POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY



               THE ARCHEOLOGY OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
               Deep Structures and Surface Acts of Knowing


                           T. R. Young


                    The Red Feather Institute

                               for

                  Advanced Studies in Sociology



                         August 27, 1990
                          May 11, 1991

_______________
Circulated as part of the Transforming Sociology Series of the
Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology, 8085
Essex, Weidman, Mi., 48893.  Ph. 517 644 5176.

                      POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY



  THE ARCHEOLOGY OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE

     And The Drama of Human Understanding


INTRODUCTION   The title of this essay comes, of course, from a
book by Michel Foucault.  While Foucault was interested in the
ways language usage and political economy shaped the knowledge
process as they affected asylums and prisons, I am interested in
a different archeology; that of the larger orientation of the
knowledge process: its manifold missions and methods; its agents
and repositories and its hierarchies of knowledge across the vast
sweep of human history.  I am particularly interested in the
ontologies which lay at the heart of the knowledge process and
the epistemologies which are used to reveal that beating heart of
that history.  Finally, I am interested in the social psychology
after which each of the three ways of thinking strive; what
manner of human being do each given knowledge process create?

     Foucault had done some of his archeological work when he
wrote about Madness and Civilization (1961/1988).  In that work,
he located the use of the concept of madness in its immediate
socio-economic history.  Madness was an explicit control
mechanism involving a "...whole set of relations between
hospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures of
social exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms of
industrial labor and bourgeois morality, in short a whole group
of relations..." that characterized the use of madness as a
scientific and legal practice (Foucault: 1972:179).

     There is now a vast drama playing itself out in the human
quest for understanding.  Modern science is under assault on the
one side by premodern affirmations of inspiration and revelation
as the true pathway to knowledge and, on the other side, by
postmodern insistence that all science is a poetics and a
politics.  In our personal lives, we can catch occasional
fragments and events of that drama; we daily see the effort by
some to teach their children about divine creation and healing by
faith.  The Chronicle of Higher Education carries reports of the
intense struggles in academia to decenter Greek, Roman and
European standards, ethics, values, principles and paradigms. 
Those who are well read can catch rough outline of its fragile
and fractal shape.  Most of us can sometimes sense direction and
results of the knowledge process if we look closely at a lot of
work done by a lot of people over a lot of years.  The point of
this essay is to offer one reading of the drama of human
understanding as I have come to comprehend it.

THE EPOCHS OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE   I have, as arbitrarily as have
others, used a tripartite scheme with which to catalog and
organize the unfolding drama of human knowledge.  There is first
the Pre-modern age.  Its dramatic moments center around the
Revelation of Divine Plan while its method of discovery is
through Ecstacy.  Each effort in premodern efforts to make
connection with the ineffable and infinite requires the use of
all the accouterments of drama:  action, plot, personage,
suspense, danger and delivery from evil.

     Every time a shaman or a priest confronts the mysterious
forces of the other world, the outcome is uncertain.  Each time
one ventures into the dreamworld, there is no certainty that one
will return.  Each time such plays are staged, the outcome must
await events.  The visit of the dead in our dreams force us to
move outside of ordinary time and ordinary causality.  The voices
of our Gods we hear in trance or in sleep move us to tell others
of the word of God and to follow that word.  The teachings of our
gods forces us toward the Drama of the Holy, a drama which traces
its origins in Darit, sanskrit for good work.

     The second epoch styled itself the 'modern' era; its central
mission is the discovery of Natural and Social Law through
empirical study.  The dramas of discovery in modern science are
equally momentous.  The discovery that stars returned each year
in mathematical precision would open the eyes of an idiot.  The
discovery that a given glaze fired at a given temperature would
take the breath away at the beauty of its depth.  The invention
of dynamite gave one power equal to that of the gods of thunder
and lightening.  Awareness of the effects of vaccine on smallpox
or pasteurization on wine brought peak experiences to Pasteur.  

     The dramas in modern scientific knowledge are still
unfolding.  Whoever has read of the Double Helix or of The Voyage
of the Beagle; whoever has shared moments of discovery with the
monk Mendel or read the essays of Lewis Thomas can appreciate the
awe and wonder that comes with scientific discovery.  One who is
religious cannot fail to grasp the elegance and complexity of the
world their god created.  As with premodern ways of thinking,
there are infinitely more dramas to savor and to share which
await in the drama of scientific enquiry.

     The third but scarcely last epoch, one coming to birth in a
slow and troubled process, is called the postmodern.  Among its
missions for knowledge and human understanding is the
Constitution of Social Reality by human beings themselves in
concert with some more or less inclusive collectivity.  The
thought is that those who participate in the construction of
their own life worlds best know them; that construction and
reconstruction is the best pathway to knowledge.  For those who
look at prior realities, deconstruction is a useful route to
human knowledge; indeed this essay is a deconstruction of the
knowledge process as it twists and turns through history.

     The postmodern has many expressions; some are oriented to
the despoilation and exploitation of nature and society while
some are oriented to the drama of the Holy and New Age religion. 
The postmodern is as fragmented, shattering, contradictory,
intransigent, decentering and variable as are the 3000 to 4000
distinct social life worlds found in history.  For some, the
postmodern is a social formation in which appearence, image,
simulacra, and sign are subordinated to fraud, management, and
control.  The postmodern condition is seen to be, part and
parcel, hostile to the human project.

     The reading here is much more encouraging.  I see
postmodernism as an effort to decenter natural and divine law; to
reduce the use of laws, principles, standards, and norms in
support of those now privileged by wealth, ethnicity, gender or
power stratifications.  I see how postmodern sensibility could be
oriented to a democratic, eqalitarian, creative and compassionate
sharing of the many constructions and deconstructions essential
to the knowledge process.

ORIGINS OF EACH EPOCH    Both modernists and pre-modernists view
the knowledge process as given.  Postmodern sensibility locates
all knowledge processes in the larger political economy and
historical struggles in which art, religion, music, literature,
poetry and science itself are found.  The archeology of human
knowledge offered here re-inserts both mission and method in its
larger history.  Again, the reading below is but one of any
number of possible readings of the archeology of knowledge.  It
is oriented to a decentering and recentering of the knowledge
process; decentering it from the absolute and from exclusivity in
truthful statements in the first instance and recentering it
toward democratic praxis and purpose in the second.

     The premodern knowledge process was informed by manifold
efforts to deal with the forces of nature; to interpret the facts
of personal and collective experience of that which is not
directly observable: dreams, cycles of the season, long term
change and to deal with recurrent problems.  Premodern knowledge
processes as social institutions arise in the dim recesses of
history in the effort of some peoples to live in harmony with
each other and with the ecology upon which all life depends.

     Other peoples sought the wisdom and favor of the gods in
pursuit of less noble goals; the conquest or the ravaging of
other societies for profit or for sport.  For them, the point of
the knowledge process was to ascertain favorable times to raid
neighboring villages; to exact revenge for real and imagined
injury; to terrorize or to immobilize rebellion and resistance by
women, slaves, and serfs; to build monuments to themselves or to
recreate a political economy in which wealth was produced and
accumulated at the top of social hierarchy.  For many long
centuries, the hierarchies were religious hierarchies in places
as diffuse as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mexico, Nigeria and China.

     The modern epoch was born along with the newly emerging
commodity and industrial capitalism that replaced feudality,
slavery and primitive communalism as modes of production.  In the
effort to explore, subdue, and to use the physical and social
resources of this world, the age of science was born.

     Some place the birth of the modern era with an essay by
Bacon on The Advancement of Learning; a work which inspired
Shakespeare to write The Tempest in which play Prospero is
contrasted with Caliban; the former a man who embodies the modern
spirit and the later, 'a freckled whelp,' not honored with a
human shape.  Others would chose Thomas More whose Utopia was a
savage attack on superstition and in praise of Reason.  Rabelais
wrote Gargantua and  Pantagruel in the effort to encourage men
and women to reach their potential as humans while Erasmus,
writing in Praise of Folly, ridicules religious ideas and
practices as hostile to the human condition.  It is said that
Luther hatched the egg laid by Erasmus and Luther was, most
certainly important to the age of reason.  His protestations
helped refocus the knowledge process by asserting that this world
was part of the divine and that work inside and stewardship of
this world was a holy calling.  Science and the scientific method
became a holy calling; whoever looked for God could find Him in
all the parts and processes of flowers, trees, wrens, and weasels
of this world.

     However, it was the successes of Copernicus, Galileo and
Newton to describe and explain physical events and processes not
directly observable that truly opened up the modern era. 
Galileo, Newton and Copernicus were followed by the great
geniuses of modern physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology as
they unravelled the secrets of nature.  Much of modern science
was forged in the effort to place the human upon equal standing
with the gods as a knowing and acting agent.  Reformation,
renaissance, humanism and science all dwell in the same
epistemological realm.

     But the Reformation and the Renaissance rested upon pyramids
of power and wealth that were built into the feudal empires of
Europe and the near East.  Great empires in league with great
religious traditions clashed and heaved for 700 years in the
middle ages, from the time of the moslem expansion to the final
consolidation of the Christian Empire centered at Rome in the
14th century.  Out of the drama of war and religion came great
contributions to the knowledge process both in terms of content
and technology.  The printing press was of equal importance to
calculus in the success of Newtonian physics.

     Capitalism arose to challenge feudalism and primitive
communal arrangements.  Its virtue was that it rewarded
improvements in navigation, metallurgy, ballistics, surveying,
weaving, and agriculture handsomely.  To improve mining, milling,
shipping, and manufacturing demanded a special pathway to
knowledge.  It is called science as if the quest for precise and
complete laws were the end all of the knowledge process.

     Together, Bacon, Erasmus, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo and
capitalism gave us modern science.  What we did with it was, on
the whole, most congenial to the human project.  While there
remains as much and more to do; while there is as much and more
to know; while there are these and other ways of knowing, still
the modern epoch has been glorious.

     Postmodernism had dramatic moments of its own in its quest
for quite a different knowing and known.  It arose out of the
struggles of women, workers, colonial subjects and minority
groups to create social relations more congenial to their
purposes and practices.  In the refusal of people to take neither
God, Master, Boss, Husband or Science as the final Authority on
social truth, postmodernism insinuated itself into the knowledge
process.  In the art, music, theater, poetry and literature of
social critics and now in the ontology of Chaos theory,
postmodern thought offers dramatic contrast to its predecessors
and its competitors.

     If one is a mathematician, one tends to stress the work of
Poincare who found it impossible to predict the dynamics of three
bodied systems.  Some point to the work of Kurt Godel who proved
it impossible to axiomatize any formal system completely.  Some
make much of Heisenberg and his indeterminacy principle.  Even as
I write, string theory and the work of Yoichiro Nambu changes our
view of space, mass and time.  Yet, important as these are as
the mathematical underpinnings of postmodern science, still it is
the raw and bloody struggles of stubborn, uneducated people who
forced open the knowledge process to a rich and multi-centered
ontology.

     There remains much ugliness and uncertainty about postmodern
mentality.  Distaste and repugnance for those who, explicitly or
not, embody one of its many modalities is most understandable. 
Indeed, the negativities of the postmodern deserve whole books;
but it is the overall architecture of the knowledge process which
shapes the present work.  The reader can easily insert self into
the shoes of a fundamentalist Christian or Moslem and gain a
sense of the horror and outrage that such thinking arouses when
there is talk that God is dead.  For them, it means that
everything is profane and there is nothing that can be done about
it.  Meaning, purpose, destiny, and hope of reward or punishment
are lost.

     One can easily understand the anger and fury of an orthodox
scientist who is told that objectivity and the discovery of
universal laws are not possible.  One can imagine the disgust and
aversion such a scientist would experience as s/he is told that
subjectivity and chaos are preferable, more congenial to the
knowledge process than is certainty, control and absolute truth.

     As Yeats said in his great sad Irish voice, speaking on
behalf of all those who see the more negative implications of the
postmodern: things fall apart; the center does not hold; a blood
dimmed tide is let loose and everywhere the ceremony of innocence
is lost.  But, as we shall see, there are possibilities in
postmodern thought that encompass and celebrate both premodern
and modern missions of knowledge.  That celebration takes
surprising forms, however.  Whatever the possibilities and the
problematics of postmodernism, one cannot escape the dramatic
confrontation it poses to current modes of understanding.  If we
are wise, lucky, patient and kind, we might be able to enjoy the
drama played out in a thousand universities, ten thousand books,
and 10 billions lives.  More than that, each of us will find a
role to play if we are not yet dead to learning and to teaching.

     Post-modern thought accepts a plurality of knowledge forms
and a plurality of pathways to each knowledge form.  In critical
theory, for example, there are three major forms of knowledge
useful to a good and decent society:  positive knowledge about
what is; modern science is well equipped to produce this kind of
knowledge.  Survey data using numbering systems to produce
descriptive statistics, summary statistics, and inferential
statistics all help provide positive knowledge about what exists
empirically.  

     While trend data, comparative data and data on the dynamics
of a system are mined by modern scientific methods and must be
part of the knowledge process, hermeneutical knowledge is also
necessary to create shared social life worlds.  Phenomenology,
semiotics, socio-linguistics, dramaturgical analysis, and most
especially, symbolic interactional theory in its many varieties
all constitute tools with which to understand how two or more
people can possibly think alike, feel alike or act alike.

     But positive knowledge about what exists and hermeneutical
knowledge about how social facts are created do not suffice to
the knowledge process.  A society needs to produce emancipatory
knowledge in order to serve the human interest in change and
renewal.  For critical theorists, change and renewal is to be
oriented to praxis; in this form of postmodern science, praxis
entails a delicate, shifting balance between the common good and
autonomy of the acting individual...a shifting balance that fits
very well within the dynamics of deterministic chaos.

     Praxis, as a knowledge process, involves collective
participation in creating social life given that one knows social
reality best if one helps produce it.  If the knowledge process
fits too closely with existing, accepted, institutionalized ways
of thinking, then understanding on the part of the individual
suffers.  If each individual, separately, decides on a thing, the
common good may suffer while the sharedness of knowledge is
diminished.  Given that social life requires such sharedness of
knowledge and given that each situation is unique, then the
balance between society and individual calls for wisdom and
prudence more so than other knowledge processes.  

ONTOLOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROCESS      Central to the more
emancipatory uses of the knowledge process is an understanding of
the missions, methods and repositories of knowledge in each of
the three epochs at hand.  The first point I want to emphasize is
that each epoch has quite a different view of the underlying
ontology to which its efforts to know are addressed.  In the
changing seasons of human reason, there are implicit
understandings of the nature of reality which preshape the
knowledge process and drive it toward one set of conclusions or
another.  

     In this section, I would like to explore, with the reader,
three such ontologies and think about their meaning for missions,
methods and uses of knowledge.  We can begin with premodern
thought.

Premodern Ontologies     There are many premodern peoples who
treat the spirit world as an integral part of this world rather
than separated by some existential gulf.  Parrinder, for example,
reports on the Chenchu of Southern India for whom the various
gods are immediately available and present (1971:35).  For such
people, they themselves are part of the Holy.  The role of
knowledge processes in such a society is to celebrate the
holiness of the universe and the special place that members of
that society have within it.  We will return to this
understanding later in this section when we talk of New Age
religion and its understanding about the ontology of the
universe.

     For those who live in the Christian tradition and all of its
assorted cousins, the world as we live it has two parts.  Such an
understanding is said to be Dualistic.  There is, on the one side
of reality, pure forms located in God's Mind or, alternatively in
the dream world.  In this world, there are only imperfect
approximations of the ideas of God.  The source of the
discrepancy between perfection and actuality is to be found in
human imperfection.  As human beings are fallible creatures; they
cannot understand nor embody the perfection of God or the
ideal.  The point of emancipatory knowledge processes is to
repair that separation by one of two methods both of which
require understanding of the gods and praxis based upon it.  

     Such an assumption requires an epistemology; a pathway to
knowledge.  One such way is to enter into the next world, absorb
the Will of God and return with the good news.  Since the next
world is one of pure spirit, only one's spirit can make the
journey.  This pathway to knowledge requires the discarding of
body and world with the aid of psychogenic practices: deep
trance, psychedelic substances, dancing, chanting, drumming or
fasting.  Pain and pleasure can be used to induce the soul to
leave the body.  Many of the practices the modern world condemns
as vice are, in the first instance, part of the method with which
to secure sure and certain knowledge of the ways of the gods.

Modern Ontologies        Modern science, in many forms, retains
the dualism but recasts it into a different paradigm.  Theory
replaces God as the repository of the ideal.  On the one hand
there is that which really exists; call it noumena.  There is
also that which is perceived and conceptualized; call it
phenomena.  The mission of modern science is to reduce the gap
between what is and what we think we know.  The end point of that
mission is the specification of a grand unified theory that give
prefect understanding of this, the only world.  The method of
knowledge in modern science is the method of successive
approximations involving hypothesis, testing, and reformulation
of theory.

     The postmodern view is that space, time, and most forms of
social reality are human concepts and human constructions.  The
central mission of postmodern analysis is to show the human hand
that shapes thinking about politics, economics, psychology and
physical science itself.  All theories, all principles for
judgment, all standards of excellence are set by humans and
benefit those who define and enforce them.  No one escapes the
intellectual and emotional field of their own culture to find and
describe truth outside its pull.  There is no objective reality
described impartially by value-free, tough-minded scientists who
bring truth to set before the Prince and the Pope.  The method of
the postmodern is to revisit the historical moment in which a
work was produced, reconstruct the social economy and, using
comparative research, document the personal and social issues
which gave honor, respect and esteem to one theory or one novel
over all others.

     Part of the postmodern is a philosophy of knowledge about
what exists and how to know it.  Another part of the postmodern
is a critique and a cry of rage.  The former is called postmodern
science and the latter is called the postmodern condition.  For
many, the postmodern condition is one is which everything is
private, fleeting and deceptive.  Baudrillard describes the world
as hyperreal, an endless stream of simulated images that refer to
other images from other times; copies of copies, ghostly doubles
of nothing but the pulsing images that fill our consciousness
with desire for more of the I and more of the mine.  

     Other postmodern critics see a good deal more substance to
the images produced; for them, such images shape the behavior of
whole industries, whole peoples, whole epochs.  In this critique,
the postmodern is a dramaturgy of the absurd; a sociology of
fraud in which those who have the power and wealth to control the
media use it to project an image in lieu of authentic performance
in the social process.

     Law and order presidents who violate the law help engineer
the postmodern condition.  Advertizing firms which sell the
sizzle and substitute cheap meat help engineer the postmodern
condition.  Ministers who milk unknown others to live in luxury
engineer the postmodern condition.  Universities which use sports
in lieu of quality education also contribute to the postmodern
condition.  For some postmodernists, wherever they look, they see
fraud, deceit, appearance, and mystification.

     Others look at the postmodern and see opportunity and
responsibility for dismantling the ancient structures of race,
class and gender privilege.  They look at political fraud and see
the need for strong democracy.  They look at economic deceit and
see the need for democratic socialism.  They look at war and see
the possibility of peace.  Nothing is fixed or frozen in time;
all can be set right or at least made better in terms that speak
to the human project.  For those still able to believe and to
hope, emancipatory knowledge processes must be fashioned.  The
missions and the methods of human knowledge are thus shook open
and set free from the fixed laws of Nature and God.  Most of what
is offered here is oriented more to emancipatory knowledge than
to the pessimism and nihilism of European scholarship.

     One can appreciate the archeology of human knowledge by a
closer look at the missions, methods and effects of each epoch. 
Recalling that each has a differing idea about how reality is
organized, one can easily appreciate that each has a different
mission for the knowledge process.

MISSIONS OF THE KNOWLEDGE PROCESS       If the world of the
premodern intellectual was split into the visible world of
imperfect humans and the more perfect world of the all-knowing
God or gods, then the mission of the knowledge process in that
cosmology was to reunite the individual with the invisible or to
find out what the gods had in mind for this world.  The one
mission was to work in this world according to the plan of the
spirit world; the second mission was to leave this world for a
better one.

     The first mission entailed the second in that passage to the
next world depended upon praxis in this world.  Praxis itself
required knowledge of the larger plans and purposes of the gods. 
The central dramas of the knowledge process required deep and
continuing contact with the gods.  Rituals, sacrifices, retreats,
tests of purity, tests of faith, tests of favor all entailed
drama that seized attention and suspended disbelief pending the
outcome of the performance.

     By prayer and by mortification of the flesh, one could leave
the temple of the flesh and enter into the temple of the
spiritual.  There one could assimilate the Will of God or the
workings of the gods to one's own problematics.  Upon return to
the physical world, one could bring the message of the gods and
spread the word of God in aid of practical action in this world. 
After a life of faith and devotion, one could depart this world
and gain eternal peace.

     The transformations of purpose from pre-modern to modern
science was equally dramatic as the successes of science unfolded
in the centuries after Newton.  Instead of compliance to the will
of God and/or intercession by the gods, the official purpose of
science was, originally, a quest for evidence of the work and
wisdom of God.  If God were creator; if God were Omnipresence and
Omnipotent, then evidence of the grandeur of God could be found
in the design of flowers and in the algorithms of life.

     God receded as science succeeded.  With science, one
discovered how the world worked; with technology, one could bend
the world to one's own will.  As God became redundant, science
came to argue that science was its own justification; science for
the sake of science.  The true scientist was thought to be
interested in only pure theory; not technical applications or
base motives of greed, fame, or power.  The practical application
of science was held to be a less form of praxis.  Aristotle set
the stage for the stratification of the knowledge process:

          The life of study is superior to the life of action
          since one most closely approaches perfection in the
          study of nature than in the affairs of men.  

     The physical ontology of Newton's universe is, then,
monistic.  There is only one world and that world is a coherently
connected, closed, deterministic universe with no history and no
future; only endless, unchanging cycles and processes which could
be measured, predicted, and, therefore, controlled.  Pierre
Laplace, an 18th Century French mathematician and enthusiast for
the modern view put it thus:

     Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a
     knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the
     momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature
     consists.  If this intelligence were powerful enough to
     submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace
     in a single formula, the movements of the largest bodies in
     the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it nothing
     would be uncertain; the future and the past would equally
     present to his eyes.

     Yet, for many caught by the spirit of the modern world, the
application of theory to human purpose offered a human solution
to the problem of alienation. By means of the acquisition of
knowledge about the objectively existent world, human alienation
could be reduced.  Out of this understanding, secular humanism
arose; as humanism arose, the possibilities for the postmodern
began to emerge.

     As a matter of fact, pride, self advancement, wealth and
competition often play false with claims of objectivity and
impartiality in a dispassionate quest for truth.  But, as
subjective, partisan, secretive and conservative as it was,
capitalist sponsorship of modern science helped reduce the
alienation of human beings from nature and natural processes. 
With its many successes, science helped human agency replace
divine agency and intervention in meeting the problems of
physical survival: food, energy, transport, communication, and
construction became the focus of the new way of knowing.  The
management of social change became a human task.

     The predominant view in the modern world-view came to be
that change was progress and that progress entailed an ever
closer approximation to the perfection of a mechanical, linear
model of nature and society.  Modernist thinkers assumed that the
role of the scientist was to guide society [through its leaders]
through the stages of social evolution in a way that would
minimized conflict and delay.  It was science and theory which
was to guide change rather than prayer and theology.  Scientists
assumed, with confidence and with good reason, that they could do
better than priests to produce the new Jerusalem.

     Postmodern missions of the knowledge process began as a
debunking and as rebellion at the smug, self-serving ideas about
law, religion and morality one society imposed--often by force--
on another.  Thoughtful women rejected male-centered theories and
ideas about gender relations, justice, and morality.  Subjugated
colonial peoples rejected the claims of Europeans to hold
monopoly on religion, politics and economics.  Oppressed
minorities refused to bow and to honor claims of superiority of
their oppressors.  Working class men and women declined to give
over the labor process, the division of profits or exclusivity
over investment to owners, managers, experts, or officials.

     The postmodern mission in its more emancipatory moments
became praxical and multidimensional: first was the relentless
criticism of every privileged form of knowledge to reveal its
human agency and its political agenda.  Second was the gathering
of reliable data on the forms and trends in that privilege.  A
third mission of the knowledge process was to create and to
legitimate alternative ways to organize social life while a
fourth dimension involved a quest for knowledge about how best to
transform those structures of privilege.  Finally, there was a
full circle back to an unrelenting critique of new social forms
on both immanent and transcendent standards.  The postmodern
mission has profound implications for the nature of method:
epistemology and ontology were to be collapsed into praxis.

     The quest in the postmodern epoch is, then, not so much
knowledge about the Will of God nor about the wheeling of stars
in the firmament or about ships at sea but rather knowledge about
self and how one might best fit into the world as it is or as it
could become.  The Punk movement and the Sex Pistols, as is Hard
Rock, is best understood as a metaphysics of resistance and
rejection of certainties and verities most of us accept.  The
Deconstructionism movement in art, science, music and literature
embodies the same metaphysics of resistance and rejection of all
that is privileged; all that is settled; all that is pronounced
as final and given.  

     Postmodern sensibilities accept that modern science could do
much to meet the problems of physical survival but there were
cultural and spiritual problems left unresolved.  Objectified,
neutralized, depoliticized science could not handle problems
which were, essentially, political.  In the postmodern analysis,
the sources of crime, poverty, war, hunger, pollution, disease,
and existential crises were to be found in the great structures
of privilege: racial, gender, class, national and bureaucratic
authority.  

     Liberation theology and New Age religion have, as their
central mission, knowledge about how to live in peace in a
wounded world without making the wounds deeper; maybe even
healing them.  Liberation theology seeks the end of alienation in
this world on a social level while New Age Religion tends to
encourage the individual to make self part of the sacred here and
now.  Much of the environmental movement is informed by an
abiding sense of the trusteeship in which the fate of the world
is, for weal or for woe, dependent upon the present generation. 
All of this resonates with the thinking of those in the premodern
world who see the universe as a unified whole and people as part
of that unified whole.

     In its more pretheoretical moments; in its moments of
existential terror; in its nihilism and its solipsism, the
mission of the knowledge process became self serving advancement
and opportunism.  One discovered as much as one could about
psychology, sociology, anthropology, religion, and politics in
order to use that knowledge for private purpose.  Often this
private purpose contributed to the human project; more often it
subverted human dignity.  It made use of trust, belief, faith,
compassion, honesty, and fellowship.  The ugliest moments of
postmodern life preempt much of its meaning in these days, in
this country, in the political economy of marketing and in the
social philosophy of libertarian freedom.  But that is only part
of the postmodern experience.  Most of it is yet to come.  What
transpires for the future depends upon the methods of knowledge
acquisition used.

THE METHODS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE          Ancient pathways to
knowledge include intuition, revelation, divination by casting
sticks, by interpreting cataclysmic events, by reading cards, by
listening to inner voices, or by reference to holy texts.  Modern
science diminished these as the privileged source of human
knowledge yet the great majority of nonscientific believers
stubbornly retained their faith and their belief in the realm of
the Holy as the locus of truth.  

     These folk methods of knowing, still important to the human
project, produced knowledge systems which were labelled
primitive, pre-modern and viewed as superstition, myth, magic or
mysticism by modern science  Many postmodern analysts tend to
reject both modern and pre-modern ways of understanding.  
However, in a multi-dimensional knowledge process, one would see
these methods as prior to and complementary of the scientific
method rather than precursor or competitor to it.  I return to
the point in a companion volume entitled, The Drama of the Holy.

     Folk methods of knowledge still speak to the human process
and still rely to great extent on the teachings of the Bibles, on
the words of priests, on the visions of prophets, on the response
to prayer and on the interpretation of miraculous events. 
Perhaps 95% of the people now living on the face of the earth
still give more of their attention to such knowledge processes
than to organized science including medicine and most certainly
sociology.

     There are parallel folk methods of knowledge that complement
and compete with the efforts of saints, shaman and priests to
enter the realm of the Holy.  There is astrology which has a wide
readership.  There is gambling and chance still connected to its
original purpose of testing the will of the gods.  There is
alcohol which brings escape as well as drugs still used to make
connection with the unknown.  Holidays, festivals, birthdays,
anniversaries, and christenings still bring people together in
the quest for divine blessing in the realization of the Holy.

     There are morality stories to be found in every song, play,
book, television program, movie, poem and painting.  Most
morality stories invoke divine authority as the guarantor of its
centrality to the human process.  Dance, sculpting, architecture,
urban design and political treaties all have such christian,
muslim, buddhist or hindu moralities and prayers embedded deep
inside them.  

     One cannot diminish sacred missions and methods of doing
knowledge.  Indeed, one should not attempt to put aside folk
methods of knowing; they are too valuable to the human project to
cast aside.  At the very minimum, such methods provide a moment
to stop and consider what one is to do about an important moment
in one's life.  At the very most, such methods of knowing bring
insight, certainty and purpose to the human process.  

     The very irrationality of premodern thought is most helpful
to the knowledge process.  With irrationality comes imagination,
creativity, possibility beyond the possible, discontinuity of
social causality, reversibility of social causality,
transcendence of social causality to entirely new dynamics.  This
transcendent rationality is recaptured in much of what is called
New Age religion. 

Modern Science      For those who claim to be the chief
architects and the agents of the knowledge process in modern
times, i.e., the last four centuries, the central method of a
well designed knowledge process is quite different from folk ways
cum premodern ways of knowing.  With the scientific revolution of
the 16th through the 20th centuries, pathways in the knowledge
process became radically different from pre-modern knowledge
processes.  Rather than contact with the spiritual world, the
'scientific' pathway to knowledge required closer and closer
contact with this world; with atoms, flowers, snails, children,
self and societies.  One had to immerse oneself in things of the
flesh and in the busy, throbbing, messy events of plants,
animals, and human societies.  Empiricism replaced ecstasy as the
privileged pathway to knowledge.  The best empiricism is found,
most modern scientists believe, in the Newton's method of
successive approximations to eternally valid laws everywhere
constant in their expression.

     Newton's epistemology is so firmly entrenched today that it
is called the scientific method as if there were no other pathway
toward knowledge other than the formulation and testing of
hypotheses and the building of general theory.  That method
requires neutrality, objectivity, impersonality, and disdain for
the consequences of the search for truth.  Validation and
falsification of hypothesis and theory are the sole concerns of
the scientist; let fall what may, one seeks the truth.

Postmodern Method   The postmodern pathway to knowledge is active
participation in the reality/creative process.  For some
postmodernists, all one can do is to deconstruct the play, poem,
novel, or scientific theory to show the hidden political agenda
and the neglected cultural bias that shapes it.  As Paula
Rothenberg (1991) put it in her spirited defense of postmodernism
in academia, middle class white eurocentric males teach their own
values and call it 'ethics;' they teach their family form and
call it 'psychology;, they offer their own literary products as
timeless and universal 'classics.'  Those who claim universal
standards and offer absolute truth are frauds who use their power
and their position to police thought.  They impose standards they
only can meet and call it excellence.  They impose truths that
benefit their own life style only and call it science.

     The logic of the postmodern, seeing the human hand in every
truth statement and in every test of human knowledge, in the
construction of all social realities, this logic implies the need
for intersubjective methodologies.  Such methods are
intersubjective on a number of dimensions: in the first instance,
human knowledge helps create the universe it studies.  In the
second instance, human politics shape the knowledge process about
that intersubjectively created universe.  In the third place, all
knowledge requires intersubjective understanding; words, ideas,
theories, and social life worlds cannot exist separately in the
minds of human beings.  Knowing, speaking, thinking and
communicating is a collective, not an individual activity.

     The speaker of a word loses possession of the meaning of a
word in the very act of uttering it in the presence of another. 
The author of a letter, play, book or research report surrenders
authorship of that work in the moment s/he publishes it.  One
cannot be a mother alone, a physician alone, a teacher without
students.  All social realities and the knowledge that produce
and describe them are shared symbolic work.  Heisenberg, in his
Physics and philosophy, put it thus:

          Natural science does not simply describe and explain
          nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and
          ourselves [italics added].

     What Heisenberg says of the natural world, symbolic
interactional theorists say of the social world.  Every self,
every role, every relationship, every social occasion, every
social institution, every socio-cultural formation is the product
of seething, struggling, trying, denying, claiming, acting and
interacting human beings.  Dogs and dolphins do not create
cosmologies; birds and fish do not establish churches or heavens;
insects and elephants do not write books nor do planaria or lions
deconstruct the knowledge process--the ontology we study is as
much our creation as the language and methods we use to uncover
its forms and functions.  We can find the creating process in a
retrieval of the origins of the knowledge process.

     Postmodern understandings of intelligence, morality, and
truth are profoundly unsettling.  Intelligence is a social
product; not something that resides inside the cranium of a
specific person.  Morality is a social process inseparable from
the way social institutions are organized.  Truth is a human
product infinitely variable, infinitely nuanced, and a function
of human activity.  Social facts become real in the consequence
of faith, belief, and performance.  Social facts are always
fractal; they open and close in phase-space much as a cloud of
mayflies over a millpond.  Social facts change as scale of
observation changes.  Social facts change at each iteration of
them.  Social facts transform as social processes bifurcate and
lurch toward new forms.  Social facts create a rich and varied
basin of outcomes far more complex that the simple straight
forward causality undergirding modernist thought.

     If we wish to give a premodern treatment to the knowledge
process, we attribute its ontologies to god and nature; if we
wish to approach the knowledge process from a modernist
perspective, we assume pre-existing realities and try to describe
them as truthfully, honestly, and impartially as possible.  If we
chose to look at the knowledge process from a postmodern vantage
point, we must enquire of the origins of each epoch.  Again, it
is not contradictory to take all three point of view seriously
and to honor the contributions each makes to human understanding-
-at least, not contradictory for postmodernists.


Alienation and the Drama of Human Knowledge  If the mission of
the knowledge process in premodern societies is, broadly
conceived, to gain insight into the plans and purposes of gods,
the practical purpose of the knowledge process of the knowledge
process is to eliminate alienation.  The ways in which alienation
is conceived and solved differ in each epoch.  In general terms,
the premodern view is that misery, suffering, death and other
calamities are inherent in the imperfect world of the immediate.

     Given such an understanding, the solution to alienation
entails departure from this world and transmigration of the soul
to the spirit world.  Alienation is alienation from God or from
the spirit world from whence one came.  Reunification with God
is, in the Christian, and Moslem traditions, the solution to the
problem of human alienation.  In Hindu and Buddhist traditions,
compliance with one's place in life is a step toward a final
reabsorption into the spirit world.  In the Jewish tradition, the
keeping of God's Law is adequate to the solution of human
alienation--the existence of a heaven or a paradise on the one
side or a Hell on the other does not play such a large role.

     The Jewish tradition looked forward to the coming of a
Messiah who would help establish the Kingdom of God on earth. 
Death and passage to heaven or the underworld were not the
central solutions to the problem of alienation.  The possibility
of a kingdom of God on earth evolved as the science and
technology with which to understand and to master the problems of
social life developed.  An important part of the knowledge
process coming out of the Jewish tradition was the role of the
prophet who had to stand against king and priest in critical
protest of sin and corruption.  Such jewish critics have
contributed greatly to the knowledge process from Amos to Marx;
from Durkheim to Derrida.

     Out of the Jewish hope of a heavenly city of God on this
earth, Christianity emerged with its own utopian visions.  For
Christian scientists, the quest for knowledge in this world was a
quest for and homage to God since God had, in his infinite wisdom
created all creatures great and small.  Modern science began as a
companion to religion and ended as its enemy.  

     For the modernist, the solution to alienation came to be the
unification of subjective understanding and objective truth.  In
the vision of human emancipation offered by modern science, if
one could become learned in all the fields of science, one could
be as the Gods.  Corollary to this perfect knowledge was its use
to create the heavenly city.  The  compleat scientist could use
knowledge in practical ways to minimize disease, hunger, crime
and other plagues upon the land.  In this world-view, God
retreated further and further from the everyday affairs of men
and women.

     Yet modern science is, basically, an elitist and
undemocratic way of doing knowledge.  It has a star system with
masses of spectators who are to applaud enthusiastically and to
conform unquestioningly to the findings of natural and social
science.  Lesser persons are to seek out the scientist, put a
problem and take the counsel of the scientist into all domains of
life: childrearing, marriage, production of automobiles, habits
of health, patterns of social policy are, properly, the purview
of science.  Thus is human alienation moderated if not
eliminated.

     The postmodern understanding and solution to alienation is
quite different.  The architecture of the knowledge process is to
be decentered and distributed broadly among the population.  The
star system and its adjunct, the expert advisor recedes along
with god while the collective constitution of truth and knowledge
is put in place.  For the postmodern architect of knowledge,
there can be a multitude of truths which inform a multitude of
social life forms.  The point is not so much as to engineer the
world to eliminate alienation but rather to organize the
knowledge process in such a way as to maximize participation.

     It is a distinctly post-modern idea that alienation is
estrangement from creation of the social relations in which one
must live out one's life.  In the premodern world, it is God who
is the creator; in the modern world, it is the scientist who is
to engineer social relations; in the postmodern world, informed
adults are to fashion their relationship with each other in each
and every domain of life.  There are no God-given or natural
limits to such negotiations.

     The inequalities of power and status are seen to shape and
to pattern such social relations and, in a praxical modality, the
distribution of power must be democratized.  The knowledge
process, in its democratic format, requires what Habermas has
called, happily, undistorted communications.  Prior to and a
requisite of such undistorted communications is a radical
democracy of language and speech that does not privilege any
given policy.  Robert's Rules of Order provides a model for the
dynamics of a fractal geometry of communications (and policy)
which keeps some elements of social life fairly constant while
allowing other elements of social life to vary without
constraint.

Solutions to Alienation  The various solutions to alienation can
be summed up, then as far as the knowledge process is concerned
for each of the three epochs:

1. The Premodern Solution:  Salvation; conformity to God's Plan,
     to Harmony with the Dream-world, acceptance of Karma,
     transcendence of Dharma by renunciation of self and desire
     for things of the flesh: wealth, power and social honor.

2.  The Modern Solution:  Determination of Absolute Truth; An
     emerging Correspondence between subjective understanding and
     objective reality.  The building of General Theory.  The use
     of Prediction in order to verify and the use of cybernetic
     control systems as an aid to planning and management of
     social life by experts.

3.  The Postmodern Solution:  Critical Self-Reflection; Change
     and Renewal in self and society.  Collective control of the
     knowledge process oriented to the creation of truth by true
     action.

Authors, Architects and Agents of Social Knowledge Process  Each
epoch vests responsibility for the knowledge process differently. 
The premodern agent of knowledge is the Holy man or woman, called
variously a Shaman, Priest or Guru.  Whatever the label, that
person is the intermediary between this world and the dream
world.

     The modern world invests primary responsibility for the
production of knowledge in the person of the Scientist, theorist,
technician or engineer all of whom embody the ideal of the
Renaissance Man.

  In the knowledge hierarchy of many pre-modern and modern
thinkers, techne was the province of slaves and women; praxis,
the province of superior men; theory was the province of the
gods.  As humanism began, it was thought that a few men could
become as the gods: Priests, mathematicians, universal scientists
and theoreticians such as Comte, St. Simon, Spencer, Marx, Bacon,
and Einstein although Albert might demur from such accolades, the
others would not.

     The postmodern author of knowledge is equally the artist,
poet, architect or writer.  The active and acting citizen becomes
central to the knowledge process by way of a radical
intersubjective knowledge process that sees human beings creating
their own realities in every changing format.  Scientists and
priests become in the same moment, citizens while citizens become
scientist and prophets.  The self-fulfilling prophecy takes on a
truth value that is a function of the degree to which people
embody the norms they adopt as congenial to the human estate.

Institutional Locus of the Drama of Human Knowledge  The primary
location of the quest for sure and certain knowledge in the
premodern world-view is the temple, church or alter; sacred space
more generally.  One entered a holy place, put aside distractions
and communicated with God through prayer and meditation.  For
some cultures, one left one's people and went on a journey of
discovery to a high place or a secluded place there to open
oneself to the inspiration of God.

     For many peoples, the dance or the feast were places where
sacred truths were embodied.  The practical application of divine
truth was in the realm of the holy and that realm was created out
of time and space by collective worship and communion.  Such
moments of the holy are found in our Thanksgiving feast; our
Christmas pageants; our Easter renewals of faith and in the
simple acts of kindness to strangers.

     The locus of knowledge shifted from temple to University as
the modern era unfolded.  The first universities were, of course,
religious temples converted to the education and training of holy
persons.  The accumulation of religious truth had grown to such
proportions by the 10th century that the knowledge industry
benefitted from programmatic procedures and from a division of
labor into the various programs of study.  

     The crusaders brought back realms of knowledge from the Near
East to Europe and the modern university began to develop.  But
the knowledge process grew even more constricted as faculties
divided into the various professions and as each discipline made
claims to given bodies of knowledge.  Scientific professions
staked out a landscape and trained its devotees to study it in
minute detail.  The hard sciences distanced themselves from the
Arts and Humanities in the effort to become objective and
empiric.  By the 20th century, there were literally hundreds of
scientific specialties and, as those in the arts and humanities
appropriated the methods of quantification, measurement,
generalization and interpretation from the physical sciences, the
number of sciences doubled and redoubled.

     The location of knowledge is the postmodern era is widely
distributed in every social institution.  Transition from the
narrow politics of representative democracy to the interactively
rich politics of the public sphere is on the postmodern agenda. 
Instead of the policy process located in the state sector and
thus reaching out to every institution under its purview, a
radical and direct democracy of policy making in each
institutions by employees, customers, and general citizenry in
concert is proffered.  

     There is a special meaning to the concept of the public and
that of politics in postmodern understanding which reaches back
to classical Greek thought.  In the division of labor envisioned
by Grecian social philosophy, praxis was the task of enlightened
men; techne was the province of slaves and women while theory was
the province of the gods.  In both premodern and modern times,
this tripartite division of the knowledge process was instituted
both as philosophy and as everyday practice.

     The postmodern vision of emancipatory knowledge calls for
the unification of these three forms of knowledge in a public
sphere as well as the extension of democracy inside decidedly
undemocratic institutions.

Repository of Social Knowledge/Wisdom   Some premodern societies
deposit their most important kernels of cultural knowledge in
strings of knots; some in poetic epics; and some in glyphics and
graphs.  In many societies, there are story tellers who carry the
wisdom of the ages in their narratives.  There are, as well,
ritual prayers, holy bibles, gregorian chants and archaic myths
in which to encode the fundaments of knowledge.  Paintings,
sculptures and cravings also store the central wisdom of an age. 
Even parades, ceremonies and clothing have a story to tell those
who would listen.

     Whatever repository of knowledge is used, only those with
status and honor can call forth the stories, interpret them to
the present moment and stand in critique of the powerful who fall
short in following that wisdom.  In premodern times, the shaman,
guru, monk, magician, curandero, sorcerer, and priestly
functionary were given such honor.  Prophets, preachers and
oracles stand in particularly close contact to divine sources of
wisdom; they do not store and retrieve wisdom so much as receive
it.

     The modern era relies upon scientific Journals and scholarly
texts to keep the knowledge available in ready and readable form. 
Yet the knowledge can be found in the very fabric of the system
of production and distribution.  Every factory, every machine,
every office, every hospital, every newspaper is the physical
embodiment of knowledge that encodes its meaning and preserves it
to the future.  Every technology that comes brings with it a
storehouse of information and, when it goes, takes with it
stories that remain untold for centuries.

     Much that is of valuable to the human project is lost simply
because the repositories of knowledge are given over to serve the
information needs of some more than others.  The history and
anguish of women, minorities, labor struggles, and oppressed
religions are culled and discarded by the new keepers of the
flame.  Oral historians now scurry around to try to reconstruct
the lost history of an age; revisionist historians of science and
politics have to go back and revisit the archeological sites in
which the knowledge once appeared. 

     Postmodern sensibilities, themselves, arise out of an
awareness of the distortions and limitations of elitist systems
for the storage and retrieval of knowledge.  The gate-keepers of
knowledge serve masters which, even to them, are often unknown. 
The struggles over control of the knowledge process are untold
simply because the losers have no voice in which to speak of
their views, purposes, causes or goals.

     Today, newspapers and magazines report and interpret the
events in far away places from a parochial point of view.  The
radical democracy of the postmodern epoch insists on giving
enemies, nonpersons, madmen and women, homosexuals, women,
workers and children a voice which tries to be true to the lived
experience of such people.

     Those who hear these voices speak out and say things that
are not comforting to the present set of relationship; to the
present settings of standards; to the present inventory of goals,
often respond with anger and with dismay.  Postmodernism itself
is subject to the politics of knowledge in which gatekeepers of
knowledge are appalled to hear such voices speak.

     Charles Sykes, in his righteous indignation at the inclusion
of such voices in the university, interprets such inclusions as
failings and subversions (1990).  Sykes believes such postmodern
efforts will lead to "...the demise of the university..' and that
postmodern professors are responsible for this turn of events.  A
more scholarly and scientific approach would entail an effort to
locate postmodernism in its larger socio-historical context and
to look within the university and the society for the factors
which call forth postmodern thought rather than personalize it
and psychologize it.  There is something important and valuable
going on which Sykes, Kimball, and John Silver are missing.

     For Sykes and others of a more traditional bent, the
university is to be a repository of knowledge oriented to
modernist science encoded in formal written language.  For Sykes,
goals such as diversity, pluralism and open enrollment are code
words for the lowering of academic standards.  Those who study
home economics, side walk graffiti, kid literature, or physical
education have no place in which to deposit the knowledge and
wisdom therein contained; not in something called a university.

     The repositories of knowledge open to the postmodern spirit
include emancipatory art, science, literature, poetry, music and
politics.  It is found in the reader as much as the author; in
the plagiarizer as much as the creative writer; it is found in
the trashheaps of history as much as in the palaces.  For the
postmodern student of life and literature, the repositories of
knowledge are infinitely varied; the scholarly journal and the
elitist university lose their privilege as the repository of
knowledge along with famous books and famous names.

     Knowledge is, in a postmodern understanding, more a verb
than a noun as in pre- as in post-modern ways of knowing.  As a
verb, it is much harder to store and to catalog than are nouns.

The Social Hierarchy of Knowers and Known    If we nose about in
the middens of knowledge and thought, it is clear that some
groups are privileged apart from the merits of the knowledge they
bear.  In the pre-modern era, those groups faithful to God's Plan
take precedence.  Those few who scoff and scorn the worship of
God or heap ridicule upon the Plan set forth by the gods find
their words as leaves in the wind.  One must be very careful of
what one says if one wishes to be heard in such a camp.

     In wartime, pacifists lose their voice.  In a patriarchy,
women lose their voice.  In a slave society, slaves are to be
seen and not heard.  Serfs and servants get small shrift in a
feudality.  The division of labor in bureaucracies gives the
right to a brain and a voice to the top echelons while those at
the lower levels can only mutter and complain.

     In the modern epoch, societies with 'modern' communications
systems are privileged over low-tech societies.  In Africa, Asia,
Cuba, and South America, the Voice of America is heard throughout
the land as is the BBC in the World Service.  The Soviet Union
also has an elaborate set of broadcast facilities spread over the
world to give its version of socialism a voice.  How can one
person contravene or contextualize the cultured and knowing
voices that fill the very air around the world?  How can a
Hutterite gainsay a Dan Rather or a Peter Jennings whose
broadcasts are inserted into an envelop of advertisements urging
Hutterite children to want and to demand all the goods of a
commodity culture?  How can a wise woman or man in Australia
watch their culture fall apart at the onslaught of ranchers,
tourists, state officials, and merchants without feeling the
terrible inequalities of speech and tongue given to the merchants
and politicians by virtue of their access to mass media?

     In the USA, there are some 600 well-funded Right Wing think
tanks which use the press and other media far more extensively
than do Left Wing intellectuals or any minority group.  As both
Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan understood, whoever controls the
microphone controls the ruling ideas of an epoch.  Much of the
channel capacity of all the media today are oriented to serving
the information needs of multinational and national corporations. 
Even 'public' television programs nature shows and other safe
supplies of knowledge to the mass audience it serves rather than
engaging public issues of the day.

     From a postmodern perspective, there can be no hierarchy in
privilege as between sets of knowers or between sets of that
which is worthy of knowing.  There can be variation of course and
each variant knowledge set and its knowers may establish
standards by which contributions to that particular form of
knowledge may be judged but such standards do not have a
universal writ.  One may not set Shakespeare or Moliere or Mark
Twain as the standard to emulate and to exceed for all time and
place.

     This means that immanent critique is possible and fair
comment can be made in terms of those standards set by the
knowledge industry itself.  However, transcendent critique is
more difficult.  In other work, I have argued that it is possible
to set Praxis/Human Rights Theory as cross cultural and
transhistorical bases for critique.  I have been careful to keep
the endpoints of each such human right open and the whole set
open for discourse and collective review.  However, claims of
universality and eternality are equally suspect in postmodernism
as in chaos theory.

     Postmodern modalities in the knowledge process require a
different use of technology to match a different set of standards
about privileged access and control of the knowledge process.  It
will take the genius of a thousand computer scientists to format
the hardware and software with which to help create a mandelbrot
knowledge set.

Hierarchies of Knowledge Sets      It should be clear by now that
the set of knowledge statements that are privileged in premodern
societies are statements that embody the Divine Word, the
preferences and attitudes of Spirits, Gods, Nature or of 
Earthmother.  Such statements are made in a special voice or in a
special language with which to elevate them above the profane
words of everyday life--indeed, the use of such a voice or such
words in everyday life is everywhere seen to be profanity and
blasphemy.

     Any form of practical knowledge that is to be heard and
heeded must be inserted into that theistic envelope used to
validate knowledge in a given society.  Words, practices, and
institutions that come in other envelopes, theistic or secular,
are treated as if they were noise in the system.  Every society
has a filtering routine by which such knowledge sets are
dismissed and devalued.  Corruption, evil, sin, profanity, the
word of the Devil, madness and folly embody the prophylactic
processes by which foreign sets of knowledge are expelled from
the social body.

     Every culture needs a filtering set in order to preserve the
integrity of its knowledge paradigm.  What is lacking is an
algorithm that will hold some essential parts of the knowledge
set constant over time and allow other essential parts to vary as
new and useful ideas come in from outside that set.

     By such means, hierarchies of knowledge are established and
preserved.  By such means, the ideas and understandings that
inform the socialization process, the work process, the worship
process and the other interactional processes that comprise a
society are reproduced.  In New Guinea, it is considered
corrupting for a woman to touch a musical instrument; she can be
put to death for it.  In Islam, the use of alcohol as a pathway
to the Holy is defined as insult to Allah.  In Christianity,
criticism of the Bible is thought to be the work of the Devil and
deserving of the harshest punishment while the use of alcohol to
invoke the sacred is thought to be homage to God.

     Modern thinkers, on the other side, tend to elevate and
honor those statements couched in the dry and remote terms of
science.  The more general the theoretical statement, the more
respect and homage it receives--never mind the difficulty such
statements give in respect to verification and nullification. 
The law of evolution is so general that, as with statements from
astrologers, they can never be proved, unambiguously, to be true
or false.  If a given variant in gene helps fit one into a given
ecological niche a bit better then evolution is said to have
occurred.  But if it takes centuries for any given gene to prove
itself more suited and if ecological niches change more rapidly
than such genes can prove out, then what happens to the theory of
evolution?  Or if good ideas lay about until the political
economy has changed, what is it that is evolving, the idea or the
economy?

     There are many problems with the idea of a law in science;
the findings of chaos challenge the entire notion that such
absolutistic statements can be made.  The interaction between
observed and observed means that the law is contingent upon what
a given scientist does or does not do.  The line between science
and politics is blurred at the margins of a scientific principle
in ways that would cause great dismay to the modern scientist
were s/he able to understand the point.

     The laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of
genetics, the laws of economics and the laws of psychological
functioning are well respected and given precedence in the
hierarchies of knowledge we institute in the university today. 
The modern mentality tends to see things in terms of hierarchy
since there are absolutes in Nature and society which enable one
to rank order height, weight, length, breadth, as well as
animals, vegetables and societies in terms of interval and
rational numbering scales--thus is rationality won.

     The very word, modern, transforms into modernization theory
which privileges high energy, high tech, high profit systems of
transport, communications, therapy, social control, agriculture
and warfare.  Those societies that spend the most to produce the
most sophisticated means of delivering death are said to be
modern societies while those which kill on a face to face basis
are said to be primitive.

     In the modern home, one can display the works of Joseph
Campbell and his wonderful set of Atlas of world religions but
one could not have a shrine with a statue of Mother Mary or a
picture of Jesus before which visitors were expected to kneel in
homage and obeisance.  In the modern office one can display
Lichtenstein or Pollock, Johns or Warhol but one cannot display
pictures of Malcolm X or Farrakhan or the Stations of the Cross. 
They are too much laden with meaning and with passion to pass as
art.

     Science, theory and other modern products must be stripped
of their history, passion, and partisanship in order to pass as
modern.  It is not that there are no politics in such products
but that the politics must be discreetly out of view.  Cobol,
fortran, Ascii, and arabic numbers are the preferred language of
modernity.  They do not permit of rebellion and resistance; they
do not speak to pain and the uses of pleasure as do French,
English, Spanish and Sanskrit.

     The hierarchies of knowledge are dismantled in the
postmodern moment.  The privilege science accords itself over
premodern and postmodern ways of knowing is challenged.  New age
religions stubbornly ablate and assimilate modern science to
their problematics.  Holistic healing forces the spiritual into
the clinic and the hospital.  Holistic healing forces the doctor
and the nurse to expand attention from the single individual
patient and its physiology to the family and its dynamics; to the
political economy and its effects on human and other populations;
to the entire culture and its harmful moments for women, children
and other minorities.

     Postmodern moments insist that the irrational, the
nonrational, the antirational modalities of thinking be given
equal footing--or for some, higher footing--than objective,
rational modalities of thought.  When Luke was told by Ben ObeWan
Kenobe to let go and let the Force guide him, Luke was told, in
the same moment that all the technology and all the mechanical
data processing in the world would not defeat the defenses of the
enemy; that intuition and instinct in their own nonlinear moments
would anticipate and defend against the enemy.  The Frankenstein
story was an epic by Mary Wollenscraft Shelley that science must
be wedded to human compassion else we create a monster.  The King
Kong saga instructs us that the primitive forces of faith and
belief must be, poetically, joined with tenderness and love.

     Postmodern modalities of thought give preference to
intersubjectivity in creating social life world over objectivity. 
One is to subordinate technology to the pursuit of
intersubjective public policy dynamics.  At the same time, Public
Opinion shares equal standing with wisdom of the past and with
scientific lore.  One does not privilege one's own products over
those of another age if one is to keep faith with the spirit of
the postmodern.

The Drama of Good Work        There are some kinds of work in the
field of knowledge and knowing that are given privilege in any
epoch.  For those who, in communion with their God, want to do
good work (liturgy is the term), one must orient the knowledge
process to the embodiment of God's Plan.  Liturgy as good work
means that one should honor one's mother and father; that one
should honor one's elders; that one should honor one's priest as
the bearer of sacred knowledge.

     In effect, sacred work is conservative work; one must
excavate knowledge that tends to reproduce society in its present
set of social relationships.  The work of those who would
criticize and innovate is to be constrained by the spirit of the
law.  Those who would teach or sing or dance must be constrained
by loyalty and fealty to existing hierarchies of privilege or of
participation.  To those who do such work with purity and with
fidelity, great honor is given.  The essence of Sainthood is that
one embodies most fully a central value of the culture; that one
embodies most closely a social norm in society; that one embodies
in one's life a central truth of that knowledge system.

     Whole religious orders are inspired by the boddhisattvas,
the saints and the Khomeini of an age.

     The modern world give preference to those who seek new
knowledge.  The discovery of a single fact is a cause for joy;
the discovery of a stable relationship is a cause for pride; the
discovery of a workable theory is a cause for high praise--for
Nobel prize.  Whoever says science says new insight; new
understanding; new synthesis; new paradigms of knowledge.  

     One can well understand the tension between science and
theology in christendom; the one privileges old truths while the
other demands new truths.

     The postmodern spirit takes a different view of truth.  In
the postmodern world, those who unveil the partial and partisan
character of knowledge gets preference.  Those are given honor
who deconstruct the politics and private agendas of writers,
poets, politicians, historians, sociologists, theorists of moral
development, or physical scientists who privilege order and
control over chaos and turbulence.

     Yet there is another kind of knowledge work that has more
positive moments.  Those who use reason, rationality and
creativity in aid of sociality and self-determination are the
saints of the postmodern era.  Those who create new ways of
responding to old problems without destroying the best of the old
are given homage and deference in the world of politics and the
arts.

     Bertolt Brecht tried to reorient drama to the human project. 
Simone de Beauvoir tried to reorient gender relations to the
human project; Picasso, Goya, and Daumier tried to reorient art
toward the human project and away from the celebration of power
and privilege.  Foucault has done much to show the agendas of
social control masked over as modern science.  It would be
difficult for anyone informed by the postmodern visions of
Foucault to learn and use the science and technology of social
control in prisons, asylums, or clinics after reading Foucault. 
Such is the dramatic impact of the best of postmodern work

Sources of Distortion of the Knowledge Process  Each epoch has
its own theories of how and why the knowledge process is
distorted.  For those oriented to a premodern vision of truth and
necessity, there is weakness in Faith; seduction by Devils,
exposure to other (presumably false) beliefs, gender (often women
are thought to be incapable of understanding the true God, age
(one's understanding is thought to improve with age), and simple
hubris, a certain overweening confidence that one knows better
than to the gods.  These are the sources of ignorance and evil.

     Those in modern science use many of the same tactics with
which to account for the mismatch between the truth about
objective reality and subjective understanding.  The complexity
of the data, deficiencies in technique and technology, partisan
bias, and simple dishonesty are thought to account for the
variant understandings of truth.  Of the problems in technique,
faulty theory, poor research design, incompetent researchers and
experimental contamination are adduced to explain away the
variety of findings presented to scholarly journals.  

     Of the problems of technology, a bigger and better space
telescope, a bigger and better computer, a bigger and better
super-collider or a bigger and better electron microscope, mass
spectrometer or other piece of high technology equipment would
provide ever closer approximations to the enduring truth about
heaven and earth.  

     Prior to and parallel to these obstacles to a full
understanding of nature are the more common failings and faults
of human beings; the poor showing of women, minorities, children
from poor families, and others in math, science, chess, music and
other harmonic and periodic events in nature is thought to arise
from an inherent limitation of ability.  Appeals to differences
in body chemistry, brain structure, character faults and cultural
deficiencies resonate with science itself as an explanation of
the inability to be interested and master the almanacs of
science.

     The postmodern view on the deep structure of knowledge is
far different from the two other orientations.  For
postmodernists, truth itself is a human product.  This quest for
truth turns out to be much more an exercise in politics and
poetry than one might suspect.  Objectivity is not possible, not
because of personal failings so much as because of the
intersubjective nature of the realities studied.  Postmodernists
do not view it to be a failing that one is disinterested in
management science, mathematical models of the stock market or
the ways in which chlorophyll robs electrons from water molecules
and smuggles them into the heart of ATP.

     The deficiencies seen by postmodernists as diverse as Punks
and professors of literature are to be found in the ways the ways
ontology emerges from human effort rather than in epistemology
per se.  The Stratification of Power, Wealth and Social Honor
which privileges some forms of knowledge and which gives an elite
unequal access to the knowledge creating process are the chief
problems in the knowledge process.

     In the concrete case, the facticity of crime or poverty is
not at issue; rather at issue is the social sources of poverty
and crime.  At issue for postmodernists is not empirical
statements of crime rates (although there are great political
forces as work to bend and distort those data), what is at issue
is how crime is explained and how such putatively scientific
explanations come back to further distort the human process.

     By using reductionist theories of crime or poverty (body
chemistry, premenstrual stress, culture of poverty, differential
association, or control theories, such theories mask the factors
in ordinary social life which call forth crime and subvert policy
that would minimize crime rates.  By looking for linear causality
rather than at deterministic chaos, bifurcations of social
dynamics, and the exploded personal tori of those who must live
their lives out in a materialistic, patriarchal, macho,
competitive world, modern science turns the knowledge process
into a power play to further disenfranchise people.

Teleology of each Epoch       For every thinker in the modern and
premodern world, there is a destiny, a natural goal-state toward
which the dynamics of society and nature lead.  Associated with
this fate is a whole theory about the pattern of change.  for
premodernists, Times were good; imperfections arose; a terrible
day of reckoning will come upon the earth and, according to one's
work, Paradise/Heaven awaits the faithful while Hell awaits those
who scorn the work and will of god.

     The Hindu tradition teaches that it is possible to gain
salvation from the imperfections of this life by Samsara;
proceeding through the cycles of birth, death and rebirth. 
Ascension to Bliss depends upon one's Karma, understood as right
living according to one's station in this life.  The cycles of
birth and death end as one improves one's karma and gains Nirvana
One's rewards and troubles in this life is shaped by one's
actions in previous incarnations.  The idea of structural evil
bringing about the downfall of the innocent is foreign to this
understanding.

     The Buddhist tradition, derived from Hindu thought, offers a
different destiny; in its social philosophy, pain and suffering
are a constant.  There is no hope for better days--through living
the good life encoded in the eight-fold truth, one can minimize
pain and one can escape the cycles of life but life itself is
imperfect.  The escape is toward non-existence; renunciation of
self and of desire more so than full enjoyment of a heavenly city
so important to the Christian version of destiny.

     The bifurcation in destinies in many ancient understandings
at once illuminates the dualistic character of premodern thought
and the value placed upon right action and right thought informed
by eternally valid standards of conduct.

     In modern physical science, the assumption was that order is
given but tended toward disorder.  The Second Law of
Thermodynamics gave evolutionary direction to the ontology of the
cosmos; all systems tended to their most probable state--random
location in the space available to its elements.  Brownian
movement was the final state toward which all systems pushed as
they disintegrated.  However, the natural tendency toward
disorder has been greatly revised in the past 60 years.

     Lars Onsager won a Nobel Prize in 1928 for his work on
limited irreversible thermodynamics which permitted pockets of
order in a dis-assembling cosmos.  Ludwig von Bertalanffy
published his work on systems theory the same year.  However
postmodern science has no natural teleology.  We do not go from
the big bang to the big void.  Out of chaos comes order in a way
very familiar to premodern thought.  Prigogine won the Nobel
Prize in 1974 for his work on unlimited irreversibility which
permits order to develop continuously.

     The direction of change in the modern epoch is evolution
toward perfection in knowledge, being and society.  The standards
of perfection vary with the interest of the modern scientist. 
Biologists and system theorists tend to equate perfection with
match with environment.  Those in the philosophy of knowledge,
epistemology, and aesthetics tend to equate perfection with the
retrieval of Absolute Truth employing Absolute Reason.  Those in
sociology tend to see an evolution from disorder to order; a
growing division of labor in which more complex societies have an
evolutionary advantage and displace simpler societies.  This
analysis, of course, privileges societies such as the United
States, England or Germany in which there is no end to the
divisions and subdivisions of work and play.

     Such understandings of evolution calls forth the idea of
stages of evolution in which simpler systems are displaced by
those better adjusted to their environment--presumably the more
complex systems tends to have survival advantage with human
beings at the top of the evolutionary ladder never mind that
cockroaches and sharks have outlasted most other species and may
well outlast the human species.

     Radical sociologists point out that the subdivision of labor
is a political tool by which the labor process is more closely
controlled by management; that which is natural, becomes, for the
postmodern social critic, just another form of coercion whose
chief merit lies in the ability of a few to disenfranchise many
from the knowledge process and the reality creating process.

     For those postmodernists who, explicitly or implicitly, key
off chaos theory, there is a fluctuation between order and
disorder.  Order is not privileged as the destiny of the universe
nor is disorder natural to the human estate.  Order in social
affairs is a consequence of a set of controls; rewards,
punishments and built-in constraints on workers, students,
children, women, colonies, customers and competitors.  In the
United States, putatively the freest country in the world, layer
upon layer of control agents work to engineer human behavior in a
wide variety of control systems.

     Chaos theory itself does not have a teleology; the end-
states of any given system including the best designed social
systems fall within a fractal basin boundary.  The destiny of any
given society on that fractal basin depends, in nonlinear
fashion, upon the number and interactions of bifurcations in its
dynamics.

Sources of Change in Each Epoch    For most people in the more
traditional ways of thinking, the engine of change is either the
unfolding of God or direct action of God in the World.  If
floods, famine, or war come, they are said to be a result of the
vengeance of god.  If peace, prosperity and good fortune ensue,
one is said to be blessed of God.  If good things happen to
obviously evil persons, it is said to be the result of a pact
with the Devil.  For those who think God to be all powerful, such
inappropriate rewards are said to be the result of God's
inscrutable Will; that there must be a divine purpose that will
reveal itself in time.  When bad things happen to good people, it
is said to be a test of faith--as indeed it is.

     The engine of change in the modern world is the mismatch
between system and environment.  There is a natural advantage to
those systems which best, of all competitors, can extract order
from their environment and, in the same moment, resist the
actions of other system to draw order from it.  In the Struggle
for Existence, Adaptation and the Survival of Fittest constitute
the driving forces toward the end state above; perfect match
between system and environment in terms of the system to exploit
the order in the environment.

     This view tends to privilege the most rapacious of
predators, the most hard shelled of predators and the most
unfeeling of predators.  This view tends, as well, to privilege
whatever system is favored by the scientist; if one is a bird
fancier, then the capacity of the bird to fly faster than its
prey is said to be progressive evolution.  If one is an
entomologist, successful adaption is protective coloration or a
nasty taste increasing the inability of the bird to prey on it.  

     The driving forces of change in the postmodern mentality
come more from the internal dynamics of a system than from
outside forces.  Postmodern critics of capitalism, of
bureaucratic socialism, of authoritarian hegemony point to these
very structures as productive of change.  For conservatives,
inequality guarantees the survival of the society; for postmodern
critics, inequality produces the conflict that tears a society
apart.  For Marx and most contemporary marxists, it is the
contradictions within the structure of capitalism, slavery,
feudalism or bureaucratic socialism that threatens its existence. 
For conservatives, capitalism is a stable, progressive system
that is subverted by outsiders rather than by insiders.  

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROCESS  There is a social
psychology that is privileged by the orientation suffusing a
given epoch.  In the broadest possible terms, the very essence of
self hood is shaped by the ontology and epistemology that
suffuses a socio-cultural entity.  I want to conclude this
chapter on the archeology of knowledge by considering the
implications of each modality of human thought for its effect on
the degree to which each permits the human being agency and
autonomy.  Thus, one goes from the knowledge process to the being
process.  In this endeavor, one contributes to the archeology of
social psychology; the study of ancient, modern and postmodern
ways of being.

     The tendency in premodern ways of thinking is for one to
subordinate one's own will to that of the Divine in everyday
affairs.  Ultimately, there is the final obliteration of
subjectivity in favor of divine Will.  One is taught and the
structures of knowledge and praxis insists that the subjectivity
of God trumps human subjectivity.

     If we understand, as did Durkheim and most anthropologists,
that the subordination of the individual will to that of God is,
in effect, a subordination of human thought and being to the
collective--since God is nothing more nor nothing less than
society in the abstract--then we can understand and account for
the linguistic practice that obliterates the 'I' in favor of the
'We' in so many premodern societies.  To push oneself ahead of
others is unthinkable in many premodern societies.

     Among the Innuit, for example, there is no word for the
first person singular; one must use the second person general,
i.e., the concept of the "One."  Thus, one does not say, "I think
it is going to snow this afternoon."  Rather one says, "One
thinks it is going to snow this afternoon.  Note the ending on
the verb form, think, takes an 's' as if it were the second
person talking (in our verb pattern).  The 's' makes the
statement appear as if it came from another person other than the
speaker.  Since there is no particular individual whom the
speaker has in mind, in effect the speaker is generalizing
his/her thought to that of a second person who embodies the right
to speak.  Since that second person does not exist in the
particular, it exists in the general--an abstraction of all of
those who have a right to speak and be hear in a society.

     Other language forms are used in parallel fashion to
engineer this self-effacement.  Among African peoples, women
lower their eyes when talking to a strange male.  Children,
knowing they have no social status, often cover their eyes with
their hand and peek out between their fingers when they are
listening when they are not part of the adult solidarity that
enjoys the right to talk or to listen.  Among moslim women,
clothing is used a language system to communicate that the veiled
woman is not, sociologically, present when she is, most assuredly
present in physical and physiological and psychological terms.  

     The net effect of self-effacement in any situation is to
given priority and preference to the collective in the knowledge
process; sometimes that collective gives less than the full
status to all human beings present in a family, tribe or band in
the knowledge process but each member does have status in the
sharing of other aspects of social life.  

     Another effect of such self effacement is to strengthen the
bonds between individuals.  In a society in which the 'we' trumps
the solitary individual, that individual always has a place.  For
example, a man or a family which does not get along well in one
band can move into another band as long as the wife or the
husband has the right to claim kinship with one of the members of
the second band.  This advantage helps keep the peace.  In times
of scarcity, it also is a way of redistributing wealth.

     In modern times, science solves many of the problems of
production and distribution of the necessities of life.  In
parallel fashion, God tends to disappear and self to emerge as an
acting agent of its own will.  Modernism gives much autonomy to
the individual.  Protestantism succeeded, in part because of its
yielding to humanist claims for knowledge and understanding of
the Word of God without priestly intermediary.

     The social psychology that fits the scientific modality is
one in which objectivity and impersonality is stressed.  In such
a social milieu, people become objects to be controlled in linear
fashion while impersonality robs them of their human, personal
variation.  Such a social psychology also fits the capitalist
concern with profits and control.  If one can, in the name of
impersonality and individual welfare, dismiss the needs of
employees and customers, then profits can be increased.  If one,
in the name of objectivity, treats markets and suppliers as
objects to be controlled, intersubjectivity is lost and the
welfare of some separate set of owners maximized.  

     The transformation in social psychology necessary to take
the stance of objectivity and impersonality took centuries to
happen.  In the modern epoch, the very meaning of the word,
individual became reversed from its premodern meaning.  That
which was once an indivisible part of the whole now is a
separate, fundamentally different order of being.  Raymond
Williams, in his meticulous work, Keywords, has given a date to
this reversal.  He notes (1976: 134) that, until the 16th
century, the word still took the sense of one being part of a
greater whole.  

     By the time of John Donne, the word was beginning to be used
to denote the single person.  Indeed, Donne railed against the
idea than anyone could be an 'island unto himself, apart from the
main.'  Williams attributes the change in usage to the emergence
of capitalism and the decline of the feudal system (135).  In the
17th and 18th century the term began to take on the meaning of
the singularity in both physics, logic and philosophy.  John
Locke gave the separate individual the autonomy to calculate the
consequences of this or that action and decide his/her own fate. 
By the 19th century, the individual existed on its own.  

     While both conservatives and radicals spoke against the
possibility of the single individual, their position became the
minority position.  Thus Burke, speaking for conservatives said,
'The individual is foolish, the species, wise.  Marx, speaking
for the Left attacked the practice of opposing individual and
society by claiming that the individual is a social creation,
born into social relationships and determined by them (Williams:
136).  Liberals and libertarians insist that there is only the
single, acting, culpable individual.  They insist that both God
and Nature intended the single individual be free of any
'artificial' constraint--left to make decisions and free to
benefit or to suffer the consequences of them.

     For such liberals, the democratic process is said to be
fulfilled if each person votes secretly in pursuit of private
ends.  Each criminal is thought to be the object and agent of
his/her own actions and punished for them.  Each worker is
thought to be an equal at the bargaining table and the idea of a
union, a mere conspiracy to rob owners directly or consumers,
indirectly.  Separate families, separate nations and separations
between people and other animals; between individuals and nature
as a whole.

     But the fact of the matter is that whether the collective or
the individual (as a separate entity) has an independent and
prior existence is an empirical question.  For postmodern
thought, that empirical question is settled intersubjectively;
whether we are together or whether we act as single persons is a
matter of the way in which social life is organized.

     Postmodern thought tends to accept an array of permutations
of self as possible.  One sees an entire gamut of understandings
about the self from the most self-centered, self-serving actors
to the most self-effacing.  The degree of inter-subjectivity
varies widely among those in the post-modern era; some are
radical libertarians who tend to emphasize individualism and
separatism while some are radical humanists and tend to emphasize
collective politics and ecumenicalism.  The overall thrust of the
postmodern, however, is to reconsider the place of each
individual in the whole and to reunite the separations produced
in an era which analysis and autonomy in ontology and causality
were privileged.

     Many of the literary devices used in this work, make use of
the first person plural.  I often write, 'we' when it is, in
fact, I who am doing the thinking and explaining.  However, I
understand that there is a reader, so as a matter of social
engineering, I make that person a part of a special collective of
we two by using such pronouns.  I further understand that anyone,
known or unknown, who is interested in the topic at hand
constitutes a member of a solidarity who has the right to be
included in the grammar of being.  Thus, I surrender my autonomy
to some extent and yield authorship to the reader.  By doing so,
I strengthen the anticipated contribution of the reader in the
very use of a plural pronoun.

     Such invitation is at once a partnership and a trap.  I
invite the reader to take this essay seriously and incorporate it
as true in her/his own thinking by such linguistic and literary
stratagem.  However, it is in the same moment, a trap since it
inserts the reader into the act of thinking and puts thought into
the reader's mind that may be very different from those thoughts
that arise had I not treated him/her as a partner; had I used a
literary form that treats the reader as an enemy and a spy.

     It is part of the dynamics of intersubjectivity that when
one is put in such a position; that of innocent partnership, one
suspends distrust and tries to take the position of the
speaker/writer.  Thus self and society are twinborn: you accept
provisionally, what I say as a true statement.  If we share
enough of the social world in which we both live, then I can
speak to you and for you.  However, if there are serious
differences in our social position, the consequence of your
suspension of disbelief may do you serious harm.
Reading/listening/hearing thus becomes a trap.  Rather than an
exercise in intersubjective understanding, they become an
exercise in deception and management of the thought process; the
whole is fragmented and the single person is left to its own
devices.

     New Age religions often take the view that the earth and all
its creatures are a sacred unity.  At the same time, many threads
in New Age religion challenge ancient orthodoxies; feminist, gay,
animist, and shamanist books puzzle and outrage more traditional
practitioners of religion.  On the other side, there are some New
Age religions which are little more than fraud and exploitation. 
Cousins to these frauds are the teleministries of Jimmy Swaggart,
Pat Robertson, and the Bakkers who exploit the terrible
loneliness of mass, impersonal society to their own needs.  There
are more positive moments in New Age religion.

     Liberation theology insists that religion look at its world
through the eyes of the poor; through the eyes of Black people;
through the eyes of women instead of and in addition to rich
white men.  Some in New Age religion are little more than
hucksters of religious fads; some little less than white collar
criminals yet most are very serious in their efforts to heal the
wounds that plague society and nature.

     If we consider the permutations of a mandelbrot set for the
geometry of the self, we can appreciate that there can be
multiple social realities in some of which the individual person
is indivisibly connected, sharing and compassionate while in
other of this mandelbrot set of social realities, each person has
variable autonomy, creativity, originality, surprise and delight. 
Chaos theory gives us an ontological model of what could be; only
a well designed public policy process can give us the possibility
to create an ontology of self and society that speaks to both
personal freedom and social justice.  A well tempered religious
sensibility can make such a geometry of self and society a holy
connection; holy in the oldest meaning of the word, helig =
healthy.  

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