I understand that the word "holistic" has seen increasing circulation as a popular hollowed out buzzword, but there are often good reasons for useful words becoming popular and then steadily hollowed out, whether many of those words' users understand those reasons or not. Setting aside the tacked-on buzzword quality though, I do like the concept of holism and find it useful to think about. Seeing as how my thinking and writing seek to make responsible use of a form of holism, I was thinking it might be a good idea to tease out what that might mean.
Once one dispenses with the simplifications of the buzzword itself, it can actually be quite difficult to properly describe holistic thought which is done well. So I'm going to work around it with a meandering discussion and some metaphors.
Now, this is a pretty coarse simplification, but in the Western tradition - and you could say this is a tendency over time in an aging civilization in general - there is a tendency towards empiricism and materialism in which knowledge and inquiry, and general productive and cultural activity, become ever more specific, detailed, and specialized, with a direct anchoring to verification of the senses, in service to the senses, which must be written down or recorded in turn.
Collectively we've been through enough crises of knowledge and action in which instantiated abstractions that were for the most part descriptive and functional were increasingly exploited by powerful actors to obstruct reality and manipulate large swathes of the population for various ends. You can take the classic example of Enlightenment era market states seizing the reigns from the feudal theocracies, though of course it is always much more complicated than that.
Part of this dynamic is a gradual anchoring into the material and verifiable as a greater organic trust breaks down, and simultaneously civilizations tend to become more and more focused on doing things materially, and their growth and success produces and accompanies a growth in material mass and complexity that a given civilization is responsible for sustaining and maintaining, which necessitates an increasing emphasis on that material mastery and doing.
And if you want to do specific things, you tend to have to focus on those things, penetrating down further and further into their inner workings, detecting ever finer distinctions and contrasts which can be leveraged to manipulate those things materially. The problem with this is that the more you do this as an individual, the more time and energy you spend focusing, and you have to ignore more and more of the surrounding reality connected to that thing you are focusing on.
This works just fine if you are supported by large communities of people who are working on all of the various branches of labor division together and mutually supporting each other through their separate but connected efforts, and the greater system itself can be trusted to maintain those branches individually, and then harmonize those branches collectively, in the interest of some greater organic whole and its overall health and stability. In fact, I think this is one of the key components that can achieve the soaring heights of what a given civilization can do materially, and makes up the underlying tissue and function underneath those myths of legend in which great societies achieve astounding feats of material power and efficacy, which in turn sustains great feats of cultural and political power and efficacy, and vice versa.
But then what happens when all of that starts to come apart - which we've covered here aplenty - as it seems to inevitably do throughout history? Like the inattentive sniper that is snuck up on, people that are in the middle of hyper-focusing on a given branch of labor suddenly become aware that there are others around them, creeping up, looking to step on them and eat their lunch. And you do need lunch to do intensive specialized labor.
I remember fairly late into the Bush Jr. era, there were still a lot of professionals that just didn't want to think about those lousy, lying politicians, and the government was good for nothing anyway, and it was better to just keep one's head down and trust the private sector. These sentiments still remain to be sure, but there has been a steady expansion and intensification of political consciousness, especially in the last decade.
Underneath this steady expansion were various countervailing and contradictory cycles, to be sure. In the US, the Left was particularly vibrant in the Bush years, and seems to quiet down a bit more in the course of Democratic administrations, with the Right steadily getting louder about encroaching socialism during those Democratic administrations, and so on. A lot of people were genuinely concerned about politically manipulated conceptions of terrorism for example, but a lot of that was compartmentalized as well, in favor of getting on with the day and tending to one's immediate family in the confines of one's single family home.
After the financial crisis there was a growing and widening politicization and hatred of economists and financiers, And the Obama era saw an upsurge in broad hopes for reform and rejuvenation, which quickly gave way to disappointment and then bitter cynicism. And then the Covid pandemic really sunk in the notion of systemic dysfunction and widespread abandonment. Now in the 2nd Trump era, it seems one can't get away from the political dimension, that constant interrogation of the nature of our interrelations and their structure and function. You see politics emerge in just about every conversation, with professionals everywhere struck by the uncertainty and the paralysis and the growing instability.
It is in the deepest advancement of our atomization and alienation that the issue of our relations and their nature has become most compelling, which mirrors the general nature of contemporary action in this country: we don't do reflection and maintenance, just constant outward expansion and indulgence until hard limits are met and there is a crash, and then we react ad hoc to that crash, learning little, patching wounds to facilitate the resumption of further expansion and further crashes until we more completely exhaust ourselves and arrive finally at rock bottom, where immediate expansion is no longer possible.
When everything is working together well, the more fundamental processes underwriting that wellbeing tend to disappear in the background. This is the nature of stability: when we begin to trust a thing, it becomes taken for granted by its very nature. This is a good and desirable thing for the most part. It allows one to focus one's attention and energy on increasingly complex pursuits that build upon those stable fundamentals, strengthening and augmenting their power. But when that stability is won with ceaseless exploitation without reciprocation, then you are steadily eating away at those very fundamentals that have begun to disappear from conscious awareness, by a matter of course. Even further, you are gradually wedging apart from the bottom all of those many branches of labor division that are themselves in a steady, meandering process of separation by their own nature. What's more, this is a process that tends to worsen unaddressed due to its emergent invisibility, and the damage reveals itself through failure and crisis.
This is a process that seems to bedevil that evolving form of human organization we loosely call "civilization," which through time tumbles its way from breathtaking expansion and achievement to terminal decline and crash, after which it picks itself up and dusts itself off somewhere else in a different form, and over time, a certain tendency and way of being is engendered and edified and strengthened.
So what happens when things start to go wrong? As Marx put it, "every separation is separation of a unity." And those dysfunctional separations tend to be separations of an increasingly dysfunctional unity, which is malfunctioning together and thus the whole is jeopardized.
To repeat a previous point, all of those underlying obscured fundamental processes become more visible by virtue of their increasing dysfunction. And as time goes on, there is simultaneously an isolating and separating-out and focusing-in of the more simple and fundamental elements going wrong and then a grouping together of those reconstituted and rectified elements together into a new working complex unity, after having collapsed and scrapped the previous dysfunctional complex unity, as far as the rot goes anyway, with as much as possible salvaged for convenience, as the tendency goes.
Let's run through a quick material metaphor to illustrate and personalize this process and drive this point home. And then I'll relate all this to my own position on holistic thought and writing, and then we'll wrap this up.
Take modern central heating. You press a button, or you have the thermostat set to a certain desired temperature, and upon being triggered, the entire system hums to life, sending heated air into an enclosed space until it is the desired temperature. If your enclosed space is well-sealed and insulated, the energy you use to heat the space goes to more efficient use, as it takes less energy to get the indoor heat up, and the indoor heat is maintained for longer periods of time with the same amount of energy.
For someone who likes to read and think and write, this is a wonderful thing. You alter some settings, the space heats to the temperature you want, and you can focus time and energy on the things you like to do best. But for this set of conditions to hold up, you need to have a couple of things going for you. Modern heating systems tend to be either heating elements powered by electricity, gas-fired heaters, or oil heaters, all of which are typically assisted by electrical fans that move the hot air through venting to the desired locations, and these systems are generally coordinated and controlled by some sort of electrical analog or digital console.
Much of this prefigures electrical wiring, various combinations of aluminum and steel, steel piping and various types of gaskets and threading and joinery for gas applications, an entire complex of gas or heating oil extraction and distribution, productive industry for the infrastructure and the actual hardware, various associated extractive industries for materials, electrical infrastructure for the electricity, plastics and computer chip production, and the entire body of specialized and skilled labor to produce and run all of those industries, distribute all of those products, install and maintain all of those products, and so on. And we're just talking about the dang hardware and the energy that makes the hardware go. You have to have enclosed space too to store and implement the hardware, and that enclosed space implies an entire constellation of construction trades and materials. And the entirety of all of this is capitalized and distributed on the open market. In other words, it all costs money, all of which is constantly negotiated by a multitude of people, and you have to have social permission to get some of that.
When it is all working together, this is a wonderful and powerful arrangement. But what happens when any little part or resource is held up in that web, such as through trade disruptions like the kind caused by an imposition of tariffs (a goddamned can of worms we'll have to open another time) or resource depletion? Or what if one can no longer acquire the money required to maintain the constellation of requirements, such as maintaining the hardware or paying for gas or electricity? Or what if one lacks the means to hold the space required to contain the heating elements and the climate control, such as when one can no longer pay rent, because a small minority of humans have subverted the political economic means of distribution?
So in order to enjoy a certain type of lifestyle, I've moved away from conventional housing and heating and the commercial relationships that support all of that, for a whole constellation of reasons, such as a growing personal and environmental instability, a dislike of the dynamics of financial obligation and commercial pursuit, and so on. But this also means forgoing all of the advantages that those things provide.
It it is hard to do all of the other things you want to do when you're cold. Temperatures in the 50's Fahrenheit are doable, and can even be pleasurable if you bundle up a little bit. In the 40's, it starts to get uncomfortable, and you have to pile up the layers and blankets and your basic functionality starts dropping. In the 30's, it starts to hurt, and you have to basically bury yourself in a cold weather sleeping bag and just not do much of anything, let alone read, think, and write.
One way around this vulnerability is to collapse down to a simpler and cheaper suite of technologies, which may also require a spatial readjustment as well. In denser and more polluted areas for example, wood-burning may be restricted or even prohibited, and wood has to be sourced from somewhere further besides.
For the sake of argument, let's simplify the scenario and say that you collapse your heating dependency from an entire complex of central heating technologies and housing and the vast array of human beings and resources required to maintain them, and jump straight down to building fires as an individual to keep warm. If you're cold, you can make some heat yourself with wood, an ignition source, and some air. But what exactly would this require?
First you have to understand the basic elements of fire. You have to relearn how fire is created through a spark to a certain fuel source, a source which is suitably arranged to facilitate airflow while at the same time maintaining the combustion. You have to also pay attention to the state of the fuel: how dry it is and in what state of decay it is, what the species of wood is, how finely it is split, and so on. You have to pay attention to where the cold air is coming from and whether it is getting to the fire, and whether the hot air has somewhere to go.
So, without all of the many people working to produce all of the many elements that sustain the fire that you want, you have to isolate and rediscover all of the elements to produce the fire yourself, and then correctly implement them to achieve the results you want.
This collapsing process of simplification works partly because you are relegating more effort and energy to simpler elements that are governing themselves, as opposed to relying on huge, complicated relations of elements that have to be deliberately arranged in the proper order. So, trees produce and reproduce themselves, pulling energy from their environments to do so. Once they are fully grown, you can cut them down and harvest from them, or otherwise harvest them when they have fallen such as in a storm. The tree itself has done a greater portion of the work for you. Contrast this to the vast chains of human-manipulated elements set in the proper relation to each other, forming central heating infrastructure.
Anyway, once you have the basics down, you can steadily work your way back up the many relations that are working together. Your fire is working, great. Where is that fire going to burn? You've got to burn it somewhere where the fire doesn't catch everything else around you on fire, while at the same time the fire is sustained without going out. So you're learning about different types of stone and what can take the heat and what can't, and then how those things are arranged. There are also ways to arrange vessels for the fire which help it to burn more efficiently, and which direct that heat in more productive ways, such as the iron casing and piping of a wood stove.
Once you get a good fire going, you will feel that radiant heat, and eventually that fire will go out, so you will notice that heat going away to various places unless the heat is trapped within a shelter, so you start paying attention to what type of shelter holds that heat in best, and how the joinery of that shelter can be more tightly bound, and how the sides and roofing of the shelter can be more insulated, and so on.
And then those spheres of mastery keep growing and expanding. Eventually the generalist approach begins to break down, as there is only so much you can accomplish with the time and energy you have, and so you associate with others working on other problems, sharing the products of those others' efforts, and then you are back to forming a division of labor and branching specializations again, which are hopefully all working sustainably together in good synergy to produce a good life.
What's good about this collapse into a simpler suite of technology though? Notice there is a movement here: a whole moving of the sphere of perception and action that fundamentally alters one's circumstances and daily experiences. When there is a holistic movement like this, you get a corresponding holistic change in the entire attached state of affairs, which contains within it a new set of values and effects.
So you move back to wood fire? It takes a lot more work and it makes a mess. You could be breathing in some of that smoke if it isn't managed well. The activity of producing and sustaining it pulls more time and energy from other things you could be doing, such as reading and writing. But it is also quite rewarding to produce your own fire.
You can watch the fire and it is mesmerizing. You can listen to it and it is calming. The light it gives off is pleasant. The smells are wonderful. The actual radiant heat has a different quality to it and feels really good. Producing the firewood takes a whole other set of skills that are satisfying to implement, and carrying, bucking, and splitting the wood takes much more physical exertion that can be pretty satisfying and feel good too. And all of these feelings and experiences get much more complicated with their own synergistic effects when you are optimizing the fire and shelter that the fire heats, especially if you are working with other people to make it happen.
So, how does all of this translate to the writing and thinking here?
What I'm trying to illustrate is that any given thing necessarily implies everything else, and changing your relation to that thing changes your relation to everything else that thing relates to as well. Your thought is necessarily reliant on your surroundings and your activity, and by the same coin, your surroundings and activity can be arrived at through thought, and a movement towards holistic thought requires a recognition of and a reckoning with that state of affairs. But when you start to mess with the whole of it as you become more conscious of the whole - especially as the whole of it becomes more unstable - then you have to pay attention and work with the whole of it to make sure that everything is working right, together. What that entails though is a little more complicated than it sounds.
As we saw with the question of heating, the whole is not necessarily stable until the most basic and pressing elements of that whole are isolated and brought into the proper relation to each other, which means bringing them into the realm of your control, or which otherwise can be safely trusted to govern themselves in synergy with your circumstances. This distinction is actually quite important, and there is a real art to making the proper judgements in this vein.
Where I'm going with this can be illustrated with another naturalistic metaphor. I think of the synergy of this thinking and acting, and how one handles it, much like one handles a transplant in the garden. One handles the entirety of it like one handles the entirety of a transplant.
One uses discrimination and isolation and precision like one uses the sharp, delimited trowel to make the proper cuts around the living sphere of the transplant, so as to move it into the proper relation desired, while preserving the integrity of its living system as much as possible. It is impossible to reproduce through discrimination the actual living soil and the living system of the plant itself, and it is better to let that sphere be and encourage it to govern itself. One can attempt to move it all whole - while discerning the boundaries of what the whole should be, so that the whole of that constituent could be set in proper relation to the greater whole that constituent is part of.
One thinks, and makes distinctions and decisions, yes, reorienting one's thought and one's self in the desired direction. But that is only part of the process. The rest consists of letting that reoriented whole breathe and live and grow in the directions it will, as one can't discriminate and govern all of it. One thinks, and re-orients one's life, and then that re-oriented life produces all sorts of unforeseen effects and consequences that feed back into one's thought, and so one thinks more and re-orients again, and so on, in the hopes of augmenting the multitude of good effects, while diminishing the bad.
We're drawing attention to personal intentionality and action here, but also in play is the nature of what one is taking in. I've mentioned food before: what one eats affects how one feels and functions and ultimately how one thinks, and the same is the case for one's surroundings, as well as one's daily activity and the experiences that activity produces.
Just as important is the form and content of other thoughts that are coming in too. Reading other forms of expansive and holistic thought feeds those expansive and holistic thoughts that are continually developed within one's own self. I'm thinking here of writers like John Michael Greer, who masterfully weaves together history, science, occult thought, myth, and much more, making sometimes far-flung and disparate connections, and you take in that form of thought whole and then process the whole of its relations, synthesizing those diverse relations with your own.
To summarize everything here, thinking is just a small part of the equation if you are dedicated to holistic thinking. You think alongside your daily activity, your life circumstances, your environment, the resources and influences you take up into yourself, your historical position, and so on. You think with the acknowledgement that any given thing necessarily implies everything else.
I could go on describing the many aspects and considerations of holistic thought, but I think I'll stop there. Like I said, difficult to describe. But as always, we'll keep describing it in different ways.
