European Counter-Traditions and the Western Unconscious
by Dr R. James Ferguson
European history and world history, for all the work of critical scholars and
deconstructive revisionism, still tends to be viewed in terms of epochs and periods.
1
Combined with a core event or central theme and a sense of 'narrative closure', these
factors are sufficient to shape the key historical narratives or storylines that are
repeated about the past.
2
Simply by knowing the time, the general social context and
place, we seem assured of having some genuine understanding of the issue at hand.
3
Popular histories, often but not always written by experts in the field, remain best
sellers, especially when stripped of the references and technical apparatus that
supports a strong storyline.
4
The History Channel suggests to its viewers, with
narrative glibness and engrossing visual detail, that we can easily explore not only the
main galleries but also the side chambers of history with just a little extra effort.
These video documentaries imply that more detail will always be discovered about the
past, but for now, this twenty-five or fifty-minute slice of reality is all you need to
know (before the series becomes available). The 'past is honored and forgotten',
5
even
as it is positioned within the realm of commercial infotainment. The technical
expertise of such products, both written and filmed, conceals their highly constructed,
editorialised and inferential nature.
Scholarship is aware of the dangers of such narrative approaches, but instead provides
its own layers of theory and methodology to each and every historical event or issue,
multiplying the versions of historical events that we can envisage while robbing each
one of certainty. In the meantime, the needs of politics, the legitimation of power, and
the social imagination that sustain communities
6
come together to create a series of
vital myths and grand narratives that are imbued with conviction as to their meaning
and a depth of human creativity that is itself deeply engaging. In spite of the fervent
renunciation of such 'foundationalism' by post-modern scholars,
7
these narratives
remain powerful mental and political touchstones. Nations, through leaders and
popular memory, mobilise their founding myths just as power needs to warm itself on
the touchstone of civilisational values. Power must be justified by moral claims,
leadership based on grand vision, the current cycles of destruction and poverty,
whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq or Sudan are largely the fault of victims (but
may be ameliorated through the correct form of intervention). Such stories multiply
and dominate media discourses even as critical analysis seeks to undermine,
deconstruct and deny them. Big stories, like religious visions, however, are hard to
refute. The very scale of a grand vision, whether the 'clash of civilisations', the moral
hegemony of the West, the 'axis of evil', or ‘globalisation and its discontent’ have a
dramatic glow that gain them a niche in the human imagination, no matter how far
they are from the complex realities of the 20
th
and 21
st
centuries. A plausible certainty
is often better politically than a complex, uncertain probability supported by
examinable facts.
Grand narratives and great traditions imply key phases of historical development,
running from the first human use of tools through the various ages that are in effect
posited as stages of development. Complex and dangerous theories about human and
37Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
cultural evolution lurk behind commonly used terms: the bronze, archaic, classical,
antique and medieval ages, the Renaissance, Reformation, Revolutionary, Industrial
modern and post-modern periods. More recently, we have been told of the 'end of
history' (a very brief period as it turned out), a 'short' twentieth century, and a chorus
of voices assured us that September 11, 2001 ushered in a terrorist age with a new
global order, noting the down-side of globalization and the supposedly ‘border-less’
world.
8
Although historians have recanted the ideas of strict evolutionary development and
progress, this is still implied both in popular histories and the way 'surprising'
examples of early sophistication are treated. When evolution is insufficient, notions of
discontinuity, chaos, or revolutionary change are utilised as similes of that which is
not evolutionary. Although intense debate continues to delineate the beginnings and
ending of the these epochs, they are still used as the main approach in teaching
history, in positioning text books and documentaries, and in the setting for fictive
books and film. This sense of history, no matter how crude, is structured into the
mental life of 'modern' educated people, even when dealing with diverse Asian,
American or African cultures. The utility of placing an idea, a person, an invention, or
an issue in its historical context is not disputed. However, all of these constructions
involve powerful acts of imagination that may hide or exclude as much as they
reveal.
9
In the case of European history and European values, the dominant historical narrative
has been repeatedly revised in ongoing cycles of reinterpretation of the past. Some
would assure us that the Greeks did not invent the 'West' and that indeed we have to
look further to Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilisations for many of the sources of
European vitality.
10
Alexander the Great was a butcher and destroyer of civilisations
as much as he was hero and founder of the Hellenistic Age (while in 2004 Greek
lawyers assured us that he was certainly not bisexual).
11
Witches were a phenomena
largely created by the social pressures and the projective imagination of the late
Middle Ages.
12
The actions of the Spanish Inquisition, though often regrettable, have
been greatly exaggerated in a black myth fostered by Protestant propaganda.
13
Britain
is the invention of 19
th
century English universal education and does not represent a
strongly unified culture or identity.
14
The Scandinavian contribution to early Russian
and Ukrainian history has been greatly underestimated, or alternatively exaggerated,
for political reasons.
15
Each thesis, no doubt, has its own merit and represents an
exciting opportunity to re-assess our knowledge and assumptions. To a limited degree
this would allow us to retest our real understanding of facts and own our knowledge
within a progressive, open and critical society, a process superficially compatible with
a trend in political thought running from J.S. Mill to Karl Popper, Noam Chomsky
and John Ralston Saul. However, sustained effort is needed to challenge dominant
traditions if they are embedded in the popular imagination. The deep architecture
remains the same, but the rooms are viewed under different lights, from different
perspectives, or in more detail with new intellectual tools.
Revolutionary thought may be possible, but requires a genuinely critical approach
which goes beyond mere revision, or the repeated working up of supposedly new
theories (a trend supported by both popular and academic publishers). In the worst
case scenario, this indeed becomes 'the thriving activity of publishing and
forgetting'.
16
The fascinating detail of history is so overwhelming that budding
38Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
historians might sympathise with James Joyce's hero in Ulysses when he says than
'history is the nightmare one tries to waken from.'
17
In this sense, it only a partial
exaggeration to argue that in Europe: "Those who come later chose their ancestors for
themselves. The European heritage is the object of a vast usurpation of a legacy. The
European are the heirs of antiquity in nothing."
18
Europe is a shifting zone of
geography and influence in the present, a contested cultural zone in the future, and a
shifting horizon of the past as diverse Russian, Celtic, Turkish and North African
histories claim a vital place in the 'House of Europe.'
In the case of the European tradition, the true diversity of the social and intellectual
life of the past has begun to emerge as every aspect of life, society, art, and
architecture comes under closer scrutiny. This is achieved not just through the mere
revision of the historical record or the history of ideas,
19
but the recovery of lost areas
of social memory and the discovery of that which has been obscured. At best this
involves a serious engagement with and sustained critical analysis of precisely that
which lies outside current assumptions. What emerges, however, is a sense that
dominant traditions and triumphant institutions hide secondary and marginalised ways
of viewing the world, ways that were hidden rather than destroyed by dominant
cultural systems.
20
These ways of thinking about the world were often embedded in
popular traditions, sublimated in daily practices, buried as stories or myths, or fused
into complex works of art which now seem mysterious or displaced within their
historical setting. They may also form the bedrock of irrational and emotive
dispositions that carry through to the current period in a subterranean system of
beliefs and prejudices. These receive limited public scrutiny for the very reason that,
when expressed overtly, they are readily dismissed as ludicrous, archaic, or
superstitious. This is much more than everyday prejudice, or a tendency to steer away
from anything that speaks seriously of the supernatural, daemonic or sinister. Rather,
it is one of the bases of Enlightenment rationalism and the later dominance of
instrumental logic.
21
Moreover, this aversion removes none of these averted elements
from having a certain guiding power on unreflected action.
This appropriation of the past in the name of diversion, however, disguises something
rather more insidious. Over the last two and a half thousand years, dominant
intellectual and political traditions have generated counter-cultures that carry the
seeds for later revolutions of thought,
22
that constitute alternative visions of the future,
and give people the intellectual space to diverge from the dominant ideologies of their
own time. In some cases these repressed elements form active bodies of literature and
thought that coalesce as virtual counter-canons or anti-canonical doctrines,
challenging the intellectual dominance of mainstream religion or literature.
23
Some of
these ideas now seem ludicrous (at the emotional level) and their basis disputed
(logically or empirically), but this has not robbed them of their social and structural
function in the 'knowledge game'. They have not lost the symbolic associations that
imply new human possibilities. Furthermore, at the most extreme, what is repressed is
a sense of the potential for revolution, or at least revolutionary change in the way
human relations are organised,
24
a possibility that is only occasionally grasped and
carried through to a successful transition. This sense of divergent possibility is
sometimes projected onto the past, a distant future, or as an immanent and radical
change that is about to transform the world, either through revolution or apocalypse.
39Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
These European counter-traditions are certainly not continuous, nor a fully integrated
intellectual system. However, dialogue among these 'counter-cultures',
25
and their
interaction with the dominant ideologies of European civilisation, have been strong
enough to generate a particular world of imagination, a hidden grand narrative that
could be accessed by heretical scholars and visionaries. Ironically, it was this
'counter-vision' that provided the enriching soil needed to give birth to a Christianity
enriched by Graeco-Roman scholarship, to reintroduce Greek logic and Aristotelian
philosophy to the Middle Ages, and to lay the groundwork for the Renaissance and
the Reformation. As early as the 13
th
century, some five percent of the population of
Latin Christendom 'had separated themselves from the Latin Church and set up their
own religious ("heretical") communities'.
26
The counter-tradition also enriched the
stream that led from Alchemy to what we would today call early experimental
science.
27
It contained seeds that would aid the move towards political equality and
the liberation of women from the precise and limited roles of Christian paternalism. It
also generated some of the intellectual furniture for orientalism, channelling, New
Age mysticism, and the ongoing shift of meaning associated with magic and
vampires.
28
Whether it can provide one impetus towards of new global 'community of
communities' based on a more harmonious environmental and social participation
remains to be seen.
In their preconscious, uncritical aspects, counter-traditions also carry potent myths
concerning power, evil, and social hierarchy. These negative myths, rather than the
cold rationalism of decision-making, regularly guide the images that the media still
use when making 'moral' judgements on the calamities of today's world. This countertradition is often uncritically invoked in editorials, in the public speeches of
politicians, and in the casting of global affairs as a great melodrama in which there
must be heroes and villains, but in which evil protagonists seem to have a greater
reality as protagonists. If not Hitler or Saddam Hussein, then terrorist extremists
strapped with dynamite will suffice. Villains in corporate boardrooms, crime lords in
penthouses, under-class rogues dealing drugs on the streets and turning children in
zombies, and foreign narco-terrorists are also part of this projective mechanism.
Critical judgement is replaced with collective psychodrama. Hence the great appeal of
'reality' television, where projections and prejudices are blessed with real-time
miracles of spy-cam verification. In such times, no one asks if Bush or Blair knew
that it is much easier to believe in evil than good, and that man might well make the
Devil in 'his own image and likeness'.
29
A simple dualism, a heroic battle between
light and dark, a vision less sophisticated than that found in ancient Sumeria, will do
instead.
30
Furthermore, those who seem to support, promote, or believe in those things
held to be wrong or evil become castigated as 'people of the lie', a term indicating a
moral and spiritual lapse as much as a rational failing.
31
In the 'age of terror', such
people are painted in strategic thinking and the media as persons whose freedom, and
lives, may be destroyed at will in the search for a greater freedom, usually for other
people deemed in some sense to be more worthwhile. The public face of the military
operations through 2001-2010 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Somalia,
though supported by rational reasons of real politik and the real threat posed by
terrorists groups, also contained elements of demonisation, stereotyping, the use of
pre-judicial lethal force, and in some cases the suspension of normal legal guarantees
usually granted to criminals, combatants and prisoners of war. These methods involve
a psychological and moral narrative that appeals to both rational interests and
irrational patterns of identification.
40Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
Dominant and counter-traditional elements today are creatively linked in a floating
sea of signs and symbols that have become consumerised and technologically
disseminated.
32
The power of these clusters of meaning, whether presented in fictional
or non-fictive forms, should not be underestimated. Babylon has more than a
historical or Biblical resonance for the young Rastafari who use it to symbolise the
entire world of conformity and money that destroys values, a concept that has become
transnational as reggae carries its message to small Rasta communities around the
world.
33
A world champion wrester and superstar, the 'Rock' presented a 'respectable'
history documentary by National Geographic about early Egyptian history, because,
yes, indeed, there was once a Scorpion King. Here the movie seemed to precede,
indeed legitimise the documentary account, The Real Scorpion King. The idea that in
the second millennia there was a great matriarchal society based on the worship of the
Great Goddess, though at best an overstatement of limited historical materials from
early European and Middle Eastern archaeology, has nonetheless been used to help
launch a creative re-appraisal of the nature of human sexuality.
34
This is the kind of
false 'knowledge' that indeed articulates change, mobilises resources, motivates
societies, aids social transformation,
35
and provides the conceptual glue for innovative
communities. Such ‘knowledge’ can provide these roles without presenting a fully
developed ideology, without being in any positivist, empirical sense 'factual', and may
not be based on valid reasoning. However, there is then little control over the moral
and political directions in which such ‘false’ inspirations lead, whether towards some
positive liberation or towards prejudice, racism, or new forms of chauvinism. This
interaction of tradition and counter-tradition may still in the long-term ratify dominant
terms that marginalise alternative or excluded ones.
36
On that other hand, that which was once 'beyond the bounds' and excluded can later
on be accepted, and in time re-located within the regulated social sphere as a new
norm. This occurred, for example, in the early history of Christianity, where an
excluded religion over several centuries was transformed into the cultural basis for
governance and social values within the Roman Empire.
37
Likewise, protests against
corruption and turpitude within the Catholic Church were the seeds from which both
the Reformation and Counter-Reformation would grow. Small republican
communities that survived as the exception in parts of Italy and Switzerland, along
with social movements such as the Quakers, Ranters and Levellers, would be threads
in the larger European swing toward more egalitarian, democratic societies.
38
Diverse
religious codes and their interpretation became one way of interrogating both a
'hegemonic theology' and its power structures.
39
Movements of protest and popular
religion can in turn became institutionalised and normalised, providing major sources
for historical change, in effect overturning or modifying the old order. In large
measure, this overturning of the hierarchy of the past generated the European
emphasis on democracy and humanism, traditions that were not just based on the cold
facts of political calculation, but rather a vision of humans as not only equal to each
other, but equal to the task of understanding the universe.
40
Not just equality before
the law (at first for citizens), but access to knowledge and 'processes of truth' (one of
the key aspects of court and educational systems), was gradually subject to the idea of
being ‘equal available’ for all.
One over-interpretation is to assume a single, partially organic counter-tradition
reconstructed post-factum within the European imagination. Direct interaction can
41Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
sometimes be glimpsed among suppressed or distaff traditions, e.g. between Alchemy
and Kabbalah, the possible influence of Kabbalic thought on the pessimistic
apocalyptic views of Joachimism (a strand Christian thought following the 12
th
century Joachim of Flora),
41
or threads that indirectly link Gnosticism and Hermetic
writings with later forms of Christianity.
42
For a short time in the 11-12
th
centuries
there was a nexus between Christian, Islamic and Jewish societies as they interacted
across a multi-cultural Mediterranean.
43
Modern critical analysis sought for a time to
integrate myth and dream in the realm of the meaningful alongside logic and
analytical reasoning.
44
Post-modernism gave symbols and signs a crucial role in a
view of the world which could only be semiotic, but always denied such symbols a
role in revelation. However, the interaction among dominant and secondary traditions,
though sometimes approaching a genuine dialogue or exploration, tended to conceal
'dominator hierarchies'
45
in which one code always set the ground and rules of
interaction, establishing its own priorities of legitimacy and guidelines that limited
tolerance. The doyens of dominant or new, emerging traditions became authority
figures, made money, and rubbed shoulders (and who knows what else) with the
famous. The champions of subaltern traditions at times would become spectacular
champions of new ideas, but would often be forced to recant, be enjoined to silence,
executed, or ended up in poverty as unrecognised voices within their own generation.
Spinoza, Da Vinci, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, each experienced some of this
oppression, though in the end their brilliance would be recovered by the reverence
given to them in later reconstructions of European intellectual history.
Some of these suppressed or overturned traditions operated as the virtual
'unconscious' of Christianity. The ideas that Christian dogma, institutions, and law
sought to repress from the fourth century onwards did not entirely disappear. As such,
the values and world views that could not be accommodated in the public Christian
world had to be redirected either into a private space or a counter-veiling tradition
with its own resources of memory, preservation, and articulation. Christianity, and the
different Christianities, are key elements in the wider history of the West.
Christianity, moreover, has been crucial in developing not just a body of religious
custom and associated cultural artefacts, as any religion may be said to do, but also
engaged in the systematic development of an exclusive dogma, the formation of
educational and propagation for a set canon of texts and values, and created robust
institutional structures directly tied to the ideological content of this system. As such,
it indeed made spirit flesh, and denied, or tried to deny, other messages such
embodiment. The monopoly of the Church on belief and education was never
complete, and was soon subject to strong challenges. It remained, however, for some
fifteen hundreds years at least, the major force against which reform was launched,
whether in the areas of alternative churches, the schism between Latin and Orthodox
belief, apocalyptic movements, the divergent proofs of an emerging science,
46
or
demands for freedom of conscience.
Ironically, modernism and post-modernism would soon find themselves haunted by
the ghosts of the alternative belief systems that Christianity had also helped breed.
Over the last three centuries, when educated men 'lost faith' in a unified and
authoritative Christianity, they often turned not to what we would recognise as
science, but to spiritualism, political theism, scientism, free masonry, theosophy, a
humanism moulded on ahistorical views of the glory of Athens, or later on to New
Age religious eclecticism. From this point of view, the European Enlightenment was a
42Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
failed project that made the world safe for diverse forms of the irrational. Just as the
ancient Greeks, for all their vaunted invention of a self-critical and rational
philosophy, had a public life deeply saturated with the emotive, irrational, and
religious,
47
so in the contemporary world, science is publicly acclaimed not for its
critical 'method' but as a source of technology that allows utopian dreams of personal
pleasure, public empowerment and the provision of solutions to all possible human
problems. In the public domain, science is science fiction, always pointing out
towards a universe of infinite possibilities that dwarf human problems in the here and
now. If the area of rational thought has greatly expanded, it is surrounded by a much
wider and wilder domain of the irrational.
These processes in part revolve around the construction of history, the sense of the
past as creating the conditions of the present, and the building of a conscious tradition
that is the touchstone of everyday life and the basis of normative judgements about
power and truth.
48
The process whereby the historical records begin to be
systematically preserved as evidence of the past and are subject to academic discipline
(in the modern period during the 17-19
th
centuries) is in fact one way of understanding
the world.
49
Less systematically studied have been the mechanisms of forgetting,
whereby experiences and ideas are lost, displaced, and divorced from the active
tradition of social memory. Hence the well-worn adage of T.W. Adorno, the 'history
of philosophy is the history of forgetting'.
50
This forgetting, however, is not just a
random act, but a socially constructed amnesia.
51
It involves not simply the loss, but
the displacement and transformation of the information and understanding of past
events and ideas. These displacements, in Freudian terms, may indicate processes of
'repression, distortion, negation and the like',
52
but also have central roles in identity
formation and social adaptation to disturbing events over which individuals and
societies have limited control.
Social 'forgetting' is not a simple process. It may be a non-systematic loss of material
that was never committed to an enduring record, or was not passed via oral history
from one generation to the next. In other, cases, however, forgetting is a willed and
intentional structuring of what is transmitted forward from the past, and what is
allowed to shape our future imagining of how the historical record should look, e.g.
the careful displacement, grafting and partial repression of the history of Kiev onto
Russian history, conflations over the role of international verses American troops in
Somalia, or confusion over naval exclusion zones in the Falklands (Malvinas Islands)
during later television documentaries.
53
Several key mechanisms come into play,
either in pivotal individuals (public figures, historians, journalists), via institutions, or
through the collective memory of what is tolerated within a given society.
On this basis, certain parallels can be drawn from the psychology of individuals,
though this is only a useful metaphor for wider social processes.
54
Memories can fail
to be created and are lost in the historical record because adequate and sustained
attention are not given to them. For many ordinary events and the details of private
lives there is almost a complete loss after three or four generations. In other cases, a
tradition may be poorly recorded, sidelined or marginalised. Even if some record is
retained, it becomes a rare item that is not referred to regularly, and drops out of
public awareness, making no impression on the educational arena. Framing narratives,
sometimes falsified or erroneous, are then constructed as if these factors had never
before come into play. Museums, family history societies, community projects,
43Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
popular history, films and novels perform these functions of appropriation and partial
memory on a routine basis. Even libraries, in spite of archival and research roles that
provide a wider repository of knowledge, are still subject to acquisition trends, public
demands, and indirect forms of censorship.
55
Likewise, social projects of the 19
th
and
20
th
centuries such as the extension of public education to all children and literacy to
most citizens has had a major impact on conformity and moral values, imposing forms
of social control at the same time as it has enhanced opportunities for individuals and
the generation of social capital.
56
At various times early Gnostic thought, the cultural legacy of the gypsies, the
cosmopolitan cultures of early Medieval Spain and southern France, and the role of
female troubadours (Trobairitz)
57
fit this notion of marginalised elements that were for
centuries trivialised or stereotyped, but later revived as 'stories' worthy of merit.
However, other influences are less well received. Profound schools of Rabbinical
learning emerged in Eastern Europe from the 16
th
century onwards, while until World
War II an extensive Yiddish literature flourished in a zone stretching from Poland
down to Odessa.
58
Though well-chronicled in academic works, these influences have
barely impinged on popular Western awareness. Nor is their contribution to Eastern
European thought and culture likely to be widely revived in the expanding European
Union. The popular image of the pogrom, ironically, may perpetual a partially true
image of outsider groups as victims, but does not highlight the crucial role of such
groups in the formation of modern Western thought. The dramatic, negative content
has been perpetuated as horror and the cathartic witness of mass crime (portrayed by
Spielberg and a line of historical films since Otto Preminger's Exodus),
59
but the
positive cultural legacy may still be ignored or trivialised. 'Everyman' knows of the
Holocaust, few Christians have opened a Talmud, even in translation. The 'outsiders',
whether the displaced picturesque images of the European south that was once the
focus of 'northern' prejudice and construction,
60
a Roma group that has been resident
in Europe for hundreds of years, or recent Kurdish and Afghan refugees, are still
decoupled from their indigenous roles within a wider Europe and from civilisation
legacies in order to facilitate the prejudicial formation of Europe's national identities.
61
These rich cultures have since been re-discovered by specialised scholars, artists,
film-makers and musicians, but have not entered the wider Western awareness. This
collective consciousness, in so far as it has any unity, remains both arrogant and
fearful, a compromise formation based the selective 'dreaming' of the past. The Kurds
were useful in the war against ‘Satan’ Hussein (and their treatment one measure of
Turkish democratisation in terms of the Copenhagen criteria mandated by European
Union officials), but this did not equate with a broader understanding of their past and
future role in the Middle East.
62
The people of Afghanistan may be forgotten once the
hot war against Al Qaeda is over and national elections have met international
standards, but reconstruction remains slow in a war-ravaged country that fades into
another backwater of global concern even as conflict in the troubled south of the
country continues through 2006-2010.
63
This selective dreaming of the past projects
itself onto the present and thereby imagines a fragmented, often exclusive, future.
In other cases a more intentional form of forgetting or removal from the public record
occurs. These forms of activity range from selective transformation of the historical
record by historians for more than two centuries, e.g. the underestimated role of often
unnamed women in the historical record of the Roman world and early Europe, which
has been the focus of recent 'recovery' historiography over the last three decades,
64
44Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
through to the suppression and destruction of alternative traditions, as in the banning
of the use of hieroglyphics in early Christian Egypt (along with the defacement of
many monuments, or their transformation into Churches). This is a much wider
tradition than simply banning and burning books, a common Christian preoccupation
from the fourth century to the twentieth centuries, making later Soviet events jejune in
comparison.
65
It also involved making some areas of public discussion and research
improper, and a refusal in daily life to entertain easily observed facts that cannot be
accommodated in the dominant world-view.
The power of such viewpoints can be demonstrated in the issue of female sexuality.
The simple realities of female pleasure, eroticism, and orgasm as a human parallel to
male sexuality were soon displaced in the Christian tradition. This involved both a
suppression of female sexuality and its displacement and polarisation into two
different images, female virtue verses female depravity.
66
In between, there was little
scope for a normal female sexuality, nor for a positive sexual relationship between the
sexes. These processes were indeed backed up by an ideological hegemony (as in
Gramsci's theory), but also by the selective usage of 'ideological state apparatuses' (as
in Althusser's thought)
67
via the nunnery, the insane asylum, the system of
prostitution, the advice of the medical profession, and through differential school
education and the legal systems which selectively discriminated against women who
acted outside authorised roles.
Metaphorically, this more 'intentional amnesia' parallels the psychological processes
of suppression and repression. In psychoanalytical thought these two concepts are
related but theoretically distinguished. Suppression is the conscious effort to ignore,
forget, or push away from consciousness awareness a thought, memory, emotion or
experience.
68
In such a situation, the person is still aware of and can retrieve such
information, but chooses as far as possible not to do so. Ironically, efforts at
suppression can often fail, especially under conditions of anxiety or distraction, and in
effect brings to mind the very thing to be forgotten.
69
Repression, however, is more
unconscious process, with the effort of the psyche to prevent threatening memories or
ideas from even entering awareness. This involves a much deeper effort at eradication
of the memory and associations leading to it, and has a much stronger impact on the
subconscious, dream-work, and is more dangerous for future mental health.
70
In the
long term, however, there may be a relationship between suppression and repression.
Ideas repeatedly suppressed may eventually become part of a repressed complex,
while in turn, new thoughts that uncomfortably suggest repressed material may
themselves be suppressed, often through mechanisms of anxiety and marginalisation
from awareness. It is necessary to distinguish this process from non-intentional or
unmotivated forms of failing to remember,
71
whether due to a lack of initial attention
or due to information not being processed past short-term memory.
Suppression and repression of unwanted knowledge, combined with the social
amnesia directed towards particular interests, form two sides of a process that prunes
and shapes individual interaction with the historical record and our wider intellectual
horizon. It is possible that learning the art of speech (and what not to say aloud) itself
forms one of the bases of selective suppression, and eventually of a more complete
form of repression.
72
It thus includes social and cultural components, in which social
interactions shape patterns of disclosure and repression. In an important analogy, we
may even speak of an 'unconscious civilisation', one directed away from its core
45Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
values by a hijacking of the language, tools, and legitimising processes of rationality
in the name of 'efficiency' and the needs of special interest groups, i.e. the
'corporatisation' of knowledge and truth directed to extrinsic gains.
73
In terms of historical and intellectual traditions, the acts and art of suppression can be
effectively charted. Banned books, suppressed doctrines, punitive court cases, debates
over what might be taught in school, and censorship policies give a clear map of
conscious efforts to either silence, or remove from the main public arena, those ideas
which are held immoral, subversive or 'unthinkable'. In the chase of Christianity, this
process had begun at the same time as the Canon that was to become the accepted
Bible was being shaped, with some works accepted as authoritative, others disputed
but not completely rejected (antilegomena). Some works were placed outside the
Canon as 'apocrypha', and others more completely condemned.
74
This also occurred in
doctrinal areas, with major theories about human nature debated by Church leaders
and then suppressed after intellectual battles and court cases, e.g. St. Augustine's
successful suppression of the heresy of the perfectibility of human beings without the
necessary intervention God's grace, the 'heresy' known as Pelagianism.
75
The charting
of the orthodox and heretic within differing Christian traditions, e.g. over the nature of
Christ, whether God was triune or monophysite in nature, the status of icons, methods
of crossing oneself (especially disputed among different Orthodox Churches), formed
a virtual intellectual battlefield that shook the foundations of wider Europe and the
Levant for almost two thousand years. In these cases, the tradition was deeply
contested until one interpretation became dominant. Nor was this just a battle of ideas
and list of texts: it was a battle over political power, institutional wealth, and the
ruling ideology that would shape the future of Europe. Thus, as noted in the fourth
century Egyptian debate over canonical biblical books: ‘Athanasius’s disputes with
other Egyptian Christians over the biblical canon were not struggles over lists of
books alone, but reflected more fundamental conflicts between competing modes of
Christian authority, spirituality, and social organization.’
76
Repression, however, was not often complete. One tradition could be dominant, but it
could not erase the historical record completely, while small groups continued their
affiliation to alternative traditions, e.g. in Russia those who follow unreformed
Orthodox traditions, e.g. the 'Old Believers'.
77
If these events seem confined to a
doctrinaire and authoritarian past, then several current debates remind us that these
events have led to much unfinished business. The religious revival around mystical
apparitions of Mary, both in Spain and parts of Latin America, had indicated a strong
piety that cannot be satiated in a largely patriarchal Catholic Church. The issue of a
female priesthood, in such a setting, becomes a symptom of a wider dominant and
subordinate tradition, and much more than a debate about traditional Christian
doctrine verses feminism. Likewise, the tools of legal and informal suppression are
still regularly used against cultural products that challenge social order, e.g. the past
effort in France to suppress certain forms of rap music as deeply anti-social, and some
self-censorship in U.S. media industries through 2001-2003.
78
Ironically, one of the places where a code of silence has developed on certain topics,
viewed as politically incorrect, are university campuses. In the name of justice and
equality certain topics can be hardly raised outside of very specialised classes.
Professors may summarise existing views but find it dangerous to profess their own
critical analyses if these challenge mainstream views or dominant social interests,
46Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
especially in areas relating to gender, race, religious politics,
79
and more recently the
blanket condemnation of the social roots of terrorism which makes the analysis of
long term causes risky (unpatriotic) for many academics. In the developed world
lecturers are now more often gagged by the fear of student law suites, lack of
employment prospects, risks in not gaining tenure, or a record that may lose them
research grants rather than by direct threat of government or religious censorship.
Even the label ‘political correctness’ has now become a term of abuse and used in
attempt to marginalise crucial debates”
80
Repression is a concept central to both psychology and politics. Freud viewed this
mechanism as one of the key elements in the formation of the subconscious, a major
defence mechanism protecting the ego, the root of much psychological displacement,
dream-work and neurosis.
81
For thinkers such as Marcuse, Norman O. Brown and
Russell Jacoby repression is the key that unlocks both the treasures of psychoanalysis
and an understanding of social psychology.
82
At the broader level, however,
repression is a political tool used in silencing and restricting counter-cultures and
counter-traditions that challenge dominant historical and national narratives. If
civilization itself can be viewed as a mechanism designed to suppress the free
expression of human drives and to modify them to communal needs, then incomplete
repression leads not only to a complex life in the human subconscious, but also a
virtual 'unconscious' structuring of suppressed material within counter-traditions. In
this sense, suppressed traditions and cultures are a counter-memory or alternative
choice that has been pruned away to reinforce the preferred ideas of a given culture in
a given time period. If the heresy of a female God within early Gnosticism had been
allowed to thrive, this would have undermined the essentially patriarchal authority of
Catholic Church.
83
If female prophets and seers had been allowed to extend their
authority in early Christian communities, this too might have challenged the exclusive
role of male priests and their hierarchy of abbots, bishops and cardinals.
84
Such
choices, Christian priestess and the feminine God, were to be removed by making
them unthinkable. Some accommodation might occur: the cult of Mary was allowed if
at times de-emphasised, while nuns were allowed to forsake the world, though a
certain suspicion of this as an escape route for women from their proper family duties
was harboured through the Middle Ages. In particular, though the spiritual role of
nuns was admitted, they were largely excluded from a larger 'leadership and
sacerdotal' role in the Church, as well as from much formal higher education.
85
Even
leading female figures such as Hildegard of Bingen and Heloise in Paris were indeed
exceptions, while only in separated religious communities such as the 14
th
century
Lollards of England were women given key preaching roles in what were in effect
counter-churches that persisted in some areas down to 1530.
86
In any case, the road to
the nunnery was only in some cases a road to spiritual freedom: a sizeable number of
unmarried or widowed gentry women may have been relegated to relatively poor and
under-funded nunneries, especially if their dowries were too small or if they posed a
financial burden to inherited estates.
87
As George Eliot would note in passing in
Daniel Deronda, to later generations poor nunneries would seem little more than
female asylums for women who had been caste off by society.
Other mechanisms play a major role in silencing traditions and in forced forgetting.
These include the normal arts of trivialisation, superficial irony,
88
patterns of humour
and sarcasm, and marginalisation. In part, this derives from the very way societies set
up bodies of knowledge, and the issues to which we give attention in the generation of
47Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
public knowledge. These 'discursive practices' profoundly shape our knowledge,
theories and social systems:
This context discloses a systematic organization that cannot be reduced to the
demands of logic or linguistics. Discursive practices are characterized by the
delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent
of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories.
Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its
exclusions and choices.
89
In effect, the way we structure, use and discuss knowledge is part of wider set of
relations deeply concerned with power and obedience. Ironically, this emerges most
clearly in studies of truth, justice, madness and punishment. Zones of exclusion, of
control, as well as loci where status can be charged, all form patterns of exclusion and
inclusion. In post-Renaissance European society, as noted by Michel Foucault,
asylums, early hospitals (whose functions were often non-therapeutic), factories,
prisons, barracks and schools controlled both discourses and social power.
90
In
post-17th century Europe it was the hospital, the asylum, and the workhouses which
acted as places where the mad 'as well as others unable or unwilling to work' were
confined and excluded from society.
91
Madness, like other 'variants' of the human
condition, was structured as part of a 'broken dialogue' concerned with the language
of authority, power, transgression and exclusion, and eventually confinement.
92
Likewise, the social production of knowledge creates certain procedures and
institutions which involve 'rules of exclusion: prohibitions, rejections, and divisions;
restrictive limitations on the exercise of discourse: rituals, fellowships of discourse,
and doctrines'.
93
Repression, suppression, and marginalisation are parts of the process
of 'world-making' that is given the shorthand name: 'culture'. Furthermore, this is not
just an external social or cultural process. In so far as it robs people of any chance of
genuine self-knowledge, a central theme for thinkers as diverse as Socrates, John of
Salisbury (12
th
century) and Freud, it also robs people of the consciousness and social
knowledge needed to build genuine civil societies.
94
The great irony, of course, is that in order to set up the conditions for the censorship,
suppression, destruction of alternative views, and selective punishment of its
carriers,
95
it is enough merely to claim to believe that you have a monopoly on truth.
There are enormous secondary gains in power and authority for those who determine
the truth as their prerogative, regardless of whether they personally entertain the
beliefs in question. 'True believers' come in many forms: -
The Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, the Fascists, and now the
free marketeers, are all the direct descendants of predestination and the Jesuits.
They are the chosen few - the minority who have the truth and therefore have the
right to impose it by whatever means.
96
The litany goes back much further than the Jacobins. A close reading of the Apology
suggests that the jurists knew well enough that they were punishing Socrates for his
pride before the demos (the Athenian public within in the context of revolutionary
democracy) and before the court, just as much as for any guilt on the specific charges
laid against him. Alexander the Great benefited from claims of his divinity and divine
parentage, even as he remained ambiguous on the issue to avoid outraging his more
egalitarian relations with the old Macedonian soldiers. Hegemonies of knowledge
were sealed within the authoritative dispositions of the Universal Catholic Church and
48Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
reinforced by an impressive educational and archival system. Scientific, economic,
psychological, legal and managerial knowledge is now concealed within complex
dialects and jargons designed to retain professional groups as gate-keepers in these
areas of 'truth', thereby regulating public spending, public health, the judicial system,
and the way people are controlled within their work environments.
97
Such trends can
lead to 'self-delusion and romanticism', aspects of an ideology utilising
unconsciousness to remove power from the public and democratic domains.
98
Nor
does the new emphasis on the 'individual', personal satisfaction, 'life style', and
personal therapy
99
necessarily lead to a 'conscious civilisation': on the contrary, a false
dichotomy between the public and private spheres distorts both.
Many areas of the repressed knowledge, in all probability, will remain hidden from
contemporary view. However, suppressed traditions often provide a central role in the
formation of 'new' knowledge. Distaff and subaltern cultures, in their interaction with
dominant traditions, have constituted a 'forbidden knowledge' that has been highly
useful in enlightening those who have sought it as freedom from dogma. This process
was driven in part by a change in the transformation of curiosity from a virtue into a
vice, in part by the desire for intellectual empowerment.
100
This tension was evident in
Christian scholastic traditions. Monks, even within orders that set aside several hours
each day for study, were enjoined not to become obsessively engaged in the question
for knowledge, though the Benedictines were an exception in promoting knowledge
over submission to the hourly routine of the day.
101
Likewise, the Dominican order
soon emerged as a major intellectual force at the University of Paris, especially in
theology and philosophy.
102
This could be tolerated under the presumption that secular
knowledge and human logic were secondary handmaidens that would support the
higher knowledge of revelation and the other divine gifts such as charity, a powerful
synthesis that Aquinas promoted with elegance. In this area, the thought of Thomas
Aquinas for a time seemed to dominate the alternative approach of the 'Oxford
Franciscans' such as Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Occam, whereby
rational thought was clearly secondary to faith and belief, but thereby freed from a
false synthesis that would shackle any possible progress in experimental science.
103
However, when the knowledge sought overturned this relationship, or led to a
confusing reversal of orders, it was deemed either daemonic or deluded, leading to
condemnation, heresy or the madhouse. In the long run, however, this limited role for
rational investigation could not be contained. The dyke of Christian faith would soon
be punctured in too many places for even Thomist theory to repair.
104
At the wider level, these mechanisms often invoke methods to reduce or contain
dangerous contradictions.
105
Ironically, this suppression and masking of countertraditions has sometimes led to their ultimate preservation. First, the condemned
works or ideas are publicly berated in the literature of the major tradition, thereby
providing distorted reflections of the suppressed works, i.e. the numerous works
written by Christians against heresies.
106
These argumentative, polemical and
evangelical works have been extremely useful in reconstructing entire ‘Schools’ of
thought and social practises that were otherwise condemned and exterminated. Here,
we see a parallel to the personal principle that conscious partial suppression is often
unsuccessful, since it marks and reiterates the very things that are to be suppressed.
107
The censors themselves often preserve the name and content of the work they
suppress, even if in distorted form, and at times keep copies in archives proscribed for
use by a select few. Second, works viewed as heretical were often hidden by those
49Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
who wrote them or sought to read them, either in remote communities, in hidden
caches, or as part of an intellectual subculture that rejoiced in such forbidden fruit (as
in the Gnostic texts that were buried in a clay pot near Nag Hamadi, to be discovered
in 1945 by an Arab camel driver).
108
More recently, banned books have generated
their own avid audiences, and in the broader tradition of European antiquities have
been major items for the collectors of rare books whose value is based on their very
obscurity. Works as diverse as the early Gnostic hymns, Gallileo's astronomical
theses, Joyce's Ulysses, and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers gained notoriety by being
banned or suppressed. For a time the Vatican even sought to prevent new reprints and
translations of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, with the Church’s
Index of Forbidden Books being maintained down till 1966.
109
Such interdictions
were, in the long term, unsuccessful to varying degrees.
Likewise, efforts at repression of dissent and uncomfortable past legacies in the
Soviet Union were in the long run unsuccessful and laid the basis for an underground
cultural resistance that would be mobilised under Gorbachev's reforms. Indeed, for
over two centuries an enduring Russian pastime was the reading and reproduction of
samizdat, banned publications. For example, Boris Pasternak's novel, Doctor Shivago,
was at first read within the Soviet Union in this way, while from 1970's the
underground Chronicle of Current Events appeared in Moscow dealing with
infringements of human rights by the government.
110
A sense of what the political
openning of the late 1980s meant to the Russian people has been captured by an essay
of the dissident poet Yevtushenko, who wrote that 'the best monument to the early
poems of our generation is the liberation from the tyranny of censorship, from the
tyranny of the observing eye of Orwell's Big Brother. And this liberation is what we
call glasnost.'
111
It must be remembered that since 1917 some 6,000 works of fiction
and politics had been banned in the USSR, with censorship based on ideological
grounds being totally lifted only in 1989. However, the openning of the KGB files,
revelations concerning disastrous legacies of the Stalinist past, the disasters of the
dirty Soviet war in Afghanistan, and a widespread knowledge of corruption among
the communist elite meant that in turn even reformers such as Gorbachev would be
swept away in revulsion at a past that had only been partly suppressed. Efforts by
former Presidents Yeltsin and Putin to mobilise a reborn vision of Russia as a great
power with cautious contiguities to its past have also involved cooption and control of
mainstream media within the country.
112
Such suppressed concepts can become part of ongoing verbal traditions, key themes
for fiction and humour, or are embedded in different patterns of everyday life,
including popular music. These patterns range from innocuous children's songs,
through to a range of aversive codes that owe their origins to a type of peasant
knowledge rooted in the everyday magic of past traditions.
113
The dangers of such
failed efforts at censorship, conscious or habitual, are that they not only make the
authority involved look ludicrous, but that the banned knowledge becomes more
rather than less attractive to active sub-communities. Even a dominant, hegemonic
discourse implies a second voice, and 'remains locked into a dialogue with the
discourse it has suppressed'.
114
If some of these counter-traditions become explicit, and even integrated into later
periods of public culture, there is much that can still be learned by addressing those
that have remained secondary or suppressed. Furthermore, the sidelining and
50Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, SeptemberDecember 2010, pp.37-58. Copyright © 2010 R. James Ferguson
oppression of divergent viewpoints in the name of 'realism', 'pragmatism' (in reality
the crudest sort of 'common sense' mobilised in support of self interest,)
115
and 'right'
(narrowly based to exclude the rights of others) remains a vital issue in the 21
st
century (just as it was for Sparta and Athens during the disasters of the Peloponnesian
War). Some two thousand, four hundred years ago Thucydides explored the
dangerous way that right, might, self-interest and delusion subverted public judgment
during periods of conflict.
116
Today the danger is not so much that we are stultified by
a dominant tradition, nor that we have lost options, but that we no longer understand
nor feel a need for a critical approach to the diverse traditions that we feel free to
appropriate at will. In this sense, we unconsciously accept the current stage of
historical conditioning without engaging in deep exploration of the traditions that
meet within us. This conditioning implies that information is all we need to have, and
suggests that all information and information channels are equal. This ready access to
rich data sources parades itself as open engagement and general tolerance. This
shallow eclecticism is one of the basic moves of an elective post-modernism.
However, a false cosmopolitanism generates risks almost as great as that of a rabid
nationalism or shallow globalism.
117
In so far as such choices are pre-consciously
conditioned, such values become removed from rational critique and thereby open to
external manipulation. Far from being untouched by tradition, we have become its
objects in an uncontrolled experiment in knowledge that has little in the way of
conscious human guidance. In part an unconsciously directed wish-fulfilment, the
outcome is sometimes read as 'destiny'.
118
A semiotic reading of the signs cast on the
shore of global turbulence suggests a future that is both utopian and daemonic:
conflict, violence, narrow assertion, destruction and death all lead, ironically, to a
technological heaven in which the privileged few survive in a self-satisfied haven.
The division between those excluded or included in heaven or hell depends on
whether or not they adopt an unreconstructed set of assumed values that assure
economic, political and technological dominance. Those in the Western technological
haven, the 'zone of peace',
119
watch (via television and cable) those subject to war,
starvation, and disease, including the poor and dislocated at the bottom of their own
societies. An emerging mythology insists that democratic, middle-class consumers
who are somehow ‘good’ will inherit the earth. Such misreadings of Western and
Christian traditions, combined with mis-predictions of the emerging global system,
are dangerous in the extreme in that they colonise both decision-making processes
directed towards the future,
120
as well as form the basis for simplistic political
decisions in the use of force against those who carry messages deemed worthy of
suppression. As such, it is no surprise that the outcome in the twenty-first century has
been a flawed modernisation and turbulent globalisation now challenged by those
once excluded.
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