At this point we must underscore the extreme discontinuity in consciousness that Jung perceived to obtain over geographical space and human time. The "primitive"
mind was unimaginably different from the modern European—accessible perhaps only to the trained and expansive imagination of a scholar of the soul like himself—
and
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the mind of India today hardly less so. In large part, of course, that way of thinking was characteristic of the times, full of evolutionary kulterkreis (cultural stages) and nationalistic völkspsychologie theories, which not seldom finished off their Hegelian equations with the proponents' own century and city at the apex. One product of this European mentality was what has more recently been called colonialist if not imperialist scholarship, or "Orientalism," readings of nonEuropean peoples in terms that justified the political and spiritual hegemony of the imperial powers. The twotiered world was in place, even if a sensitive savant like Jung could occasionally indulge in nostalgia for primal simplicity or purity of consciousness, above all when the primordial paradise was also identified with one's own antecedents. In no small part Orientalism was doubtless only a example of the mind's natural tendency to think in dichotomies, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was unchecked in both the political and scholarly worlds by compensating voices, for the European's last redoubt was the unquestioning faith he put in the arcana of his own linguistic and ethnographic sciences. 22
With typical flourish, Jung carried such notions very far toward ultimate separatism, holding that the profoundest structures of thought could be radically different in humans of one time and place from those of another. Then, with no less bravado, he turned the theories on their heads by suggesting that the West also, for all its light, exhibited pathologies as profound as any disquieting the most superstitious "native." He was far from alone in such judgments, especially after the devastation of World War I, which should have suggested to even the dimmest dolt that something was wrong in Europe. But Jung was fairly distinctive in linking the critique to the new
"medical" discipline of psychoanalysis on the one hand, and to the vogue for mythology and folk psychology on the other, bringing the two together. The combination could be explosive, and brought Jung onto dangerous ground. The process by which he came to his distinctive style of critique is of considerable interest.
In a wellintegrated culture, he said, like that of primal humanity, or indeed (in Europe) of humanity up through the Middle Ages, the archetypes—including the Shadow, representing destructive forces—are adequately balanced off in myth scenarios and symbolic symmetries, creating mandalas. Those symbols then provided for the orderly release of the irrational energies that welled up from the unconscious
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fountains of the deep, and so kept society on an even keel. For Jung was quite convinced that rationality is a precious but precarious epiphenomenon on the surface of human life, that our real drives are irrational and far more powerful than reason.
There is a severe imbalance, Jung thought, between the overdeveloped conscious intellect and its instinctive, unconscious roots in modern Western man. Myths can be compensation for that which is lacking in a psyche or a civilization, and so provide clues to the nature of the lost. The hidden gnostic truth, when found again, can awaken deep levels of understanding of the roots of both literature and current events. Faust, Jung asserted, stands as unconscious but protean Shadow over against Goethe's conscious attitudes as a child of the Enlightenment moving toward Romanticism. 23 UFOs are a "modern myth" of circular objects representing the wholeness moderns so grievously lack. 24 Jung considered the 1950 papal promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven to be "the most important religious event since the Reformation," because of its completion of the masculine Christian Trinity with a feminine component, making it a perfect and balanced quaternity. 25
More ominously, Jung later reported that as early as 1918 he had begun to notice a "peculiar disturbance" in the unconscious of his German patients, which had suggested to him that the "blond beast" was stirring. 26 Indeed, in the same fateful Armistice year he had written that, as the Christian view of the world declined, the Germanic monster could ''be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences." 27
Jung had little faith in modern notions of development and progress, for he did not think that such superficial changes in the conditions of human life could really change the equation between the rational and irrational, so heavily skewed toward the latter. In fact, like the volkish thinkers, he saw the situation as actually getting worse, for what modern developments from the Reformation on had done was break up harmonious symbolic outlets for psychic energy, therefore separating people from their unconscious and instinctual natures. The Reformation shattered the symbolic unities of medieval Catholicism; the Enlightenment, by creating the illusion that life could be rational and its worse illusion that the psyche is a tabula rasa, further alienated moderns from life's powerful and rich but irrational sources; the Industrial Revolution augmented the damage as it alienated
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humanity's conscious and psychic natures from each other through its onedimensional and robotlike occupations, and by herding people into the sterile life of urban centers where they were torn from nature, and from traditional communities in which healthy instincts and symbolic harmonies can be nourished.
The result was what Jung, following Ortega y Gasset, called "mass man," humans isolated socially from others, while also separated from their unconsciousness and their instincts. José Ortega y Gasset's celebrated The Revolt of the Masses, one of the last important frank and unapologetic apologies for an aristocratic mentality, fed into the antidemocratic critique of modernity such lines as these:
There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at the present. This fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should or can direct their own personal existence, and still rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilization. . . . It is called the rebellion of the masses. 28
Elsewhere in the same book, Ortega wrote of a new type of man—"I call him massman"—whose main characteristic is that, feeling himself "common," he proclaims the right to be common, and refuses to accept anyone as superior to himself. 29 Yet "mass men'' cannot really do anything by themselves, so they organize the state—