Minneapolis, 1957-1986). Quoted by Holland, Tom. Dominion: the making of the western mind (2019)
Louis Betty in his introduction to Renaud Camus’ Enemy of the Disaster (2023)
Sylvia Moy, William Stevenson. It Takes Two (1966) Original recording by Kim Weston and Marvin Gaye.