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May 17, 2006

Single Vision and Newton’s Sleep

At the beginning of the Industrial Age, William Blake penned these words,

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep!

More than thirty years ago (1972), Theodore Roszak wrote a breakthrough book based upon William Blake’s visionary poetry and prophetic voice, which foretold where, as a society, he felt certain we were heading. We are either there now, or dangerously close. In Where the Wasteland Ends Roszak warned that society (American society, in particular) was moving in a direction in which some “Single Vision” might overtake and so dominate us that it would begin to ruthlessly stamp out any other way of seeing or being, destroying all pluralism and the rich diversity that makes life itself possible, and crushing any real creativity.

Whether natural, scientific, political, or religious, we see evidence everywhere of the fulfillment of the double warnings (Blake’s and Roszak’s), and the rise of Blake’s “Single Vision and Newton’s sleep.” We live, it seems, in a world where tolerance toward diversity and pluralism is suspect and in danger of being crushed out by various forms of fundamentalism. Fundamentalist forces (the Single Vision) have joined together to assert themselves. This is particularly true in the current marriage of religion and politics so prominent today in American culture.

At the hands of Neo-conservatism, religious Fundamentalism, Scientism, Capitalism, and all the other “—isms” that stalk our social landscape, we are at risk of succumbing to the Single Vision that Blake so feared. Beginning in the Greco-Roman world as the religious agenda of imperial Christianity under the auspices of the Emperor Constantine, uniformity and conformity became the hallmark of western society. This “psychology of single vision” was carried forward by Christian civilization in the West into the Scientific Revolution, says Roszak, and, alienating natural philosophy, it achieved cultural supremacy in the modern world, betraying its brightest ideals (107). So, Roszak wrote his critique in which he says,

… I will be calling the orthodox consciousness of urban-industrialism by the name William Blake gave it—single vision. It was his term for the narrowing of the sensibilities we often refer to as “alienation” today. My main interest is in the cultural transformations from which this psychic style stems and the force it exerts upon our politics (76).

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