Liberation in Western Culture

LIBERATION IN WESTERN CULTURE

ABSTRACT

Western culture has held and ideal of freedom, but inherent in its founding philosophy is a deterministic viewpoint that has led us to mechanistic science and technology. This falsely objective view has divorced us from the world of natural and spirit. Although we speak of individual freedom, in reality we live in a mass society dictated by technique and utilitarianism. Human subjectivity and spiritual values have been increasingly ignored, simply because those are not in the realm of science. Thus science is our new religion, but it is failing us.

The rigid, hierarchical structures of western culture has placed individuals into stereotyped roles: subjective/objective, masculine/feminine, hetero/homo, rich/poor, etc., all part of the duality in which we view the world, usually equating one aspect as bad or evil, or at least weak.

Our political structures and ideologies demonstrate this duality and so does revolutionary theory, making our society a battleground in which few win and many lose.

Liberation is not a social or mass concept; it must begin with the individual and is personal. Then only may a liberated social structure be created, otherwise we carry our personal inhibitions into restructuring society. Thus we must examine our roles and seek individual ways to change our lives.

But we are caught in a bind of either being branded counter-cultural and subversive or of being establishment traditionalists in following our cultural concepts. Both cause suffering: the alienation of being rejected by one's society or the alienation from the natural and spiritual realm that is the basis for our culture.

Gay people should understand this problem. Gay sexuality is reviled because we live in a culture that fears and hates pleasure and sexuality in general. That is the objective split from the natural that is the puritan view of sex only for procreation, never for pleasure. Pleasure has no practical use and is counterproductive, so it must be sublimated or else packaged and sold as entertainment.

The roles of relationships, families and workplace will have to change and we will not be able to keep our gigantic, growing technical economy in its current form if we liberate ourselves. But we would not live with the current stress and threats of nuclear or environmental annihilation that is the expression of our divorce from the world and ourselves.

MAIN TEXT

It is hard to understand liberation in a culture that doesn't understand what liberation is. Our cultural heritage is one of freedom for the individual, the belief that one has the right to act on one's own responsibility. We have attempted a politics of outward, or socially oriented, individual freedom based on the concept of an inner freedom which was once considered sacred and inviolate. Not any longer. The scientific vision has become the new myth, wholly capturing our culture and making it march to technique. It is a soulless religion allowing no mystery, considering nothing sacred or inviolate. What once seemed the savior of liberty now forges new, more efficient shackles. It's ethic has nothing to do with human values, only its own ends.

The problem lies deeper in the history of our culture than that of the scientific revolution. It predicates on the single-vision promulgated from ancient Jewish culture and taken up by the Christian Churches. It is the belief that knowledge can be divorced from experience, therefore being a solely objective reality apart from subjective human interpretation and experience. This single vision has been a cultural blinder limiting our vision, setting us apart from the mystical knowing, the gnosis, that is a part of all human experience from the first prehistorical culture.

Now our scientific knowledge and technical powers carry us towards totalitarianism, mechanistic and reductionistic solutions for the world's problems. Cries for liberty appear only as a palliative or short term fix. Revolutionary movements and political ideologies come and go, bringing only misery to humankind and power to a few. Liberty is trampled into the mud. For all the political and revolutionary theories are but shored up by the mechanistic philosophy which has no freedom at its foundation, no reason to have respect for subjective human values, only an inexorable logic. Freedom, or true liberation must be found elsewhere. The fault lies in the western objective philosophy which brooks no subjective human values. There is little ground in western philosophy to recognize a foundation for human values. Values are outside the realm of science and technique.

Actually, there is in western philosophy foundation for subjective human values, but our modern culture has rejected half of the philosophical foundation. We tend to follow the line of reasoning based on Aristotle, with its materialism, reductionism, belief in matter in motion and a purely meaningless objective reality only interpreted by humans. It is an almost totally Apollonian culture, having none of the Dionysian elements of mystical celebration. We have rejected the Platonian ideals of a spirtual realm which directs and gives us values, known as spiritual idealism. Thus there is that long-held antagonism between science and religion, in reality a political power struggle over traditional beliefs. But due to the philosophical bias that theologized, dogmatized and politicized religion, religion never had a chance against science. The experiential knowing of spirituality had been lost in the west by being forced underground. Thus religion became mass ideology in support of the culture and political power rather than personal experience leading to transcendence or enlightenment.

Western culture has held an ideal of freedom, but inherent in its philosophical foundation is a deterministic viewpoint which has led us to mechanistic science and technology. This falsely objective view has divorced us from the world of nature and spirit. Although we speak of individual freedom, in reality we live in a mass society dictated by technique and utilitarianism. Human subjectivity and spiritual values have been increasingly ignored, simply because those are not in the realm of science. Thus science is our new religion.

Without spiritual values the outcome of western culture would be the destruction of the human race. Western culture desperately needs an infusion of spirit to redirect its philosophical thrust, and it is running out of time. All cultures have definite lifespans based on their ability to absorb new knowledge and change, but their foundation beliefs, when fully played out, must reach an endpoint. This is where we are today.

In order to solve our current problems, a technical assessment will not suffice. That in itself is a problem. Technical culture analyzes and organizes everything, leaving no time or rationale for the spiritual, for spontaneity and play or subjective and personal values. Nor will political and social movements or applied ideologies on a mass scale solve our problems. Politics doesn't liberate, but creates position and opposition, thus is a win/lose power game. We must return to examining individual human wants, needs and values which a standardized program cannot fulfill. Therefore a look at basics, an individual's personal concept of freedom and his limits, conscious and unconscious, to act freely is needed. We can observe how widely-held cultural beliefs and actions are constraints on personal freedom and barriers to personal growth. But to oppose the culture is to be a heretic, to be branded subversive. The alternative is to be establishment and follow one's culture hook, line and sinker. Both cause suffering: the alienation of being rejected by one's society or the alienation from the natural and spiritual realms that are the basis for being human.

There have been many movements for liberation all over the world in this century. Most of them have been of national, or peoples' liberation - for the masses, not personal and individual liberation. It is a gravely mistaken belief that liberation is a social or mass concept. Liberation is personal; it must begin with the individual. Only then may a liberated social structure be created, otherwise we carry our personal inhibitions, guilts, our unconscious emotional attachments to beliefs, into the restructuring of society, which will closely resemble the old one. And tradition itself is a strong counterforce. Political revolution cannot liberate us. Only when a sufficient number of individuals desire a change in society, will that change take place. In essence it will be done by the masses. If they are led by their emotions to follow a fanatical leader, they have given up their individual freedoms to the leader, to the mass movement he represents, submerging their collective will to his. It is only exchanging one form of bondage for another. This problem is only one side of the social effects of emotional repression. The other side is of the fanatical leader who wants power over others because he has no power over himself. He can lead the masses because they have no knowledge of their inherent personal power and individual responsibility. They want a savior. In this case fear and coercive authority rule, fulfilling dominance and submission needs. That is the nature of what is known as fascism - personal insecurity projected onto society - power directed outwardly into the political realm. Thus we must examine roles and seek individual ways to escape machine politics and technical solutions. We can revalue human beliefs, needs and wants. We can find the spirit within each of us, find the power within that is constructive, creative and responsible. We can first find our integrity to act from self-acceptance.

An in depth assessment of western culture is in order. The objective/subjective philosophical duality inherent in our culture represents a schizophrenic split in our beliefs and actions. Our culture is rife with dualities and either/or reasoning. And we tend to appreciate quantity over quality, an equating more with better. Both sides of the split have value in them. It is how those polarities are perceived and used that can help or hurt us.

In the 20th century western culture has appeared more tolerant of other culture’s differences because of the supposedly objective and value judgment-free scientific viewpoint which seeks facts rather than judgment from tradition and dogma. However imperfectly, it does help us to understand our culture as well as others. Still, there is a hidden bias. Inherent in the scientific view is a bias toward our culture as the superior and most developed one. It is a value judgment, this objectivity, which fails to appreciate the qualities of other cultural beliefs. Just because one's cultural beliefs are dominant does not necessarily make them right or absolute. Science is also incapable of recognizing anything that cannot be measured. To its view the subjective realm doesn't exist.

The one-visioned philosophical thrust of almost 3000 years has made our culture one of the more flexible and stronger, more changeable than any in the world known to human history. But every culture has its problems, some so deeply ingrained in it, perhaps ones it cannot solve, that will prevent it from changing in the necessary direction for its survival. These unacknowledged problems will eventually cause its demise. Our culture may be nearing its limit unless it can assimilate radically new data which means fundamental change. It will have to incorporate much of eastern ways of thought if it is to survive; if the human race is to survive. Still, we have one vision, and it is that vision that must be changed.

The two sides of conflict in western culture are between authoritarian, patriarchal, hierarchal, deterministic values and those of individual freedom and its supporting values. The bureaucracy, institutionalism, organization and love of technique are threatening to overwhelm the human values. We can see the success of this philosophy in the former Soviet Union. Yet it leads to tremendous inefficiency, a contradiction to the theory. Lying deeper in the philosophical foundation is the belief in a mechanistic universe, objective reality, but no subjective reality; and the reductionist values of logic and analysis. Until recently we acknowledged only linear thinking. There was no synthetic viewpoint that lead to wholeness. It gives us a literalist interpretation to life. Thus we have split mind from body and soul from mind, relegating it to a nebulous netherworld or non-existence. Because we are out of touch with our bodies we can only live in our heads, in our minds. This leads us to that uncomfortable feeling of existential angst which causes us to turn to material acquisition and other mindless pleasures in the attempt to escape the feeling. That is in part the reason for our thrust to progress - an attempt to reach the future. We are future oriented, never content with the here and now.

It is that thrust to progress that causes so much stress in our society. It is the desire to be successful, to have power over others, but may be one of the most destructive forces in western culture. Progress is almost a religion with us. We follow a protestant work ethic which rewards hard work, but denies the validity of the pursuit of pleasure. We fervently wish for a better life for all in terms of material success. Thus we have the sameness, standardization and sterility of technical culture. There are many techniques to implement our goals, but in the meanwhile ends will replace means and eventually even the ends will be thrown out. Do the ends justify the means? Or has that any meaning now that technique is the all-encompasing value system? We nearly believe that "If it works, do it.!" an engineering mentality. This is the collective and utilitarian fallacy of the greatest good for the greatest number, but it leaves out the individual good for those who make up society. Utilitarianism is what is useful, convenient, expedient for the masses. It is purely a numbers game, however, not a belief and practice that can support individual freedom.

For all its faults western culture is very successful at survival and has taken over the world. It is strong. When we feel the need our culture adopts those beliefs and methods of other cultures which will prove useful or practical. But our cultural bias screens out the remainder of meaning from the other cultural value systems. We are feeling the need for a new infusion strongly now. Witness the growth of interest in eastern cultures and religions or movements to return to traditional religious values. Part of this phenomenon arises out of our scientific curiosity ingrained in us from childhood. We need to know and classify, to understand the world, but the remaining desire is to fill the emptiness in our souls which western philosophy has reasoned out of existence. And there is a growing feeling of hopelessness for human existence unless we change the course of our civilization.

There is another division in western culture which is driving us apart, one which science and technique cannot solve. It is not the one between science and religion, although that is another duality of our culture which only appears in opposition. I am speaking of the masculine/feminine split which is related to the objective-practical/subjective-impractical viewpoint. The feminine is considered weak, less useful and passive. We of western culture have a difficult time understanding this because our culture is primarily active and masculine in our cultural interpretation. From an eastern viewpoint western culture is very Yang in opposition to Yin, thus unbalanced. Now is the time for them to balance and integrate. We cannot continue to live in a half culture. The state of the world demands that we change. The goal for us is to become androgynous individually and culturally, balancing and harmonizing our masculine and feminine aspects. This is already happening and is a good beginning on the path to true liberation. Perhaps because our culture is relatively open to new ideas we will in a short time be able to repair the problems which are pressing on us ever harder, although it will mean radical change for every individual. Both individuals and the cultures resist change because they have much to lose in facing an uncertain course. At least we have seen the problem, if not in its full aspects.

The parameters of our culture appear no longer able to contain or limit technological growth and the philosophical implications of that growth and of technique itself. Most of our social systems are now severely overloaded and incapable of operating with the data that is presented them. Most of our social problems are a direct result of this process. Simply put, our systems cannot handle the types and amount of data we offer them. Either we return to a simpler life and the morals and concepts of the past and give up our ideas of progress, or else we can change radically our culture, creating new systems which can handle our current problems and foreseeable future ones. We have no other choice, but we can make informed choices as to how to change our culture by understanding it as it is now and how it is being changed unwittingly by our scientific and technological progress. Suffice it to say, some major philosophical changes are required which also require examination of social systems and personal values.

One area we can focus on in our examination of cultural values is how we act and react with each other in relationships. We live in a male dominated society, in a culture of dominance and hierarchy. Social pressure is put on males to be dominant and to succeed in culturally approved work and social life, thus producing and anxiety and fear of failure in most men. Men must ever strive to be on top, and thus must have others to put down in order to rationalize their superiority. Women and other minority groups, such as gays, fulfill these roles - scapegoats for anger from personal frustrations and failure. Both men and other suffer. Men live in an offensive/defensive dichotomy, putting great stress on themselves. With the pressure from the speed and expectations of our hyper civilization these roles are being severely tested and losing their functionality. Divorce rates are high. Options of alternative lifestyles vie with the acceptable cultural viewpoint. Conservative and fundamentalist groups wish us to return to the simpler life of the past wherein cultural roles were secure, known and understood, and sexual repression was the rule.

In order to understand our problem we need definitions of the culturally expected male and female roles. Men are supposed to be unemotional, aggressive, active, ambitious, strong, rational, dominant. Women are to be soft, caring/nurturing, passive, emotional, irrational, intuitive, submissive. But these are only western cultural roles and concepts. Other cultures have held quite different ideas about the differences between men and women, and expressed these in varied roles. Our concepts are completely arbitrary and learned. Both sexes have the inherent potential of masculinity and femininity within. It is the natural human condition. And in the current culture these arbitrary, traditional differences are splitting us apart and causing even more stress than that of our varied and active lifestyles.

The roots of the masculine and feminine split run deep and have existed for thousands of years. It is not the purpose of the writer to detail the original causes of that rift in this context, but we can learn about the rift and how to reprogram ourselves to eliminate the stereotyped, confining roles our culture imposes upon us. We have the potential to be more human if we can be flexible in and understand our roles. We can gain or lose in playing roles.

Our culture revolves around the family with a man as its titular head and seat of power. Family structure is nuclear, involving two parents, mother and father, and a few children, all sharing a separate living quarter. Thus the family is isolated from other families and relatives. The man is expected to be involved in business or job outside the home to provide for his family. He is absent from the home environment, leaving the wife to care for the children. At least that is the ideal, but not the current reality. Or if the wife works, children must be cared for by hired, private professionals in day care centers or schools. The nuclear family has fissioned. It cannot hold together. With work outside the home there is a divorce from love and protection and nurturing of family and a divorce from love of work. The family is being pulled apart. Yet each family is an island unto itself, thus having little sense of community with other families in a neighborhood. There is a tendency for individuals and families to feel like cogs in a great, incomprehensible, inhuman machine.

The modern traditional ideal of the family is based in romantic love as a rationale for marriage, raising children and as a haven against the impersonality of the greater world. In that context it is like a mini-tribe. Sexual and relational fidelity was an expected norm able to last a human lifetime. In the not too distant past this was possible, but not now. Why was this so? Change was not occurring as fast as it is now, society was less stressful, expectations were not as high. Families were closer, lived in communities and smaller towns, relatives often lived with the family or nearby, neighbors knew each other for years, people did not move about or travel as we do now, communication with the outside world was limited and there was less to do - fewer options than we have now. Literally, we work more today and can do more work than people did in medieval society. And while it is true that we have many labor-saving devices and techniques, we use so many of them, thus limiting our time to be human and to form and enjoy close human relationships. We created a society of great technological and scientific achievement, thus we had to reform our relationships to fit it. This is a prime example of the alienation from society and each other that we feel. Alienation is a word that is overused. Freud spoke of it in one way, Marx used another, which gave rise to communism, furthering a cultural split among nations. Marx's interpretation further separated personal life and pleasure from work. There is nothing inherently wrong with our western views of progress and our love of the technological power to manipulate the natural environment unless it is at the expense of our humanity. We are experiencing that now, so perhaps we can begin to correct it if we become better aware of it. Anything else is a return to the dark ages. Now we need enlightenment.

The intense problems in today's society have forced upon us the Feminist movements and Womens' Liberation. Women are examining what it is to be feminine, and leaving men behind in their personal transformations because men have so little time for personal change and too much resistance to it because of their insecure macho image. Men are in a quandary. The current Mens' movement is an attempt to address this imbalance. Men fear expressing the feminine within themselves because that is viewed as a weakness. Many men are not even aware of their feminine aspects. Men fear loss of masculinity - the loss of power and ability, especially sexual prowess and dominance, and identity. Worst of all is to be labeled effeminant, like a woman, second class. Women have traditionally been able to freely express themselves emotionally, to be affectionate and cooperative rather than competitive. But not even Womens' Liberation always frees women from their cultural attitudes to males. Cultural role expectations remain strong. It is more culturally acceptable for women to take on masculine roles than for men to take up womens' roles. True liberation would allow either or a complete redefinition of roles altogether. But with Womens' Liberation allowing women to adopt men's roles, they are becoming more traditionally masculine in behavior with all its drawbacks and faults. We can observe this occurring in the rise of stress-related pathologies in women who adopt high-pressure masculine roles. They are experiencing higher rates of ulcers, cancer and heart disease - all symptoms of a hardened, inflexible personality, not an open, liberated one. If we are hardened into these roles we cannot be flexible to situations requiring change. If we are limiting ourselves, how can we deal with the ever-increasing new knowledge and changes it causes in our culture?

Western culture is based in male sexual domination. It is also a sexually repressive culture. Our ethic teaches us to hate and fear sexuality, yet to yearn for the forbidden. The price is psycho-sexual immaturity. The seemingly perennial double standard about sexuality arises from this concept. We have been taught that sex is only permissible within a love and marriage relationship for the sole purpose of reproduction. Behind our puritan ethic lies a fear and hatred of pleasure and sensuality, in part because it is perceived as nonproductive. It is the same with play. Only Children can legitimately play. Adults must work. They must produce products and services or children; nothing else! Pleasure and play are believed to be counterproductive. Thus our culture denies a basic aspect of our humanity. It begins with the repression of creativity, spontaneity and wonder in children. Sexuality of children is denied, as are their basic human rights. They are property. Notwithstanding the "sexual revolution", we have still not come to terms with sexuality. The freedom to practice sexuality came only through consumerism and the breakdown of the traditional family structures. Sex is a commodity to be bought and sold, and used to sell other products. Both sexes are sexual objects, not subjects. This is not sexual liberation. Liberation must concern our humanness and our need for pleasure and play as well as work. Now our culture pushes us into a sterile sexuality - the seeking of quantity over quality. Thus we have not learned how to handle our sexuality and it assumes an inordinately large aspect of our lives.

Sexual concepts are still focused predominately from a masculine, heterosexual point of view - conquest. However, true sexual freedom would allow for various sexual explorations without any prejudices or stereotypes. Relationships could be much more flexible than the ones we now have. The possibilities are endless for more loving and closer understanding of human interactions. But we are held back by our tradition, particularly that of the Judaeo-Christian - that of one small culture which lived in extreme hardship and submission, in a cruel environment 3000-4000 years ago which shaped their social reactions, but has little to relate to our time and place.

Our human relationships are foundering because we are forced into personal change by the increasingly fast social changes. Yet it is difficult to adapt to such fast changes. The social pressure to marry and remain married is still strong. People in relationships often don't change together and cannot handle or accept the changes in the other. Each person in a relationship has a vested interest in keeping the other unchanged. Simply, it is easier to live with the known than with an unknown. But change is a natual occurrence, part of personal growth and maturity. Then why can we expect people to remain together for a lifetime if they change and thus have new needs and wants? It is possible to accept change in and love another, each person giving the other mutual support and understanding throughout the change. People are capable of loving others despite differences. Just given the magnitude of human variation, we cannot expect all people to form permanent relationships nor be able to change together in compatible ways. It is better to end a relationship if it is going sour. We do have the ability to recognize this and to communicate it to our loved ones, and with concerned discussion it is possible to part amicably with understanding, and to seek another relationship which is compatible with our current state of consciousness. We can arrive at a new realization that we are capable of forming various types of relationships, or several, and need not be tied only to one person. This concept may be difficult to accept for the traditionally minded, be we must do it to enlarge our human potential to relate with others. It is a way to solve the current crisis in relationships, however, we are in need of an ethic for this new way of relating.

Many people often form expectedly permanent relationships, such as marriage, too early in life without taking the time to experience the full range of relationship possibilities. They they are tied to a responsibility which they cannot handle and which does not allow time to be playful or to learn about self and others. Thus divorce rates are high and unhealed emotional hurts abound. If we can accept a new relational ethic it can produce a more relaxed, less stressful culture. Otherwise, the stress we are building up in our society will soon reach a breaking point, and it is we who will break with it. Perhaps our entire civilization will collapse.

The alternative to liberation at this stage is a return to fascism, a return to the dark ages of witch hunts and genocidal racial and minority prejudice. The religious mania on the rise today is the precursor which arises out of personal non-liberation, an inability to change and adapt. Fascism is a fear reaction, on a mass scale, to change beyond understanding and personal control. Yet while in process can change only rarely be understood. We have the opportunity to resist change and suffer or go with it, perhaps to direct it. Nevertheless, we cannot prevent its occurrence. So to facilitate our ability to acept change we need knowledge about ourselves, and with that can come the understanding of how to accept human differences without those being a threat to one's being.

We have much to learn from the perspective of eastern philosophies that can help us. We can learn to be passive or receptive when a situation requires it, rather than always being active and attempting control of it. We can learn to be rather than do. We can learn to use intuition and a synthetic or wholistic approach, rather than a rational one. However, we need not deny our western training. It has its uses. We can discover another side of ourselves and fulfill a potential to be whatever we can imagine ourselves to be.

There is a relationship between western and eastern cultures, and masculinity and femininity. Incorporating the eastern can give us balance within ourselves and to our culture. The east believes in immanent mind, mind as part of nature rather than apart from it. God is here and now, and we are parts of it. Western culture is predicated upon transcendent mind - that of a God separate from existence, of rules, hierarchy and authority outside ourselves. Yet the eastern view accords with the view of some new western scientific discoveries. In reality, both views are correct and do not contradict each other, although that appears as paradox. The western belief in transcendent mind has been the thrust that made our culture believe that it could dominate the earth, even to exploiting and destroying the natural environment of which we are a part. That is exactly what we do to our personal environment in relationships by following the belief in domination, especially that of male over female. The female is the earth, the womb, the mother which nurtures us, but the male aspect has lost respect for her and repeatedly rapes her. If we accept the eastern view we accept mind as part of our environment, not apart from it. The one-sided view of western culture has allowed us to pollute both mind and physical environment. It is that macho image ruling western culture which makes us wish to dominate nature, to remake the earth in the image of man, and finally to remake man in the image of the machine - the ultimate and superior technical man produced by man's own limited knowledge and opinions. It totally ignores the organic, wholistic and spiritual viewpoints which are all higher systems of consciousness. In our society we then to view our bodies as machines, and so too, our minds. Modern medicine and psychiatry treat them as such. The higher level systems function un-analogously to machines. Other, more subtle and inclusive rules operate in that realm, but we are rarely aware of them. And it should be no cause for surprise that we tend to think and act like unfeeling machines, robots, although we cannot totally do so, for that is pathological. This is what our culture has taught us. Fortunately, we are more than machines.

Our culture places us in a double bind, forcing us to reject our humanity. That bind makes us fragile, inflexible and hurt inside. It is a double bind because we are damned if we do and damned if we don't give in to culture or fight it. We must be able to break this bind. If we cannot, we become schizophrenic, that which our culture has been designated, the prime example of our inherent dualism. Now we must heal this split and be wholly human. It is time to begin the exploration of ourselves and our potentials. We must heed the maxim of the great spiritual masters: know thyself.

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