The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Volume II

By Kees van der Pijl

How do we think about international relations? There is no question that society is based upon its cultural foundations, yet this mode of understanding the world is seemingly absent from IR.

The second volume of Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, a three-volume project changing the way we think about international relations, traces the key characteristics of 'foreign encounters' over time. It shows that myth, religion and ethical philosophies have always informed the way that societies have interacted with outsiders, from tribal relations to the imperial frontiers. Acceptance of this points us towards the future state of international relations.

A truly masterful work, The Foreign Encounter In Myth And Religion, is a must for upper-undergraduates and academics at the cutting edge of international relations theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781783715039

Kees van der Pijl

Kees van der Pijl is a Fellow of the Centre for Global Political Economy and Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex. His books include The Disciple of Western Supremacy (Pluto, 2014) The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion (Pluto, 2010), the Deutscher prize-winning Nomads, Empires, States (Pluto, 2007).

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1

Tribal Foreign Relations and Mythical Ancestry

A community’s collective identity emerges from the exploitation and socialisation of its relationship to internal and external nature. Of the forces in a group’s natural environment, other communities obviously require particular attention. They potentially constitute a threat, or may be hunted for prey; but they can equally provide spouses which a small group is unable or unwilling to find within its own unit. The dilemmas associated with these questions (friend/enemy, mate or meal) constitute the groundwork for mythologies of foreign relations. Once language develops, it raises consciousness to a level unknown to other species, whilst differentiating separate communities in the process of ethnogenesis. Social action now requires a frame of reference that animal instincts can operate without. Myth offers such a framework.

The oral record is rich in myths about the origin of ‘mankind’, but only to the extent that mankind can initially be aware of itself, that is, as a specific community. All across the world, communities imagined themselves as having descended from some form of heaven or extra-temporal world, and as destined to return there. In the deep past it was not self-evident that others might have had comparable spiritual experiences and claims. Ethnogenetic myth will therefore typically be ethnocentric; if it deals with others at all, it will rely on pseudo-speciation to identify foreigners as monkeys, dwarfs, demons, or otherwise.

Tribal foreign relations are characterised by the occupation of space on account of ancestry; protecting it by ritual and threats; and exchanging women and gifts. This is not a passing phenomenon. The experiences of many millennia deposit a sediment of habits in human communities which under specific conditions can be reactivated in later epochs. However, tribal foreign relations have obtained longest among communities which existed in a less demanding interethnic milieu, with more space but fewer resources. As a result, some of the high roads of cultural development were left unexplored. Hard metal technology, horses, writing, or an economic surplus to sustain a specialised class of administrators and a state were long absent among Australian Aborigines, Polynesians and other Pacific island populations, and many Amerindian and sub-Saharan African communities. The ancestors of these peoples were human as early as those of Manhattan stockbrokers or Japanese engineers – there is only one human species. But the challenges such communities faced could be handled on the basis of an initial fund of cultural achievements for much longer and only proved inadequate when they were ‘discovered’ by Europeans. By then, the means at their disposal proved so unequal to those available to their unexpected visitors that the chances to adapt their way of life on conditions set by themselves were minimal.

It is ethnogenetic myth and its role in the context of tribal foreign relations that will concern us in this chapter. I first look at how myth arises from the instinctual substratum in anthropogenesis and ethnogenesis and draw some general conclusions about the multidimensionality of human consciousness. The remainder of the chapter deals with how, in the expanded ‘memory space’ available to linguistically articulate communities, myths have crystallised that deal with the various aspects of tribal foreign relations.

IDENTITY AND MEMORY IN ETHNOGENETIC MYTH

Myth plays its part in the mobilisation of the community as a unit capable of concerted, conscious action. In that sense it is not different from contemporary social theory. It serves to overcome fear, empower leaders, and establish presence authoritatively, by providing the human group with narratives for which its genotypic mental equipment lays the groundwork. So when Lévi-Strauss (1962: 126) claims that myth relies on the ‘architecture of the spirit’, he means that the mythical imagination springs from the neurophysiological possibilities of the human mind functioning in a group. There is no other source of insight available.

The animal brain evolved from the primary neural apparatus. Already in reptiles, sensory–motor functions require the operation of higher segments of the nervous system as well. In mammals, these evolved into the limbic system, which is roughly 200 million years old. The development of the limbic system, according to Vroon (1994: 108–10), among other things enlarges the scope of analogical communication (facial expression, body language) by ideophonic proto-language – angry shouts, ‘curses’, and expressions of fear or pain. The communicative repertoire now comes to include combinations of sounds with differing pitches and timbres. In a hostile encounter, as with the hominids wielding bones in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ‘music’ will be loud and intimidating; more subdued tones will serve to reassure and soothe kin. Tests measuring facial temperatures (which record brain temperature and metabolism, and hence mood) have established various ‘meanings’ in this proto-language.¹ Particular sound packages early on evolved into ‘dialects’, which have been found to exist in communities of great apes along with other behaviour passed on by learning (Sherwood, Subiaul, and Zawidzki 2008: 428–9).

Analogical communication and ideophonic language interacted with size increases of parts of the brain; in hominids, the frontal cortex. This made learning and the selection among alternative cognitive strategies possible (Smail 2008: 93–4). In a growing brain, responses triggered by particular starters find more complex neural pathways available to them, amplifying the emotions whilst enlarging the reflective possibilities. ‘The processes emotionally perceived by individuals as thought’, writes Shirokogorov (1970: 39), ‘are chemo-physical in their nature [and] form a chain of absolute and conditioned reflexes … the origin and location of which are not confined to the central nervous system only.’ Traces of electromagnetic signalling (of the type that allows insects to coordinate their actions in swarms) are operative too; according to A. Szent-György (as in Vroon 1994: 106, 284; Bohm 1983: 175), proteins serve as semiconductors for such signals. In this way we may sense tension, or share an unspoken thought, but not much more. ‘A human’, Petrov writes (2005: 11), ‘in that respect is a genetically inadequate being, incapable – unlike bees, ants, or termites – of coding individuals into a matrix of differentiated kinds of activities by bio-code means.’ Yet acquired skills too rely on a biological substratum.

The mechanisms of sign coding are deeply concealed in the subcortex of consciousness, especially when we speak of traditional societies. It is no easier for a carpenter, potter, or farmer to explain the essence of their experiences and translate those into the logic of notions, than for any of us to explain coherently how we walk, write, or talk.

The genotype of Homo sapiens sapiens has not basically changed since the ‘human revolution’ (between 70,000 and 150,000 years ago; Renfrew 2007: 88) and the out-of-Africa dispersal of actual human communities from the start of that epoch. Articulate speech, made possible by mutations in throat architecture, was part of the human revolution. Since humans operated in small groups held together by a complex of shared practices that often differed from those of others, language developed differentially too. The use of different words leads to abstraction along divergent paths, the more so as language becomes stimulus independent. Language, in the words of Piaget (2001: 35), is ‘a partial substitute for action’ and ‘replaces things by signs, and movements by their evocation’. Thus each community developed its own culture, defined by Geertz (1973: 44), as a ‘set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call programs) – for the governing of behaviour’.

Ethnic specificity is cultural in this sense. It is constructed around a particular discipline articulated along a given linguistic–semiotic spectrum; different cultures also occupy specific sectors of the neuro-physiological ecosystem. Just as it is difficult to get rid of one’s accent in a foreign language because, from around the age of two, the particular synaptic ‘wiring’ for one’s mother tongue crowds out other pathways, a cultural discipline shapes brain–body states differentially too. As Smail notes (2008: 159), testosterone and cortisol production in response to an insult have been found to be ethnically specific. Cultural advances are transmitted to every new generation, and neural states and brain–body chemistries adjust to ensure that the functional package can be articulated and shared. This develops in relatively bounded sets, with speech demarcating areas of common understanding. Words have various functional values and are related to a distinct way of life, so ‘the language as a complex of starters has … certain limits for its variations and spreading’, Shirokogorov observes (1970: 45), and in turn is ‘conditioned by the existence of interrelations between the units’. Through such (proto-)foreign relations, spiritual socialisation develops across communities, charting paths for further ethno-transformation. When different branches of a socialised set disperse, common mindsets can remain operational even when people can no longer understand each other. Structure and syntax will retain commonalities (like the way of thinking), even when vocabularies diverge with distance and changing circumstances.

The human mind, then, does not concern the individual brain alone. It is not entirely ‘human’ either, nor is it immaterial in contrast to matter. Consciousness is a layered structure through which individuals are connected with others and with their environment. Renfrew (2007: 119–20) in this connection speaks of the distributed mind. In addition, every single mind, according to the same author, is ‘embodied’ (i.e. intelligent action relies on the entire body, as when we say, ‘a skilled hand’) and ‘extended’ (in the sense that purposeful action incorporates situations and materials to which it is applied). As population density increases along with sedentary life, these extensions become interlocked more densely as well, producing, in Smail’s reading (2008: 155), ‘a new neurophysiological ecosystem, a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve in unpredictable ways’.

The older instinctual reflexes, however, remain operative too. They may resurface when cultural discipline fails or malfunctions. Le Bon (1952: 6) famously argued that the pre-human substratum can emerge again in a crowd and overwrite the cultural heritage that is ethnically (in his terms, ‘racially’) specific. ‘From the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological characteristics, which are added to the racial characteristics and differ from them at times to a very considerable degree.’ They constitute an ‘atavistic residuum of the instincts of primitive man’, he notes elsewhere (ibid.: 51), ‘which the fear of punishment obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb’. This takes us to how we may imagine that mental dispositions, of which myths are the narrative expression, actually originate.

Instinct and Fantasy

The contradiction within which ethnogenesis and foreign relations develop is that between the separate community/society and the unity of the species. Contradiction here should be properly understood as arising in the process of exploiting the relationship with internal and external nature, including other humans. In Knafo’s words (2002: 153), contradictions ‘do not exist in the world but only in the way subjects invest the world with meaning’. To interpret events and appearances, early humans necessarily relied on reflexes developed for dealing with conflicting inner drives with which they are genetically equipped. This also constitutes the groundwork for myth. Grimal (1973: 14–15) in this connection speaks of ‘ancient modes of thought, instinctive moulds into which thought flows’. Ritual, mood equilibration, and the role of the subconscious in maintaining emotional stability are of particular importance here.

Animal ethology counts ritual as one way of avoiding potentially self-destructive reflexes. Nieburg (1970: 59) cites the example of feigning an act of feeding, not for nourishment, but to neutralise the effects of another animal’s presence by ostentatious nonchalance. Thus action is displaced to neutral terrain apparently unrelated to the fight/flight dilemma. Intra-specific aggression likewise tends to be ritualised to prevent a species from fighting itself to extinction (Ardrey 1966: 278–9). Sequential mood equilibration is a psychological process of ‘restoring order’ by counterbalancing emotional states generated by the limbic system with their opposites. Thus, as Vroon highlights (1994: 181), aggression tends to follow on fear, melancholy on merriment, etc. Post coitum omne animal triste est. Finally, there is the Freudian understanding of the subconscious as a reservoir that absorbs and represses disturbing mental content; a parallel-geared system of mood equilibration in which dreaming has its own role. Here the mythological imagination can be said to arise directly from the primordial mental configuration. ‘How else’, Jung asks (1972: 35),

could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos … into a bright day-world and dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

The mythical reflection, then, develops as an interpretation of these different genotypic responses in the process of assimilating the world outside the mind. Following van Baaren (1960: 197), myth transmutes objective processes into subjective mental states, blurring the divide between the two. It is inherently social, built around a ‘fantasy’; not as a random mental leap unrelated to social structure, but as a particular line of thought that bridges the divide between self and other (R.D. Laing, as in Nieburg 1970: 57). Myth provides the group with a story of how the world originated, as well as narratives to make sense of human drives; a narrative infrastructure in which each storyline is the equivalent of a compelling theory about otherwise frightening aspects of existence, including the relations with other groups.

The incest taboo would be the most obvious example of a mythical fantasy. Regulating marriages by prohibiting incest is a crucial marker of the evolutionary entry point into history, the transition from species to community. Exogamy regulations are part of a cultural discipline, but as Smail notes (2008: 152), the continuity with nature should not therefore be overlooked. Many mammals besides humans have ways of avoiding kin mating, often by driving out young males when they reach sexual maturity. So assuming that the incest prohibition somehow bridges the natural and the cultural, how do humans deal with it once they become linguistically articulate?

The abstraction and objectification inherent in language and articulate thought turn people’s own instincts into something confronting them as an external force through alienation. The instinctive sexual drive and the equally preprogrammed inhibition to mate with one’s kin thus create what Freud calls (1938: 46) an ‘ambivalent emotion’ towards the object; the taboo serves as a way out of the dilemma between attraction and repulsion. It combines the conflicting feelings by raising the ‘positive’ drive to a platonic level, the level of the sacred; there it is aligned with the ‘negative’ impulse into a fear of touching, or even of visual contact, both equally aspects of sacrality. It is through amplifying the contradictory instinctual responses (recognised as conflicting in articulate thought) into a more complex, ritual/ceremonial mental construction, a ‘fantasy’, that people can come to terms with their own naturalness. Only thus, via a shared imaginary, can a human being, in Jung’s words (1972: 44), ‘find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger’.

We have, in other words, a genetic substratum with conflicting impulses which at the most elementary level are balanced instinctively and physiologically. Sexuality as well as the (biological) prohibition of incest are regulated by the limbic system, which itself, as Vroon (1994: 109) explains, is an outgrowth of the smell functions. This brain segment in later development also becomes available for regulating the rearing of offspring, body language, play, emotional development, and operational learning. In this more complex field, fantasies made explicit by signs and words connect individual experiences into the explanatory narrative of a myth. As a vector of spiritual socialisation, myth, like social ritual, functions ‘to transmute events into a form of knowledge, learning, and consensus which modifies the behaviour of those involved and others who are affected’ (Nieburg 1970: 63). Nothing of this is optional; in an early community, collective and individual behaviour hang together in the strict observance of the rituals and the belief systems into which they are inscribed. That is the disciplinary aspect of culture – to allow deviance would mean putting the unit in jeopardy. I come back to this below.

Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of the structure of (ethnogenetic) myth (1962, 1989; Carroll 1977) is based on the assumption that (a) the mind (the embodied, extended, and distributed mind) seeks to neutralise opposites through mediation (finding a psychological ‘way out’ of disturbing binary distinctions); and that (b) these mediations, once made part of a narrative, obey particular rules of transformation in which symbolic roles tend to be reversed. Now it may well be that there are aspects to Lévi-Strauss’s methodology for interpreting myths which have been derived, as Mounin argues (1970: 199–214), from a problematic reading of linguistics. But the basic idea is compatible with the aforementioned properties of early humans’ instinctive mental configuration. Early myths seek to mediate the extremes and in the process tend to shift roles (though not always reverse them: it is enough symbolically to reconcile or ‘neutralise’ conflicting emotions). Victor Turner’s description of social ritual (as in Taylor 2007: 49) puts it thus: ‘Every opposition is overcome or transcended in a recovered unity … [as] a means of putting at the service of the social order the very forces of disorder that inhere in man’s mammalian constitution.’

The emotionally disturbing aspect of incest has been recorded in various mythical narratives in ways that end with a reconciliation of antagonistic forces, often by a comforting displacement to neutral terrain. A myth of the Papua of Waropen, recorded by van Baaren (1960: 83), tells of a man who kills himself out of shame over an incestuous sexual act. From his dead body originate the sago palm and the banana. Thus his transgression and the atonement combine into the staple food, the source of the life of the community. Shame is also central in the myth of Tane, the god of the forests and birds of many Polynesian communities. Tane emerges victoriously from a struggle with other deities and, as we learn from Panoff (1973: 493), he creates the first woman, Hine, out of clay. Then he mates with her. When Hine finds out that her husband is also her father, she is overcome with remorse and flees to the underworld to become its resident queen, Hine-Nui-Te-Po, the Great Lady of the Night. Because incest brought death into the world along with humanity (the offspring of Tane and Hine), Hine in her dark abode presides over the dead. Here two separate binary oppositions, life–death and lust–repulsion, are reconciled through a single narrative. Thus the individual who is subject to ambivalent, fear-inspiring emotions is reassured by a comforting, ‘authoritative’ account making sense of it all.

The neo-Sudanese civilisations of Mali and Ghana have a comparable myth, in which incest is seen as an aspect of the disorder brought into the world by the first offspring of divine masculinity and nature. In a myth of the Dogon tribes of Mali recounted by Bastide (1973: 527–8), the supreme god Amma creates Earth and marries her. However, the clitoris of the Earth, represented by a nest of termites, rises up against the divine phallus and Amma is compelled to cut it out before taking possession of her. Out of the union with Earth, thus subordinated by mutilating her, Yurugu is born; it is he from whom all mischief springs. Being without a partner, he commits incest with the Earth, his mother. Not only do wicked bush spirits emerge from this act, but the Earth becomes impure too, as evidenced by the first appearance of menstrual blood. Amma then turns away from his initial creation and continues his work by creating the eight ancestors, four male and four female, whose descendants go on to populate the world. The reality that humanity forever faces evil is thus explained by the fact that Amma inadvertently began his creation by initiating a series of incestuous unions before he got the better idea.

Many more such tales are on record, but this should suffice to illustrate the structure of contradiction and resolution that Lévi-Strauss proposes. But can we really claim that such stories are extensions of mental material from the instinctual, hominid past, as Smail maintains (2008: 48–9), and not just literary inventions? Le Bon (1952: 45) writes in this connection that ‘the starting point of the [crowd’s] suggestion is always the illusion produced in an individual by more or less vague reminiscences, contagion following as the result of the affirmation of this initial illusion’. Freud agrees (1967: 126–7) that the ‘archaic heritage of mankind includes not only dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experiences of former generations’, specifying that these consist of ‘thought-connections between ideas which were formed during the historical development of speech and which seem to be repeated every time the individual passes through such a development’.

Jung’s archetypes, such as the mother (mother deity, Mother Earth), can also be understood as such trace elements. These symbolic figures do not come with a story attached. We are conscious of their potential narrative possibilities and implications holographically, Vroon explains (1994: 61), as fragments with the hint of an integral ‘truth’ that still requires narrative articulation. Witzel (2001: 4.4) may therefore be right that Jung’s archetypes are not universal, but that does not mean that such inborn mental shapes do not exist; they have simply been elaborated into myths in some cultures and not in others.

Having memories before we are conscious of them is possible because all matter contains information, which can combine at a distance and non-causally. The experiments of Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky in 1935 established that photons separated from a pion in a beam of light carry information (left- or rightward spin) that is ‘memory’ from a state of the combined particle that no longer obtains. Einstein was at a loss to explain this, famously referring to ‘spooky interactions’ (as in Park 1989: 423–4). With quantum mechanics, however, such events were found to be entirely predictable. Renfrew’s claim that the mind is embodied, extended, and distributed remains the supposition. Yet once we assume that brain matter too may hold content dating from preconscious experiences, it can be argued that social consciousness draws on that source as well. In this way, again according to Smail (2008: 117), a community will be endowed with ‘moods, emotions, and predispositions inherited from the ancestral past, where they evolved at the intersection of human biology and human culture’.

Humans become aware of this inheritance once they activate and interpret the mental substratum holding it. They also continue to ‘remember’ facts about the world (in which their brain evolved along with everything else) when they begin investigating it. Kepler and Kant were among those who speculated that there is an element of recognition in cognition; Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist and a co-author with Jung, claims (as in Park 1989: 238) that ‘becoming conscious of new knowledge [is] a coming into coincidence of pre-existing inner images in the human psyche with external objects and their relationships’. In the final analysis, brain matter is just a slice of all other matter, and whilst the creative ability to combine and totalise is crucially mediated by social consciousness, an inner material connection obtains too.

Sacred Time and Transcendence

That a community solves the contradiction between its own separate existence and the humanity of others by not recognising them as humans can be traced back to how collective memory is constituted. People’s primary affiliation is not with other human communities but with their own ancestors, who reside in a sacred sphere remote from daily experience and yet all-embracing. Ghanaian tribesmen denote this abode as ‘time immemorial’ (Apter 1968: 83); Australian Aborigines call it, ‘the dreaming’ or ‘dreamtime’ (from the Aranda word alcheringa, May 2003: 30–2). A.P. Elkin (as in Priestley 1989: 141) mentions other Aboriginals’ use of ‘the great time’. Eliade (1964) refers to illo tempore (‘in that time’). J.G. Bennett speaks (as in Priestley 1989: 273) of ‘eternity’. Eternity in Bennett’s analysis constitutes a ‘second dimension’ in the context of the three-dimensionality of time.

The community becomes aware of itself as distinct from others by tracing its origins to the sacred universe of second-dimension time. Ethnogenetic myth is therefore also cosmogonic myth. ‘The grappling with cosmogony implies a vision of reality in which all Being is essentially cosmogonic’, van Binsbergen writes (2005: 343b). ‘All human life [is] a challenge to participate in the cosmogony of Being, and all initiation, all ritual, all intimacy, all making, nothing but a reviving of the fundamentally cosmogonic nature of Being’ (hence he rejects Witzel’s 2001 claim that sub-Saharan and Australian myth is not cosmogonic). Every cultural practice serves to ensure that earthly existence remains embedded in the larger, sacred scheme of things. This centrally concerns the observance of the prohibitions of totemism – not eating the totem animal, the symbolic ancestor, and no sexual intercourse within the same totem community (clan, moiety; Freud 1938: 54).

Let us follow through the steps by which the three-dimensionality of time can be reconstructed as specifically human, community-specific, and temporal (in the sense of historical).

The first dimension of time concerns the linear succession of moments, straightforward clock time. However, as Bennett argues (as in Priestley 1989: 273), this would not allow us to situate ourselves in the flow of events. ‘If there were no other time but this, existence would be whittled away into an elusive present that is gone as soon as we reach it.’ Piaget (2001: 133) conveys the same when he notes that the time of sensory–motor intelligence ‘consists solely in co-ordinating successive perceptions and (also successive) overt movements’. The mind here relates to ‘a succession of states, linked by brief anticipations and reconstructions, but never arriving at an all-embracing representation’. The ‘now’ in lived time – not a static point, but ‘the gathering together of past into present to project a future’, as Augustine described it in the Confessions – must be recognised in its full complexity. This implies, Taylor comments (2007: 57), that ‘as well as the horizontal dimension of merely secular time, there is a vertical dimension, which can allow for the warps and foreshortening of time’. Hence ‘everything relates to more than one kind of time’.

In the second dimension, then, time loses its chronological quality and merges with space. The arrow of time can spin around freely, just like a compass needle as it approaches the magnetic pole. According to Piaget (2001: 133), the mind in this condition

breaks away from … short distances and physical pathways, so that it may seek to embrace the whole universe including what is invisible and sometimes even what cannot be pictured; this infinite expansion of spatio-temporal distances between subject and objects comprises the principal innovation of conceptual intelligence and the specific power that enables it to bring about operations.

An ‘all-embracing representation’, he continues in the same passage, ‘can only be established if thought makes [the succession of states, anticipations and reconstructions] simultaneous, and thus releases them from the temporal sequence characteristic of action’ (emphasis added). This is possible because of the reversibility of linguistically articulate thought, in contrast to the irreversibility of sensory–motor functions and the perceptions associated with them. In the second dimension, ‘[human] thought always remains free to make detours’ (Piaget 2001: 45). It is the suspension of temporal sequence (or spatial distance, for that matter) that lends both dreams and myths their ability to connect disparate events symbolically, bring back the dead, and so on. Myth, van Binsbergen writes (2005: 326), tends towards timelessness, ‘an overwhelming mythical present’. Or in Nandy’s words (1988: 59), myth ‘allow[s] one access to the processes which constitute history at the level of the here-and-the-now’.

Paradoxically, it is only in the second dimension that a sense of direction can occur. Bennett sees it as the dimension in which alternative paths of change, ‘potentialities’, are thinkable. The narrative sequences and time-independent displacements by which the conflicting impulses of the instinctual repertoire are elaborated into myths rely on the timelessness of second-dimension time. Yet whilst the consciousness of alternatives is only possible if we project our actions in second-dimension time, we are by definition inactive in that domain, just as we cannot intervene in a dream. No progress is possible, because the sequential concatenation of actions and events is suspended. There must, in other words, be ‘a sort of feedback loop’ with chronological, irreversible action (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 56); or, in terms of the Bennett model, a third dimension of time, that of real-time behaviour framed by the social imaginary.

It is third-dimension time through which movement in the first dimension (the times of chronology, action, and ageing) and mental displacement in the second dimension, in the universe of symbolic consciousness (which as we saw, is community-specific, ‘cultural’), come together again in actual human history. ‘Successive time does not allow choice. Eternity presents us with the choice, but gives us no room to make it. A third degree of freedom is needed to pass from one line of time to another’, writes Bennett (as in Priestley 1989: 273, emphasis added). Only in this third dimension (which he calls hyparxis; Piaget speaks of ‘the final operational level’, 2001: 54), do we reach the point where development occurs, because in this dimension our actions follow some sort of design sourced from the common stock of collective memory. ‘Objectivity’ now becomes possible too, since goal-oriented action is mediated by the awareness of a larger field of possibilities, selectively validated relative to others, and thus decentred from immediate self-gratification (Piaget 2001: 84). Mass delusion, too, is standard fare here; history is necessarily made and experienced through a cultural prism, it is always ‘ethnically’ inflected.

Figure 1.1 Three-Dimensional Time, at a Point ty

In Figure 1.1, first-dimension time gives the real ‘date’, t1y, a point from which time can only move forward, so it always adds up positively. In second-dimension time, on the other hand, the ‘moment’ in eternity, the time of truly human consciousness, may be set at a different point. It can move either backwards into the imagined past relative to t1y, at t2x, or ahead of it, to a point t2z, a ‘utopian’ move by which possibilities that strictly speaking are not yet realisable come into view. Such a perspective is not actually chronological (hence, dimensions). It enables, to name but one possibility, the move away from the ethnocentric consciousness of the initial group, to universalism. Revolutions are the most clearcut cases of such movements of the collective mindset. Operational thought and intelligent action, ‘hyparxis’, is the product of the two time-lines – in the example of Figure 1.1, a regressive movement, so t2x.t1y, is negative.

The figure, for all its obvious limitations, may help to visualise why we can speak of a particular historicity of social time. Meaningful historical action relies on the space-time of the second dimension, in which some conception of eternity constitutes the frame of reference. Self-sacrifice for instance ‘makes sense’ only because action is mediated by ‘eternal values’; it is a choice absent from the instinctual repertoire, in which a voluntary death is not an option.² Eternity, a condition obtaining on the plane of reversible collective thought, in turn requires historical action, ‘hyparxis’, to be connected again to a chronological sequence of events. In the phrase of Masao Abe (as in May 2003: 115), ‘Time becomes history when the factor of spatiality… is added to it. History comes to have meaning when time is understood to be irreversible.’

The figure also highlights the chronology of magic and early religion. The earliest form in which the multidimensional