Rituals of Change as Used on You

How Environments Behind Propaganda and Ideology Transform The World

Developmental Psychology

Most of my research and writing in 2023 went into fashioning my milestone piece on computer interfaces and Jean Piaget, Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad-Faith Adversary. I was able to pull together years of stuff I had been reading in that one around the core of kids and microcomputers—the original subject of Silicon & Charybdis in 2018.

Having gotten that far, I took the lead from some online-buzz regarding Robert Kegan’s work and dove into developmental psychology post-Piaget.

All this developmental psychology, which is about how children grow into responsible adults, lead to my recent piece on how we change by alternations of individuation and alienation. From collective identification in one peer group, Kegan detailed in 1982, we then pull away and become more free-thinking and individual, then slowly finding a more mature peer group to become-within in a more robust relation.

I saw an immediate correlation in developmental psychology with McLuhan’s media ecology, albeit a complementary one. Like a tunnel being bored from both ends at the same time, or an infant and a loving parent striving to meet each others minds, the two fields projected a meeting from radically opposing origins.

Tribal Anthropology

For the past few weeks, in preperation to continue my book review of The Anxious Generation, I’ve been reading an early sociologist Haidt cites, Arnold van Gennep, and surrouding literature in that field. You saw some of that yesterday.

Lo and behold, Van Gennep’s signature concept expounded in 1909, Rites of Passage, is all about leaving one’s tribe and then returning in a new way! It’s the exact same phenomenon as I found most salient in developmental psychology.

And furthermore, it’s the premise of The Hero’s Journey, the archetypal form underlying Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Barbie Movie, every superhero origin story, and the content of every scriptwriting/creative writing course based around “character development” that money can buy. So, virtually, all narrative fiction this century and last. Everything.

And all these hero’s journeys are, as I told you early May, what I had to outwit to avoid the overwhelming sensation of being or becoming a magical fictional character. Or of undergoing a religious experience.

Oldest Trick in the Book

McLuhan, born in 1911, had been watching the modern world take shape throughout his life. And the intention of his media ecology was very explicitly, I believe, to facilitate sane navigation of the maelstrom of magical, transformative rituals in which mass-media had been drowning the world since the Gutenberg’s sixteenth-century printing press.

It is the power-dynamics of conscious, human-shaping of environmental forces which is the most insidious thing to reason about. Who is trying to control me? Shape me? Who is shaping others? This paranoia was defining for my psychosis throughout it’s course. These questions, large at first for McLuhan, largely fell away from his public writing as he struck at solutions with his media ecology.

McLuhan didn’t need to actually read or see the fruits of Joseph Cambell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces to know what he was up against. He already had the rich 19th century literature on the bildungsroman genre, or coming-of-age novel, which developed from Goethe’s 1796 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Quite frankly, human development has been understood since forever, and it’s a bloody cosmic joke that nobody seems to understand that.

The symbolism was a huge tip-off at the beginning of the modern mass-media age, as artists en masse began playing with this most recent rediscovery of fire. I mean, come on. “Hollywood?”

The wheel and the point, the rose and the yew tree, fur and faeces, have their location in a pre-Christian symbolism. At least Eliot has made a more consistent effort to lend a Christian air to these themes. Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis mining the same vein have come up with more starkly pagan fare. Modern anthropology has brought the ancient pagan lore to the surface today to a degree unexampled since Constantine. and the arts have appropriated this pagan matter with astonishing results.—Marshall McLuhan, Paganism on Tip-toe, 1955

The sacred elements of a ritual are, in the post-modern world, a MacGuffin at this point. Yew tree or lightsabre, it doesn’t matter—except indicate our technologically-facilitated ability to create entire universes for fictional origins of self-creation can sever entire generations from grounding in any real human past.

At least for a while.

All you’d need to do is arrest further development. Grow up early, but grow up no further than this.

Go Native to Get Out?

Medieval monks were generally discouraged or barred from reading Ovid or Virgil or Homer or the Socratic philosophers until they had been sufficiently grounded in scriptural study to prevent being carried away into paganism. St. Thomas earned his sainthood, in large part, by finding a way to synthesize Aristotle into Catholicism sufficiently enough to stop the newly-translated Socaratic works flooding Europe from competing against Catholicism.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the story about two men. Mr. Kurtz was the most charismatic member of some theosophic cult back in Britain. When he got into the ivory trade, he was the best in the business because wherever he went up the Congo river, he founded a cult among the locals that required them to give him all the ivory they could possibly find. Marlowe, the book’s narrator, isn’t the sort of polished charismatic Kurtz is. Marlowe is fascinating because of his stories, his experiences, his sensitive observance and deep heart. He’s a sailor, and he hasn’t a home. What he does have, however, is a boat, and all the knowledge to fix it. He’s a technician, he’s handy.

Everywhere Kurtz goes is made his place. He is granted positions. Those positions mostly sit empty and deserted owing his restless hunt for newer pastures. He has a fiancé back home and a warrior queen in Africa’s heartland.

Marlowe is invisible. But useful—essential, actually. Get’s the job done every time, come hell or high water. Men like Kurtz can’t drive or fix their own boats, let alone traverse a river like the Congo.

And so, in Heart of Darkness, I see two contrasting poles of relation to environment. Kurtz is completely socialized, and rips out the hearts of everyone he abandons. He was nowhere because he belonged everywhere. He always went native as a superficial matter of play. And he never seperated in a healthy manner. And was thus was never understood by those who loved him. “The horror.”

And for all the horrors he’s seen, the reader gets the sense that Marlowe will be okay—but he’ll never settle down either. And Marlowe, the sailor, is a slim and nimble as the sailing ships he usually steers. A tug-boat was strange choice for him, and the weight he carried nearly crushed his soul. Luckily, he had holes to mend, plates to weld, rivets to fasten, boilers to stoke. And so Marlowe not only pulled through but, in a quiet time, with the right audiance, he could actually tell his story. And not only his, but Kurtz’s too.

I myself am not a de-facto sociable guy. When you learn computers properly at a young age, it very quickly dawns on you just how wrongly everyone else speaks about them, understand them, and uses them. I’m also thirty-five, old enough to have seen how the present tech-industry is built out of all the misconceptions and mistakes which I was already weary of as a kid. Marlowe keeping his head down at his boat is in complete control of the scene. He is actually manipulating the material world—the entire voyage depends on him. Kurtz keeps the spectacle going. His charisma gives everyone reasons to go anywhere. To go get ivory. To send rescue parties. But nothing goes without Marlowe—and nobody but fellow sailors ever mistake Marlowe for being one of their own.

The domains into which Van Gennep’s rites of passage and developmental psychology’s evoloving self are meant to grow out of and grow into are social. They involve relations with other people. To become an adult, then, is to make good social relations with the best technicians and experts who do things for you. Hire a coder, find a plumber, contract an accountant. It’s always a vicarous world—and then some asshole comes along and disrupts things with a new invention.

Social involvement is symbolic. In McLuhan’s jargon, it’s acoustical. It’s a domain of magic. Say the write thing, make the best advertisement, give people the feelings of involvement or closure or healing or fear you desire, and it is made to be so. What anthropology divided up into sacred and profane realms, McLuhan divided up into sensory biases—the ratios of our body’s equilibration into relation with the material environment.

Marlowe is grounded because he’s in his boat. He loves his boat when he first rescues it from the river-bed into which it was sunk. He sleeps in it as he mends it. He feels the bed of the river beneath it, through it. He’s the only one grounded in an endless maze of dangerous wilderness and hostile natives. He is the expert on hire. Everyone else has a social relation to the boat—and thus their way to Kurtz, or their way out of this damn jungle—via Marlowe.

Kurtz’ magic is theosophy. Marlowe’s is technology. Guess who’s the more powerful, and what that means for the depth psychology of dark hearts.

Apocalypse Now?

Power Dynamics and Technological Envelopes

McLuhan took great umbridge at anthropology’s division between the sacred and the profane dimensions of life in The Gutenberg Galaxy. This prefigures the feminist critique of developmental psychology, typified by Carol Gilligan.