‘the frontier’: a key (maybe) or perhaps a momentary memoir
As I have said elsewhere, and perhaps here in an earlier post, the writing is the medium of exploration. Since I’m finally on break from a 45 year process, concluding in 15 years of more or less uninterrupted work, I’ve been relaxing by playing with some of the loose pieces left over from the development and documentation of my philosophy. ‘The frontier’ is such a piece. It fascinates me to find that this writing, relatively casual and effortless in terms of the active impulse, nevertheless still insists in moving through complex frames and engaging in developmental, if not creative ideas.
We live in an era that abhors speculation, at least in its public presentation. But I think that speculation is a necessary human intellectual function. In fact, I think I should say that we live in an era that is starved for speculation. Not only on the net, but everywhere – not only in academe, but wherever I transact with fellow students – I find all of the insistent signs of this covert desire.
But of course we live in an era of ‘fact’. In terms of ‘history’, the corollary of fact is ‘revisionism’, which I suppose should be resolved to that ambivalent term I used in ‘the frontier’, namely ‘reductionism’. Hopefully, the word is far enough away from its peculiar place in the critical theories of the 40’s so that we can restore it to its radical values. The OED suggests the word had an equally weird and specific intellectual spin at the end of the 19th century – something to do with housing. The 40’s valence was a critical approach suggesting that reducing the world to a discrete series or array of ‘facts’ somehow destroys a basic element in the mix – a sign of the flipover that has occurred between then and now. Now, of course, the preeminence of ‘the critical’ means that every discrete fact has to be absolutely verifiable, or the whole thesis, however small and narrow, and however independent of the cited ‘fact’, can be thrown out the window.
I suspect that nowadays, whoever suggested this meaning for ‘reductionism’ would presently be pickled in critical venom. And I think the key is envy – speculation envy, to coin a phrase. If you can’t speculate, I can’t speculate. So if you make the least speculation, I’m going to attack it on basic principle.
The problem with ‘fact’ is, first of all, that there is no such thing. Nothing gets to be a ‘fact’ without being a thought first of all. And the rules of thought are not logic. The rules of thought are the conditions of thinking, which are highly irrational. A ‘fact’ cannot come into being without both an interpretive framework and an act of interpretation. Both context and particularity are entirely governed by a structure which has little or nothing to do with the actualities or contexts of the ‘fact’ itself, even if we are talking about a nerve ending in the brain. By the time we get to that nerve ending in the brain we are drowning in interpretive structures that have to do with perception and interpretation – but perceptions and interpretations entirely independent of the ‘objective’ interpretations of the nervous system or the particular series of distinctions that allow us to refer to ‘a nerve ending in the brain’
History is even more interesting. The problem with history is that we either have almost no facts, or we have a global glut of fact. Historians – particularly today, in their ‘professionalism’ – don’t want to turn around and look at the nature of fact as a function of consciousness, much less how the fact behaves when subjected to the process of historical interpretation. But if we have few facts, we have to work each fact to the inferential extreme. That is, we have to draw out the maximum of information from each fact. Now let us not dare to call this speculation, because, of course, we are professional historians. But the problem here is that, if we are going to draw valid inferences, we have to assume that the given fact is somehow absolute, that it is not in itself accidental or anomalous. No statistician would allow us to draw some of the kinds of inferences that historians regularly draw concerning given facts, in eras governed by the paucity of fact. They would demand a larger sample. But the historian tends to treat each fact as absolute, draw inferences from it, and summate the inferences from a number of such isolated facts. Inevitably, the aggregating inferences begin to mirror the historian’s mindset, and not the era under study.
On the other hand, the problem when we have a global glut of fact – when we have a more or less fully documented culture – is that the nature of the approach, whether general or narrow, brings the prepossessions of the historian to bear on the material. Presumably the legitimate historian has immersed him or herself in the material. But this still does not preclude the prepossession as the natural origin of the interpretive process.
All history is necessarily contemporary myth. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can restore history to its place among the arts. A ‘scientific’ history is largely meaningless. We can and should apply the fruits of scientific ‘technology’, in terms of research, to the operations of history. A certain ‘revisionism’ is appropriate. But when we arrive at a moment, such as now, when ‘revisionism’ simply destroys and precludes any generalization, history becomes literally valueless. The ‘facts’ become so particular they lack any relevance to the present. To use a cheap derivation, there is no ‘story’ in history. If this is what history is, it is not only irrelevant, it is not even a legitimate ‘field’.
In the process of focusing on this particular piece, I have come to realize that the frontier between known and unknown has always been the seductive pivot of my consciousness. The unknown is not ‘chaos’ but ‘the other’. The known is inherently intimate and coherent by nature, if only as knowledge. I don’t need to go through the range of topics that I have dealt with in terms of unknown and known, since adolescence, although these are now turning about in my present memory. But the actuality of the human frontier, the array of specific history touched on in ‘the frontier’, attached themselves almost spontaneously in the course of my studies. It began specifically more than 40 years ago, when I encountered Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis. I was studying American culture, something not particularly in the curriculum at the school I was attending – ‘American studies’, I was told, was commonly a degree for city planners. But what I recognized immediately, from Turner’s thesis was not how the frontier mentality itself was reflected in ‘the American character’, but how the economic surges at the frontier were inevitably followed by a kind of ‘ruffianization’ of the established culture or civilization to the east. A relatively high culture produced both the ferment and the written documents of the Revolution. But this early colonial ‘civilization’ broke down with the trans-Appalachian breakthrough and the beginnings of industrialism in this country. The stabilization of the Midwest and the generalization of the first wave of industrialism flowed into a second flowering, again more or less inundated by the ‘gilded age’, the face of a second powerful wave of industrialization and frontier expansion.
This, of course, is a simplification of the historical forces at work at those points, but I think the basic or underlying thesis is correct. That is, I think a cultural correlation can be established, although the history teachers at the school I was attending, at the time I formulated this thesis, seemed to shudder visibly at the word ‘culture’. And since then, watching the patterns of behavior at the frontier, in the peculiarly cyclical peregrinations of my casual ‘research’, the thesis has tended to deepen and attach itself, as in the case of medieval Europe, in unexpected places. The European dimension of the theory developed out of a text I encountered on the Hanseatic League, a medieval trading league in the Baltic, where I discovered that the league was financing colonization to the north and east as late as (if my memory serves me) the 14th century. While what the league was establishing were commercial communities in areas that were already thinly populated, the fact pointed to frontier conditions. From there it was a short leap through history to recognize the frontier conditions that had prevailed throughout most of western Europe up to and including the time of the Hansa. The fact that we can trace a wide series of hegemonic polities, whether of Germanic tribes at the time of Caesar or the dominions of ‘counts’ and ‘dukes’ in the development of France, what we are viewing in the background is the gradual ‘development’ of a raw land or ‘wilderness’. The early medieval English kings simply apportioned northern lands to their chosen retainers, leaving it to them to subdue the indigenous ‘barbarians’. Some of these areas, of course, had already appeared in history under the kingdom of the Saxons. Obviously, the visible historical polities still represented largely ‘undeveloped’ country.
But what I am doing here is reflecting on my piece on ‘the frontier’ – my previous post – and not simply on the frontier thesis. Until I wrote ‘the frontier’, it had never occurred to me to assign the spirituality to the people and not the church, the hierarchy or the pope. Normally, I am working from memory and not from texts at hand, but I have to acknowledge doing some focused reading as I wrote ‘the frontier’. And what became obvious is that the church had gone through the same ‘ruffianization’ as the political order, that the resurgence of the frontier had undermined the church in every dimension except name, that the ultimate emergent hegemony of the church paralleled and fed out from the emergent hegemonies of the European nation states.
The issue is a question, of course. The admirers of Tibet speak of the fact that, while it was still independent, one-sixth of the Tibetan population embraced monasticism and monastic discipline. But the communists pointed to the fact that something like one-third of the arable ground in Tibet had fallen into the possession of the Buddhist ‘church’, through a long history of bequests. Neither is a preclusive fact. Undoubtedly, hunger can be a powerful inducement to religion, where the church controls the arable ground. But this does not obviate the religious and spiritual force that brought the wealth into the church. Medieval Europe was deeply religious. As far as I know, we have yet to do a proper study of the development of spirituality as a relatively ‘secular’ pursuit, that is, as something that also developed outside the purview of the church. We have not done a proper study of the vitality of the purely spiritual within the frame of the church, so the spiritual dimensions of the relatively secular culture remain remote from us. When we confront the classics from the secular literature of the European Middle Ages, we tend to take a ho-hum attitude toward the religious content, as if it were a uniform given to be ignored. But even where the authors lack depth of spiritual insight, the nature of the focus itself should be an imperative topic in research. The scientism and pseudo-scientific philosophies that dominate our culture are rarely central in our ‘secular’ literature. They generally form a peripheral interest, at best. We only see their influence in terms of the erroneous identification of technique as intelligence in the arts.
What fascinates me about the medieval is the confluence and the transition. Writing ‘the frontier’ let me turn it around and look into the core. The High Middle Ages embody a unifying principle that is tantamount to the political, but clearly not explicitly political. The fact that the emergence of the political supremacy of the papacy spelled the end of the unity tells me the unity was not a function specifically of the church. It was, quite literally, a cultural unity. The historians can cavil that this unity was not accessible to the ‘average person’, but I think we are not in a position to say that. Were the High Middle Ages ‘less educated’ than any other given era? How would we measure that? Certainly, the period is filled with manifest genius in terms of thought and art. If the art and thought are alien to us, it is perhaps because we have gone out of our way to alienate them from ourselves, to define their principles as intrinsically ‘other’ than the principles of our own art and thought. One assumes that by the High Middle Ages, the concern for knowledge and aesthetics was as powerful as it was at the height of the Renaissance. In fact, one grades into the other. This, and not the apparent nature of the institutions, is the real test. Where the culture values the ideal, the way exists, whatever the appearances.
What we have in the High Middle Ages, for all of the residual savagery underneath, is a sustained moment of cogent cultural value. If we could step out of our historical preconceptions, we would notice that not only is the late medieval as creative in its way as the Renaissance, they are a continuity of creativity and cultural development. All that changes, with the onset of the Renaissance, is the political superstructure and an emergent ‘humanism’, but the humanism is an evolutionary extension and natural outcome of what precedes it. The late medieval artists begin from a Byzantine formalism or abstraction. But by the High Middle Ages they are handling it in entirely unique and finally highly individualistic ways. The evolution out from the Renaissance produces a countering mindset that eventually identifies ‘church’ and ‘medieval’ as being essentially synonymous, and if not ‘the enemy’, at least ‘the adversary’. Through much revisionism, we still preserve the outlines of this arbitrary dualism.
But the medieval itself, in its concluding cogency as the High Middle Ages, was both a unity and a frontier in itself. I suppose any era can be treated historically as ‘a frontier’, even when there appears to be relative stability. History is always in transition. I blame the pope more or less explicitly for the end of the medieval unity at that point because it was papal insistence on the codification of doctrine that brought the truly creative intellectual period of scholarship and theology to a close. And the rigidity rapidly produced aridity in the schools, or rather reduced the schools to an aridity already present but hitherto overmatched by creative development. However, we can also attribute the end of the High Middle Ages to the emergence of the nation states, which, as I have already suggested, had a vested interest in promoting the Renaissance as an intellectual and aesthetic counterweight to the church.
But when we can isolate the medieval while retaining its connectedness to what precedes and what follows, we see a period of cultural unity produced solely and essentially by a desire for culture, a desire grounded explicitly in spiritual hunger. This hunger found its expression in the living narrative of the spiritual realizations of artists and intellectuals, both inside and outside the ostensibly ‘spiritual’ institution. Secular recitations of ‘the quest’ not uncommonly embodied a religious or spiritual understanding as profound as the most creative cores of the ‘summa’ produced by the scholars. The unity is not simply the function of ‘Latin’ culture. The secular expression of the spiritual ideal pervades the common dialects as well as the language of the intellectual collective. And a careful reading will show exactly how creative that expression was, both within and outside the institution.
While the society as a whole had reached that moment of ‘maturity’ that allows for such creative development, the society itself was still in radical transition politically. That is, the economics of the radical frontier between the raw forest (commonly with its tribal peoples) and urban culture had fully tipped toward the urban on a ‘developed’ base. But political consolidation, as represented by a politically hegemonic church and emergent nation states was nascent or just appearing. Politically, the situation was still anarchic, even though boundaries and polities were relatively distinct. In other words, what this points to is the independent power of ‘culture’ itself, when grounded in the spiritual hunger of a peoples for whom the religious symbolism and interpretation of the hour provides a legitimate experiential base. A certain economic situation is required. But politics, it would appear, are largely irrelevant.
I am not advocating an urban culture against a tribal. The point is, the world is now urban. Where tribal culture persists, it is self-destructing through the desires of the individual tribal members. We cannot counteract cheap goods against the labor intensive indigenous crafts. At the same time, the fact that the world is now largely urban is a first time situation. And it will require that we pass from the expansionist economics of the old frontier mentality – a mentality still ingrained historically in the present mechanisms for credit – to an era of balanced economy, that is, if we don’t poison ourselves first, largely as a consequence of inertial expansionists modes.
We are presently at that new frontier, a frontier that requires a return of tribal consciousness within the context of urban culture. What is needed is a living spiritual understanding, something that converts our present cultural orientation into a legitimate ground for spiritual awakening and experience. Much of what I have been doing in this blog is explore the possible ground for such an understanding.
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