The Threat of the Compartmentalized Consciousness

“Modern man protects himself from seeing his own split state by a system of compartments. Certain areas of outer life and his own behavior are kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another.”

“If, for a moment, we regard mankind as one individual, we see that the human race is like a person carried away by unconscious powers; and the human race also likes to keep certain problems tucked away in separate drawers. But this is why we should give a great deal of consideration to what we are doing, for mankind is now threatened by self-created and deadly dangers that are growing beyond our control. Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic…”

“A sense of a wider meaning to ones own existence is what raises a man above merely getting and spending.”

–from Man and his Symbols, Carl G. Jung

There can be no hope for mankind without a renewed and updated spirituality. It is unfashionable to say this among the hard-bitten intellectuals of the modern world, but I myself can see no other alternative. Human civilization is confronted with the preconditions of apocalyptic collapse—environmental devastation unfolding on a widespread and unpredictable scale. To regard the nightmare occurring in the Gulf of Mexico as a kind of temporary and unique tragedy to be endured and then moved on from is to adopt a dangerous and idiotic position of denial; it is to persist in living in the childish world of illusion. This new age we are living in requires that human beings view reality at its starkest, most naked and anxiety-provoking, something our recent generations of corporate media addicts have been loathe to do. But beyond then, we must   engage the material world through a lens of spiritual commitment, and strive to find our rightful place within that world. We must take up the hero’s journey to discover and create a unified meaning in daily existence, one which will put our horribly damaged planet, and our own horribly damaged human psyches, on a path of healing.

The long term effects on the ecosystem of BP’s leak in the Gulf will very possibly alter the trajectory of all life on this planet, and there will be other disasters like it in the future. Indeed, there is one just like it occurring in Nigeria at the present moment, courtesy of Shell Oil—it simply isn’t reported in America, because, frankly, Americans really don’t give a shit about what happens to Africans, and the American media corporations are not going to waste valuable programming time telling us about it, particularly when it might make a mighty oil company look bad. Hell, they’ve minimized coverage of our own domestic disaster in the Gulf, as far as they possibly can. And for all Obama’s posturing about placing a “moratorium on off-shore drilling,” the dangerous practice continues: BP is still operating its Atlantis well, a mere 150 miles off the coast of New Orleans. On the day I am writing this, Secretary of the Interior Salazar made a point in publicly announcing that this ban is “only a pause, not a stop.” Our leaders are unequivocal: the reckless, destructive exploitation of the planet will continue. They are still keen to wager our collective future for the massive private profits and cheap political convenience of the oil-based economy.

Meanwhile, the energy corporations continue to bomb the mountains of West Virginia into oblivion, destroying the drinking water of entire communities, in the pursuit of “clean coal.” They are pushing hard to extend domestic drilling for natural gas, presenting this, too, as a “clean fuel.” This “clean fuel” exists in tiny pockets in such geographic locations as the Marcellus Shale formations that spread across almost all of southern New York State. In order to gather the gas from these tiny, discreet pockets, they must employ a drilling practice known as “hydrofracking”—each hydrofracked well produces between one and 4.5 million gallons of extremely toxic waste water. The energy corporations’ plan for disposing of this extremely toxic waste water is to truck it across very poorly maintained rural roads and dump it all in open air holding tanks. The watersheds of some of the most densely populated areas on the east coast, i.e. New York City, would be directly risked. Within the past week of my writing, there have been gas well explosions in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas.

In the background behind all of this is a renewed push for more nuclear power plants. Even many nominal “environmentalists” have begun to bang the drums for big nuke. Their thinking is that at least the use of nuclear power does not pump ever greater quantities of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, so that its widespread adoption might slow down the advance of global-warming and climate change. But while nuclear power plants might not produce hydrocarbon emissions, they do produce other toxic pollutants which might threaten our continued existence. Over the years, cancer-causing tritium leaks have been detected at 26 domestic nuclear power plants. Nobody has ever come up with any sort of plan for how to safely dispose of the waste from nuclear power plants, which can remain lethal for millenniums. The best our most brilliant minds have come up with is to bury it deep in the ground, where it will remain safely shielded from life, so long as an unexpected earthquake does not occur; a nice strategy, so long as we ignore the fact that the natural history of the planet is the history of unexpected earthquakes. The great terror when it comes to nuclear power plants is the potential for a full reactor melt-down, such as occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Northern Ukraine, in 1986. The long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster have occurred across several countries, covering a widespread portion of northeastern Europe, and will continue to be felt well into the distant future. But we are assured by the corporate media that such catastrophes could never occur at an American plant, for they are safely constructed and well regulated. This, of course, is more or less exactly what they were telling us only a few months ago about off-shore oil drilling.

Nearly every member of our contemporary society has made a Faustian pact with reality, in exchange for the gift of seemingly cheap and convenient energy. In order to heat our homes, to illuminate our dark nights, to keep ourselves spectacularly entertained and to transport ourselves across fantastic distances at dizzying speeds, we have been willing to accept the steady, relentless contamination and destruction of the very ecosystem on which we must depend for our continued existence. We have pushed our way into a corner where environmental catastrophe has now become an unavoidable fact of daily existence. We have ceded vast quantities of wealth and nearly total political control to the corporations responsible for providing this energy, and we are seemingly helpless to stop them as they grow increasingly reckless in their pursuit of more cheap, convenient energy. And we cannot begin to imagine what we can do about any of this.

We bemoan it and cringe in horror at it all, but then we place it in one compartment, and turn about to open the separate compartments where we store the facts and pressing conditions of our daily lives—our legitimate need to earn our daily bread and maintain adequate shelter, but beyond that, our yearning for a lifestyle of casual opulence; our discontented hunger for mindless consumption, for cheap baubles and trinkets and easily absorbed, thoughtless electronic entertainments. This is the grand illusion we exist within mentally—the American Hologram, a technological utopia, in which we never have to confront the viciously destructive and unsustainable environmental reality that props it all up, and which teeters now, closer and closer to final collapse. And no amount of intellectual argument will ever truly break through this compartmentalized, illusionary worldview, stirring us to act decisively before it is too late. For this entire compartmentalized worldview is itself the product of modern intellectual thought, our inheritance from the enlightenment. No, only a deeply felt and transformative spiritual awakening can save our sorry asses now.

The difficult question to answer is this: What might this spirituality look like? Not programmatic, not dogmatic, and not authoritarian. The popular intellectual view is that modern science during the enlightenment liberated the human mind from the rigid shackles of traditional religion and superstition. In many ways this was a gift—there was a great deal in the medieval religious worldview that needed to be thrown away. The persistence of that religious worldview is a great tragedy of modern life, and a substantial part of what compromises our ability to move on and make progress on the terrible problems we now face, whether we are talking about the medieval worldview of Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, or the medieval worldview of the Christian fundamentalists in these United States. But the persistence of these fossilized ways of looking at the world is a dialectic reaction to the vigorous shunning by the modern scientific worldview of any form of sincere or meaningful spirituality. The dominant worldview of modern life is one of mechanistic soullessness. The most uneducated react to this heartless affront by clinging fiercely to simplistic dogma.

Furthermore, because the scientific worldview is one of compartmentalization, and because it deliberately separates out all spiritual concerns or questions from the more important and valuable nuts and bolts of the empirical sciences, it abandons what has traditionally been among the primary concerns of human consciousness. Questions about spirituality and higher meaning are condescendingly pushed away into a darkened corner. And within those shadows, all manner of ancient bigotry, pathological religiosity and harmful delusion continue to thrive, in place of a more enlightened and useful spiritual development. The majority of modern citizens know that the simplistic dogmas of the fundamentalists are not really tenable; yet they, too, feel lost and despairing in the mechanistic universe we have inherited from the enlightenment era. At certain moments of human existence, nearly everybody hungers for an awareness of higher meaning and purpose. A society which separates out these concerns and places them far away from the realm where its best and brightest thinking occurs leaves its members extremely vulnerable to all manner of unhealthy obsessions and manipulations.

The great gifts and achievements of the enlightenment, the scientific advancements that have built our world of daily miracles, have made efficiency the supreme goal and good, at the expense of any sort of sustainable worldview. The end result of the scientific revolution of the enlightenment was to compartmentalize human consciousness; at the level of society, this manifests in the phenomena of specialization—certain problems of daily living become the exclusive province of a particular kind of specialist. A specialist is a person who allows him or herself to become entirely absorbed in a career. A specialist’s entire consciousness and worldview becomes submerged by the facts and demands of a particular specialty, to the point where any awareness whatsoever of the rest of the world remains locked out of the compartment.

Now in a world of ever greater knowledge accumulation, some specialization is obviously unavoidable and to be greatly desired. We will need all the specialists and experts we can muster in the years ahead, as we struggle to react to environmental catastrophe and collapsing infrastructure. But the specialist of the future must be a man or woman who operates with a sense of higher purpose and meaning, who sees him or herself not as a mere technician toiling within a discreet compartment of the machine, but instead as an engaged element of a unified reality.