The Collective Vision

THE COLLECTIVE VISION

From history and historical fiction, from fantasy literature, and from modern science fiction there are stories of the discovery and exploration of the ruins of great cities or of great cultures from whence the protagonists gain knowledge, especially from the artifacts, monuments, and art of a great city. It is that idea of a great city, a planned collective center of activity, that we look upon as the height of collective achievement of a race or culture. But this vision has a flaw in that it perceives the achievements only after the fall of the city and the death of the culture, not as it was when it was alive, when the individuals who planned and created worked. Little does it tell us of everyday lives, although the information may be there to be carefully sifted from the ruins. We see the construct, not the people. Little do we know of their political and ideological arguments, their philosophical consensus. We also tend to see a culture which built great cities as one having wisdom and that elusive quality of goodness. But we must ask the questions: What ideologies led to that construct? What were their social beliefs and religions? What were individual goals? What costs of this achievement in individual lives and basic freedoms were weighed? Was it a repressive culture? Were the people happy? Was society just? These questions are often overlooked in the literature.

From our present viewpoint do we judge that technological know-how and progress makes for a great culture? Is it a sign of greatness, or is it a false front made of our own prejudiced blindness to other ways of thought? Certainly there is a shortsightedness in the science fiction genre in which technological prowess is the measure of a great culture. For technology is only outward growth; not inward, personal growth which is required for living free and productive lives in human society.

The inherent fallacy in the collective vision is that the race did not first envision the idea which built its social structure, monuments and art. That occurred in the mind of one individual, and while it is true that other individuals also may have offered ideas and criticism so that the ideology was the work of several people, the spark first occurred in an individual mind. The people, as an organic unit, or culture cannot think or conceive, cannot create anything original. It is an abstract concept more useful for statistical purposes than that of the concrete individual. Yet the work of building was certainly carried out collectively by the labor of others, sometimes under coercion. Thus centralized planning is always part of the collective vision, but it does not take the individual into account, It plans for the masses of which the individual is only a cog whose teeth can be ground to fit.

The forms of art produced by a culture are often viewed as representative of its collective vision, and there is some truth in this assertion, but one individual first conceived the idea and carried out the work, used his mind and skills to produce it. It is this originality from one mind which produced a vision adopted by the culture. The influence of the individual is paramount.

Not all collective societies make progress as we moderns define it. Those rest on a foundation of pageantry, ceremonies, ritual, and religion. A culture is often mystical and static. The individual does not exist except to fill a position in the society. Life is lived from day to day as if in a perpetual dream of the race, society, or culture. This life is bounded by conventions of belief, time, and place. Everyone must serve it. Any wish for change would be heresy and pose destruction to the cultural milieu. Such societies cannot adapt to change or can change only very slowly. Anyone who dares to see outside the culture, even to solve its problems, must be neutralized or destroyed to remove the threat to the status quo, but the conventions of the society usually prevent that freedom of thought - it is unimaginable. So the individual is unimportant except to fill a niche of service. Even a position of power is only one of service to the society. The ruler is just as impotent to cause change as the lowest slave. The individual is caught up in the mass mind which is not creative, but exists in a timeless vision. Only the vision of the great race sustains him. Nothing will be done by individuals. This is why in such societies knowledge will not grow except in limited forms and be kept in secret by a priesthood or those of similar function. Knowledge will not be applied to the world, for that would cause change. Nor can they see any need of applying knowledge to solve problems - knowledge is only for contemplation. Thus the collective vision appears uplifting, but it is really a stultifying one.

In these societies the intellectuals, while not necessarily of high intelligence, but having the skills of reading and writing, are of a very high, conservative class, and jealous of their knowledge. The whole society could not hold together without them; even the ruler depends upon their support. These intellectuals must keep their knowledge to themselves and surround it with a mystique and ritual to prevent dissemination except to those whom they choose to follow in their footsteps - a practice which resists change.

The collective vision is a centralist one in which everything must be controled, tightly organized, although the large peasant and slave classes may be largely ignored, but it is not like the modem totalitarian state with its highly sophisticated systems of complete organitation extending to all classes which requires the dissemination of carefully tailored knowledge (propaganda) to all of its people so that they be informed and politically active within the cultural mold.

In each type of collective society, primitive or modern, decisions are only made at the top by a few people, and they are carried downward throughout the hierarchy of the society. Thus the collective vision is not based on the wishes of all the people, but they will be forced to comply with it. Yet these decisions will not go against the grain of the culture.

There is a legend which warns us of the consequences of this type of vision: The Tower of Babel. The very task the builders lent themselves to eventually destroyed them and achieved in a disorderly and violent fashion what they should have pursued - decentralization - giving individual autonomy and interrelationships on a human scale. But this centralist vision is inflexible. That is why it must fail every time. It cannot take into account what is beyond it, and there is always something beyond it; so much more that it encompasses. That vision leaves out much that it might see, but mostly ignores that which it cannot handle, which would change it. It turns its perceptions away from reality, into itself. What it does not see does not exist, but that apparent nonexistence will inevitably destroy it and countless individuals will suffer in vain.

We of the present have discovered from history and in modern experience that bigness, overgrowth and overorganization are detrimental to human society. Witness bureaucracy with its paramount inefficiency and inhumanity. Communication cannot freely flow in such large and unwieldy hierarchical structures. Rules and regulations, or laws, and not human needs and wants are all that can be followed or tolerated. It is a reduction to technique, a mechanization of human society, and an ignorance of the human spirit. All largeness arises from the collective vision - that racial goal, really hubris, which is pride in the perceived greatness of an ethnic group, nation, etc., and leads the masses to labor for a unified vision which always in the end will prove too small to fit the human spirit, or human nature, and will ignore the individual from which all change originates. Yet it is smallness that we need - small institutions, communities, societies, structures, etc., which are efficient and comprehensible to individual humans, not beyond our powers of control. And we must let nature take care of the larger structures which are too vast for us to perceive in totality, having more variables than any one human or all humans collectively can take into account.

But the collective vision of one culture for the remains of another may only be the later's distorted perspective of the previous one. How does our own collective vision of a past culture differ from theirs? We must beware our collective vision of other cultures lest we make grave mistakes in interpretation. Our hindsight may not be factual, after all.

There was the greatness of ancient Rome, but if we had experienced it as it was then would we have seen it as great or any greater than our modern cities with all their problems - crime, filth, corruption? And why do we perceive past cultures or an imagined future as great? Is our farsightedness only tunnel vision? From our cultural myopia can we not see our own present greatness because of the pettiness of everyday life, or are alternatively blinded by the vision of our own greatness far beyond its reality and therefore do not perceive our problems?

We cannot see inside another culture of the past, and many of the present, although we look at them from the outside. Without knowing the inner functions of a culture we cannot know the whole from the outer viewpoint, either. So to escape from a culture and its collective vision one must know it by living in it, and then rejecting the whole or parts of it so that one can be divorced from it with full knowledge of what one is doing. Only then can one be free of culture and see each culture's collective vision for what it is. For cultural beliefs and structure are relative; cultural convention and tradition, arbitrary. One is not better than another except in terms of successful survival.

But there is a final question we must ask: If a culture is so wrapped up in its collective vision, how can one escape it? There is no simple and straightforward answer to this , but since cultures do decline, fragment, and die due to their limitations and resistance to change, the individuals who survive the downfall are thrown upon their own resources, forced by circumstances to be creative, adaptable, and to change in order to survive. Since they are no longer sheltered by society they are forced to be individuals. So the seeds of change are fruited in a dying culture and carried forth to germinate a new one.

Perhaps a culture like ours in America had little united collective vision, and the great monuments were built by individuals and small voluntary groups rather than by the entire society. That is indeed our culture in America, but we, too, have a collective vision of America the Great and Beautiful, the Land of Opportunity, the Protector of the World. Our cities are the representative monuments of our cultural heritage.

Even in our culture with its built-in desire for change - that which has made it one of the most successful on Earth - the collective vision is failing because our beliefs are battering themselves against the walls of reality. Our culture has not escaped what has happened to all others of the past. Our collective vision is not sufficiently broad for us to perceive the needed changes to keep our culture vital, for it will have to be radically changed if we are to survive. Then it will be another culture. But can a transition be made without violence or the fall into the long night of cultural death?

In essence, a culture is a collective vision. We cannot escape it. Or can we? Must we? To solve the problems in our culture we must be able to look at it as a whole from the outside, divorced from it. Only then will we see it objectively.