Journey through Time!
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
Originally published © April 5, 2016/©August 1, 2021
Unhappy he, who from the first of joys – society -- cut off, is left alone, amid this world of death.
James Thomson (1700-1748),
Scottish poet, and author of The Seasons (1858).
THE SHAMAN’S TOOLKIT
Nowhere Man has dissected the world’s resources into bits and pieces and reduced its inhabitants to unrealistic appetites. Now people’s cravings can be deftly manipulated economically, politically, and culturally into interchangeable globalized tendencies and dependencies. Everyone has been made to fit nicely into demographics with quantitative statistical profiles as people have been reduced to numbers and progress has been condensed to pie charts.
This didn’t start in the 19th
or 20th century as everything started to unravel 12,000 years ago
when man discovered the nature of fire and invented crude tools for hunting and
building, and the all-purpose wheel to aid and speed up man's endeavors.
A few hundred years later the nomadic hunting and
gathering tribes discovered farming, then they established the first rudiments of
“cut & control” policies that have been iterated in an increasingly
sophisticated manner to the present day.
Moreover, as we have currently a
multitude of explainers about what everything means, those thousands of years
earlier when someone stepped out of those huddled masses clinging to each other in
fear and wonder and explained the mysteries of Mother Nature as he understood
her. He would be the shaman priest and would remain the most powerful voice in
the community for myriad centuries.
All the great books -- The Bible (Old Testament & New Testament), the Jewish Torah, and Islam’s Koran, among many other books of mystery and wonder – have created stories and personalities with which people could easily identify, and with which they could know the truth about God, and the meaning of life.
These great books written by men are therefore largely the invention of men like themselves, only inspired as was the ancient shaman who started it all off by explaining the meaning of the clap of thunder with its haunting lightning, and other majestic signs of nature.
The divine gift of the shaman was that he figured out the repetitive nature of these phenomena, and cleverly deduced the meaning of these mystical forces that he, alone, understood, forces as repetitive as the rising and setting sun, the brightness of the day, and the darkness of the night, as well as the cause of the lightning that brightened the darkened sky with shattering booms attended by torrential rains as the skies opened up to saturate the earth.
The shaman was in the descriptive business that now has exulted names common to academia and the physical, social, political, behavioral, and biological sciences.
Invariably, after a ravaging cloud burst, a quieting calm would follow, sometimes accompanied by a brilliant rainbow. All these miraculous wonders had to be explained to the conscious man in his troubling doubt and confusion, and the shaman was always equal to the task.
What modern man might deem a supernatural experience and all the good books are fortified with such stories of the miraculous. In the age of the shaman, supernatural occurrences were part of the shaman’s everyday ritual and ceremony.
The supernatural implies an irrational conceptual explanation of causation, for what appears miraculous to the rationally oriented man today was commonplace to the shaman as events were infused with nature’s great balancing energy.
The shaman was a healer. He was the first physician and psychiatrist, as well as the first priest. How he divined the connection, that body and soul were intimately involved in health and happiness, and that the body could not be treated at the expense of the soul or the soul at the expense of the body is one of the shaman's divine mysteries. Today, anthropologists, theologians, and men of medicine, and science ponder these connections when the shaman had no such doubt.
The shaman’s perception of the healing opened the door to cures by the dramatic realignment of man’s energy in matters of degree by the power of suggestion as a healing art. It was the shaman’s belief that mysterious spiritual forces were at work which were impossible to define or explain but nonetheless in possession of boundless healing power.
Fast forward to today, and we find Western medical and psychological practices dependent on verifiable data, documentation, and replication of research hypotheses to prove or disprove data submitted to strict research methodologies and limited to the dogmatic imprimatur: If it cannot be quantified, it does not exist.
Conversely, eons ago, shamanic medicine intuitively transported its patients to new vistas where absolutely anything was possible and the supernatural or the miraculous was allowed to stand unchallenged.
The shaman activated the patient’s inner healer that resides in his soul. Stated another way, the shaman’s task was to remove obstacles to healing, which all too often have proven to be factors in the inflexible culture or the rigidity of the scientific mindset. Neither science nor ancient medicine knows the limitations of the body/mind’s self-correcting capability. In fact, there may not be any.
In the English behavioral biologist Paul Martin’s thesis in The Healing Mind (1997), we are introduced to the biological and psychological links between the mind and the body as perceived by modern science. Martin concurs with novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938): “Most of the time we think we’re sick. It’s all in the mind.”
Strangely, this is consistent with the shaman whose focus was on the spiritual when it came to man’s agony. It was the basis of his power. He had no other means to reconcile what was imagined with what was thought or experienced. And so, in a twisted fashion, the shaman echoes Wolfe’s sentiment.
Professor Martin, aided by scientific evidence has found that the brain and the immune system are inextricably linked biologically and psychologically verifying the mind/body link and implying that “psychosomatic” illnesses are congruent with this thesis.
When these links are frayed or severed, they become the root causes of a menu of complaints and possible diseases. This is not a departure from the shaman but a reinforcement of the idea that conscious man perhaps from nearly the beginning of his existence has had a sense of this intricate connection that has evolved over many millennia to our present understanding.
American medical doctor, psychologist, writer, scientist, teacher, and philosopher Gustav Eckstein’s The Body Has A Head (1969) uses the total retinue of his talents to treat the body's central nervous system as a grand romance but with the dalliance of a novelist. In a rather ponderous but most readable volume of nearly 800 pages, Eckstein postulates this thesis: “The human mind is the body’s master and (this) book’s destination.”
Eckstein’s success lies in his happy knack of discussing the complexity of bodily functions as an extension of the human personality. His approach is not simplistic, although landing somewhere in the same company of Dr. Martin and the shaman, as he insists, “The awesome intimacy of brain and mind, body and head in the presence of those particles of which we are always more and more, and of which we are finally constructed.”
Reading the impressive research of such men as Martin and Eckstein, against the modest perspective of the shaman, we see that while the shaman had little understanding other than intuitively in knowing how to treat his people, these thousands of years later modern science is confirming many of his instinctive procedures without necessarily acknowledging this connection. It is now common knowledge that psychological and emotional states influence physical health and are in turn affected by them.
For far too long, people with psychosomatic complaints were not taken seriously, claiming it was all in their heads, failing to realize that what is in the head of a damaged nature may contaminate the body with an assortment of maladies.
In our scientific cognitive, rationally dominated world, it is easy to forget how much time and energy that world spends now in confirming the intuitive world that the shaman pondered and dealt with those many millenniums ago. This is not meant to deny the accomplishments of science, but only to point out that man has always drawn his inspiration from the same well.
THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT
Like many writing projects, they gestate in the mind of the author long before they are captured in a book or article. That has been the case for this author with Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land. For decades I committed words to notebooks without uncovering the conceptual essence of what I was thinking and attempting to say.
Then I read James Burke and Robert Ornstein’s The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (1995), a book that explained how society cuts existence away from the “way it was” into a new sense of reality, a reality that has gained something much desired but at the expense of something lost, possibly forever. The theme throughout these pages will reflect that perspective.
Former Penguin book publisher Jeremy T. Tarcher (1932-2015) opens with this assessment in A Report on The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture (Putnam, 1997):
This book (The Axemaker’s Gift) is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. They are the axemakers, whose discoveries and innovations have gifted power in innumerable ways over thousands of years. To emperors, they gave the power of death, to surgeons the power of life. Each time the axemakers offered a new way to make us rich or safe or invincible or knowledgeable, we accepted the gift and used it to change the world. And when we changed the world, we changed our minds, for each gift redefined the way we thought, the values by which we lived, and the truths for which we died.
And because each axemaker’s gift was so attractive, not evil or ugly, we always came back for more, unmindful of the cost. Each time there was no choice but to adapt to the effects of the change that followed. This has been true for every generation of our ancestors since the process began, well over a million years ago. When we used the first tool to cut more food from nature than nature was ready to offer, we changed our future. As a result, there were soon many more of us. And as our numbers grew, so did the power of those who could wield that ax most effectively. They became leaders. Most of the rest of the group followed the ax with a rising standard of living. Only rarely, if ever, did we look back to examine the effect of our passage on the world because progress always led us forward toward the horizon we expected to reach. Unless we can appreciate that axemaker gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes minds, we will not recognize that our survival now depends on harnessing the same power to save ourselves.
The axemarkers are those who had the talent to take the pieces of the world and reshape them to make the tools to chop up the world. The precise sequential process that shaped axes would eventually generate language and logic and rules which would formalize and discipline thinking itself. Thanks to their talents and gifts, things have never been the same again.
With ecological and other disasters staring at us, we must appreciate that the gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes minds. What we need is a new mind, and we have the means to make a new one.
So each new tool invented changes existence and represents the latest aspect of the “cut & control” phenomenon. This has become the cultural reality of “Nowhere Man,” for each new tool has shattered or fragmented what was and replaced it with a more convenient tool. No one worries about the cost or the loss, only the promise of the new tool.
The inventor of each new tool is celebrated, which urges him to invent more new tools. People rush out to buy a new tool to make it part of their daily existence. No one seems concerned about the cost/benefits involved with the new tool as attention is only on the new tool.
Domestic power during the hunting and gathering period shifted to women as the communal atmosphere evolved with the caring of children. This community would grow as the hunters developed better hunting tools. What once could barely feed a few now could feed many. The population of the tribe grew. Better tools were needed by hunters which proved beyond the pale of their ingenuity. Enter agriculture as an alternative to hunting and the answer to growing sustenance demands.
Once agriculture was established, the nomadic lifestyle was replaced with the men tilling the soil and raising crops to feed the community. This made property important with a power shift from matriarchal to patriarchal authority. Men as farmers were now interested in acquiring land and animals.
Whoever took hold of the new tool used it to distance himself from others as the shaman had in establishing his authority and control over others, starting with those in his household.
During the hunting and gathering period, man lived essentially in harmony with Mother Nature and took from her only what he needed to exist. Now with farming, he could store crops and domesticate animals for his purposes. He could cut up the land into plots and till it until it became fallow. Once the land became infertile, he needed more land to maintain his prosperity. Property thus became equated to power.
New tools were developed in farming, but also there were “land wars” between landowners struggling to dominate and control. Expertise, once the tool of the hunter, now became the weapon of the farmer. The spear that could kill the wild boar now could kill another man over land.
An obsession with advantage changed man’s appetite for the newest tool without a backward glance as to what had been sacrificed for what had been gained with the new tool.
This “cut & control” phenomenon has become a cultural construct and gauge of prosperity as well as a measure of wealth and power from the beginning. It has been spurred on by the rationale of progress. Progress is a mindset that is seldom questioned as to its validity. Prosperity, which is the product of progress, has become society’s most important product. And what is prosperity?
Prosperity is the condition of continuously thriving for more, of always pushing the envelope, of never being bothered by or concerned with assessing limits, much less considering possible unintended consequences. Economic and emotional wellbeing is the justification for what is cut to better establish control. It is psychological blindness that seems endemic to man’s mind as Paradise (utopia) like the Holy Grail seems just beyond his grasp, but is it?
NOWHERE MAN IN THE DIGITAL AGE!
The newest tool, the Internet, could become a democratizing tool or an intrusive and demoralizing invasion into the sanctity of one’s privacy. That is the two-edged characteristic of this tool.
Swedish economists Kjell A. Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale, for much of this new century, have gone rogue in asserting a “dark” picture of the Internet’s impact on democracy in their book Funky Business (2002), and upgraded this book to Funky Business Forever (2007). These two authors reason that the “cut & control” world we live in cannot survive without hype, celebrity, and logos for everything. At the same time, they see no evidence to justify the fear that capitalism will take over democracy. We are moving towards one-to-one leadership, what I’ve come to express as we are all leaders or none of us are. So, what do these two economists see coming next?
Nordstrom and Ridderstrale insist we forget about Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s class struggle, as we are witnessing the birth of a whole new funky world because of this new tool, the Internet, and they don’t know quite what to make of it.
The digital revolution, they argue, is changing everything more dramatically than the hype mongers of the Internet could ever imagine, not only the way capitalists and investors hoped but in terms of what it means to be Swedish, American, or Venezuelan. It took millenniums to tectonically shift the continents to what they are today. But allegiances and boundaries, as well as leaders, can shift in an instance.
The transition from a society dominated by print and mass broadcast media to the age in which everyone has a smartphone and is their own media consultant is at least as dramatic as the move from feudalism to capitalism, but at what cost, at what speed?
It took hundreds of years from monarchies and the authority of the church before people took the reins of power in representative democracies. We are now observing the Middle East unshackling itself from the dominance of the West. In this interlude of this age of the Internet, we have the looming shadow of the jihadists and the terrorists using this technology to rain mayhem and chaos on the infidels of the West. It is such developments this book ponders in its funky way.
These authors call for people to become funky leaders, which means to have direction, demonstrate tolerance, embrace their fears and be attentive.
FROM TECHNOCRATS TO NETOCRATS?
After the demise of capitalism, Nordstrom and Ridderstrale advises, comes the attentional. This is another way of saying those who harness global networks of information and master the new forms of this communication tool control business, finance, and legislatures across the globe forming a new business and government elite.
This elite may very well control the minds and hearts of society. They will be the inheritors of power in what Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist call Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism (2002). Simply put, networks will make the world go round. So controlling the networks of this world will soon count for more than controlling the capital. The thinking goes: harness the right network and you can do anything anywhere at any time.
Democracy refers to a perceived global upper class that bases its power on technological advantage and networking skills in comparison to what is portrayed as a bourgeoisie of gradually diminishing importance as the technocracy of capitalism.
Esteemed Spanish sociologist and scholar Manuel Castells has described the Internet as the most extraordinary technological revolution in history, but he suggests it is as underdeveloped socially as it is overdeveloped technologically.
Netocracy envisions where power will reside. The Internet they see lends itself to the idea of funky business gauging it as simply a radical departure from conventional authority and control to a decentralized network governed by these new highly unpredictable netocrats. This author sees netocrats thriving in NOWHERE LAND beyond the control of the individual, and the authority of corporations and governments.
Bard and Soderqvist in Netocracy insist that the transparent and non-hierarchical society proclaimed by Internet enthusiasts is one of the greatest myths of the information age. Future society, they claim, will be just as hierarchical as the present but divided and not along lines of wealth and academic distinction. Nor will power lie with those who own property or the means of production but with those who sort and provide information. They write:
“It is the people who can create and sustain attention that are the Netocracy, the new holders of power, not those who simply supply capital.”
The netocrats are the inheritors of the future as they are the people who can manipulate networks and the information that runs through them. The netocracy consists of people with excellent social skills and a talent for the adept manipulation of information. The lower classes will be composed of people in this digital age who lack the ability to use the new interactive media technology to their advantage.
The netocrat is a new marvel. He is self-created as is his social identity. The cliché “self-made man” (or woman) applies as well. Even his motivation is different. He has money but money is a means and not an end goal. Put another way, he has finessed the system (capitalism) by ruling the networks that now rule the world. Is this a fantasy, or is this the new definition of power?
Bard and Soderqvist would have us see the netocrat as a leader and an artist, using his guile and political cachet to turn networking into an artistic collage of self-interest. Is this the newest Renaissance man or is this a madman going off the rails? (see The Time Magazine, July 2003).
Everything is happening at such blinding speed that it is easy to forget that this is another iteration of the “cut & control” phenomenon started so long ago, first by the hunters and gatherers, then the farmers, and beyond. Driven by the Internet and ubiquitous mobile communication devices for all, networks were bound to turn living into business and business into living. Why not technocrats into netocrats?
These networks are organizing action, gathering and disseminating knowledge contaminating it with new knowledge, controlling influence and therefore dictating behavior to comply with preconceived netocratic aims. Alas, as euphoria and optimism become the organizing principles of the Information Age, Nowhere Man slides inconspicuously into Nowhere Land with apparently no one ever the wiser.
Meanwhile, network organizers believe they will make the world go around as Manuel Castells predicts, but at what cost, at what loss? Nobody seems to mind or wonder.
Action drives the netocrat as it has driven the technocrat, while reflection seems foreign to both prototypes, as no one has the time to wonder why. Controlling the networks of this world will soon count for more than controlling economic capital. At once, the man of property and prosperity, who has had the power, now finds himself on the shelf controlling nothing while basking in Nowhere Land or in the thin air of cyberspace.
The real world has been reduced to redundancy and people to T. S. Eliot’s robots. Is this the new reality: where the fear of terrorist attacks is on everyone's mind; while gangs in our cities are on the rampage and beyond municipal control; where FBI operatives seemingly are obsessively concerned with ordinary people's lives; while it appears to be open season for hackers on private servers; while First Amendments Rights are increasingly reduced to Orwellianianisms? Whatever your sense of things, the societal implications of the communication revolution have already hit.
On December 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and 22 were seriously injured in a terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California during a workgroups Christmas Party. The attack was the second deadliest mass shooting in California after the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, and the deadliest in the United States since Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. It was also the deadliest terrorist attack to occur in the United States since the September 11, 2001 downing of the Twin Towers in New York City.
The terrorists were Syed Rizan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple living in the city of Redlands. They targeted a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, a group of about 80 employees, in a rented banquet room. Farook was an American-born U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, who worked as a health department employee. Malik was a Pakistani-born lawful permanent resident in the United States.
After the shooting, the couple fled in a rented sport utility vehicle (SUV). Four hours later, police pursued their vehicle and killed them in a shootout. On December 3, 20125, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a counterterrorism investigation.
In that investigation, the government maintained it was looking for access to one phone, but Apple, Inc. countered that asking for a code that could access the iPhone that would create a backdoor to all such devices exploitable by other entities. The government sued Apple, and Apple countersued the government. This went on into March 2015 when the FBI was able to decode without Apple’s involvement. Suites were dropped, but the issue and what it means to the future regarding privacy and First Amendment Rights remains cloudy.
* * *
Bard and Soderqvist predict what Netocracy will be, and where the power will flow, but not the common sense consequences. Netocracy draws some remarkable conclusions about the dwindling life of capitalism, and what will follow, but not these aberrations. It might be said that they are more utopian dreamers than Sir Thomas More could ever have imagined. Existence calls to the mind the imagery of a puppet on a string while “cut & control” power resides in a handful of people who have little interest in prosperity or property, much less production of consumer goods, but in all-consuming control of everything else. Is this not Nowhere Land?
Each age has its Nowhere Man who envisions breakthroughs to a new paradise but invariably finds himself in Nowhere Land as he stumbles forward. We saw it when printing was first discovered; when penicillin eradicated such crippling diseases as poliomyelitis; when the birth control pill liberated women from the prison of their sexuality. Each “cut & control” phenomenon changed mankind and therefore changed man, but in the process, it introduced new struggles and problems not likely to have been previously anticipated. It would help if we gave pause as to why this is so.
NEXT
PART SIX: NOWHERE MAN IN THE DYING SENSATE CULTURE
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