the great divide of the unspeakable
Can we acknowledge the unspeakable tragedies of colonialism, while maintaining a perspective which values the oneness of humanity? And what does any of this have to do with masculinity?
Along the eastern edge of the Australian continent lies a mountain range which white explorers called “the great dividing range”. So called because it divides the narrow, wet coastal zone from a largely desertified interior. This great divide was a treacherous barrier which prevented explorers from understanding the make up of the whole continent.
In our culture, many find the great divides of postmodern culture war issues also to be be treacherous. The reasons for this reticence are mixed and often quite valid. The ruptures themselves can carry distortion. There can be much fear. Fear of causing unintended harm, of what might happen if we do speak, or, a more unconscious fear as we feel a compulsion to speak on issues we don’t fully understand. There’s a darker source of the reticence too: we humans like to resist change. Especially change which means reevaluating an entrenched world view, or possibly sacrificing one’s own status.
In this post, I’m exploring the particular cultural rupture around race and decolonisation. I’m looking at both postmodern deconstructionist perspectives, and also, perspectives which uphold the unity or oneness of humanity. Many see these perspectives as two sides of a great divide, as if the landscapes on either side are intrinsically opposed or worse, a threat to each other. My sense is that both perspectives can operate together and indeed, holding onto that divide, from either side, deepens and intensifies the chasm.
To help bring the sociocultural toward something which, as therapists or self reflective individuals, we can work with psychologically, I will further explore the historical dynamics through psychological lenses.
But to begin, let me tell a story.
From a colonial genocide, arises a national psyche
When I was 16 years old, in my secondary school library, nestled under a mountain just beyond the southern extreme of that great dividing range, I came across a crumpled book in the Australian history section. Thumbing the pages I realised that I was encountering a part of my history which I had never known but always felt. The book described the "The Black War", a colonial conflict I have now come to know as the Tasmanian genocide. Between 1800 and 1870, almost all of the indigenous people's of Lutruwita, (the indigenous name for Tasmania), were either massacred, died from introduced diseases or starvation, were forcibly adopted into colonial homes, or were otherwise dispersed. The culture, including an ancient Earth based mythological spirituality, was decimated. The indigenous way of living, in harmony with the stark temperate island of my birth, was devoured by the British colonial project. The colonisers valued seal pelts, whale blubber and over time, the pastural settlement of swathes of native grassland for sheep farming to fuel wool mills in the north of England. And they valued all of this, above the lives and culture of the people who were already living there.
Those people, living breathing human beings, were deemed “primitive”, a convenient categorisation to justify the colony. And with each wave of migration and expansion my ancestors took over the native grassland, starving the indigenous people of their kangaroo hunting grounds and further severing the intrinsic connectedness to land. Settler massacres were scarcely policed by the colonial authorities whilst human specimens were shipped back to London for study. European place names such as “Suicide Bay” and “Niggerhead rock” mark massacre sites. Chillingly, some of those names are still in place today.
I feel great shame and sorrow for the crimes of my forbears and what it did to the peoples of Lutruwita. Alongside that, I feel a fury toward the power structures of the time which transported my ancestors there, effectively as white slaves. And while it is tempting to think of these horrors of being only in the past, to do so I feel, fuels this great and unresolved divide.
This is because the impact of this tragedy lives on in the structural and collective dynamics of Tasmania, and Australia, just as the history of the colonial era lives on in the structural and collective dynamics of all post colonial societies. Enmeshed in capitalistic assumptions and class structures, the colonising ideal is so foundational and pervasive, that it is almost unseeable. Until recent social movements highlighted concepts such as “privilege” and “structural racism”, they lived underground, unknown to all, bar those who felt their prejudicial impact everyday. And now, with the awareness stirred up, the great divide has been surfaced. It’s a divide which not everyone can see, nor wants to see. And yet, the surfacing of this divide is where we as a culture are.
On Lutruwita, the genocide was almost complete. As I understand it, only a small population of indigenous peoples live on, all of them descended from mixed racial ancestry. It is often said that “history is written by the victors” - so perhaps no surprise that growing up, the massacres were not discussed and certainly not part of the taught history. While perspectives on Australian convict era history have been revised in the last fifty years, even today in some circles, historians calling out settler violence are labelled as anti-ethical to a nationalist-colonial identity, based largely on an idealised heroic masculine symbol: the convict/settler. Reconciliation between white and indigenous peoples is in process, such as an initiative called “the voice” which aims to constitutionally recognise indigenous perspectives, but such efforts are not without divisive controversy.
Psychologically, social structures, including historical ones, can live on inside of us as intergenerational trauma. The most heartbreaking aspect in the case of the Tasmanian genocide is of the course the indigenous culture: shattered, dislocated and understandably enraged, and yet, determined to repair itself, raise awareness and seek amends for what’s gone before.
In my lineage, it is the trauma of being part of the perpetrator class. This “victorious” role might sound free of trauma, but the legacy is an unconscious shame of the atrocity. Galvanised by the cultural pride of the convict/settler, the shame is pushed down into the cultural unconscious. Further supporting denial, a symbolic, if not literal “blood oath” is folklore in Australian colonial history, where settlers may have conspired to cover up atrocity. This oath lives on as a pressure within whites to not speak up, to not look at shame. To instead, maintain a status quo and to protect the masculine ideal of which a culture is predicated. The pressure is, to make all of this unspeakable.
External histories, internal psychological structures
Racial prejudice has been understood by a variety of psychological theories. Many have written on this, a basic summary is that we are wired to look for difference (threat) on a kind of tribal evolutionary level. Racial attributes represent highly visible markers of difference, hence are ripe for “splitting” (making good or bad) which is a psychological process which allows us to rid our self image of aspects we find intolerable. This leads to the unconscious creation of self (desirable) and other (unwanted) psychological parts. The unwanted contents are projected onto the “other”, so in the case of racial stereotyping, we can project out what we carry of the past. This might be our white history (aggression, invader/coloniser guilt and/or shame) or it might be the racist assumptions of blackness our forefathers held (sub-humanness, objectification or threat). We see strong reactions across racial divides all the time in our culture, evidence of these psychological mechanisms in action.
Jungian Analyst Fanny Brewster, in her work the Racial Complex explores how historic racial trauma is passed down through generations, not as some external politic or philosophy, but by extending Jung’s cultural complex to recognise that cultural values such as supremacy and self-dispossession, are also aspects of psyche which live within. They are within us, though they come from beyond our personal experience. These cultural objects are combined with our own tendencies to split and otherise, evoking unconscious and powerful instinctual reactions. We are beginning to understand how these intergenerational transmissions occur: via epigenetics, repeating developmental experience, and more broadly through the influence of culture.
In the case of Tasmanian and Australian society, the idealised colonial masculine takes hold as a symbol of colonial survival. Then, as the nation forms, this idealised masculine is transferred to soldiers during war, and football stars during peacetime. Now it’s important to hold a bifocal perspective here: the masculine image I’m describing is not entirely bad, and has certainly contributed to nation forming. But to dismiss the shadowy side, is to see only half the story.
In his excellent work Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas Hübl describes collective culture (and trauma) as being mostly invisible “because we are swimming in it”. In the case of the Tasmanian genocide, the persecutor/victor dynamic is not detectable because it is almost universal. A similar function is also true in the case of British structural power. Elite and class domination in culture, media and government is endemic and mostly, it is white. What’s more, detecting it requires willingness, education and a fair amount of psychological strength. It’s no wonder the entrenched power structures are so vehemently resisting a direct assault on that divide. It’s no wonder, so much of this, at least to some, remains unspeakable.
Colonialism as a distortion of the archetypal masculine
To frame these collective and cultural external dynamics within an internal psychospiritual model, we may consider the distortion of masculine and feminine principals – these principals are archetypal energies, configurations of consciousness, which exist in all psyches. And I can’t emphasise enough, that these energies exist separately from sex or gender. We might consider that the coloniser mentality inflates the masculine principal (capitalist extraction) over the feminine (connectedness and belonging to a shared ecosphere).
There is no doubt the archetypal masculine can and has done great good. The manifestation of this archetypal energy includes human advancements in science and technology, in exploring the world, and in infrastructure - from homes that protect us from the elements, to great civilisations. At the same time, it’s been responsible for nuclear weapons, for wars and genocide, and via capitalism, for endangering the biosphere through unfettered burning of carbon. In this sense the masculine is operating in distortion. And through this, the feminine is also distorted. It becomes something to take from, it is idealised and objectified and diminished, or not recognised at all. The universality of the feminine principal, in all humans and of the planet herself, becomes unspeakable.
Archetypes always have a negative pole, the masculine in distortion can be overly dominant or even psychopathic. In addition, the masculine works best when it’s in harmony with the feminine. The harmonious role is, in part, one of guardian and protector of the feminine. Not to take a patriarchal stance of diminishing female power (see my earlier statement, separating biological sex and the archetype), rather to say that at any particular level of consciousness the two energies must be in relationship. At a planetary level, economic systems must be in relationship with both masculine and feminine, not as was the case in colonialism or extractive capitalism. such a balance would demand an ecological stance, which values the feminine and therefore demands that we consider the preservation of the biosphere in all that we venture.
Considering this archetypal energy is important as it then allows us to trace historical influences into our own, present day psyche. Indeed, when we encounter the manifestation of the masculine principal and its distortions in ourselves, in therapy, in our groups and in our organisations, we are working to encounter historical ills of colonialism and beyond. This work is deep and often challenging. It invites us to embrace our own internalised aggressor and extractor, to look at our own greed, our own distortions around competition, and our own need for power over others, either through individual action, or in maintaining an unconscious collusion with a powerful class. In surfacing this and choosing differently, we can tame the distorted energy and reorient toward a masculine that is more attuned. An archetypal masculine configured toward discernment, sacrifice and the protection of life.
We can see this retuning happening across the world, where distorted masculinity in men being called out in business, government, sports and media. The recent downfall of an Australian military “hero” was a powerful symbol of this transformation. The problem, it seems to me, is that the masculine is being criticised, sometimes even vilified, but not replenished. This leads to all manner of problems, some of which, I hope to write on in future posts.
To transform or to suppress?
Returning to my original problem, we might look then at how this transformation is emerging in psychological disciplines. In particular, how perspectives of transcendence and the unity of humanity sit alongside this great cultural divide.
To reflect on this, consider that every social movement bring goodness, and its own complexities. The new-age movement of the 1960s bought to the mainstream the possibility of a oneness of humanity, yet failed to develop personal morality which would counter capitalistic greed or sexual shadiness. The movement existed at a different time, without the fast pace of social media or the pressure of possible ecological collapse - in a sense the context wasn’t as furtive in a day to day sense, and as such, the collective traumas less insipid and prevalent.
In our era, anti-racist social movements, while pointing to important recognitions of systemic disadvantage and real world and ongoing violence and subjugation, evoke powerful emotional responses on both sides. This can be seen as a distortion of a moment, a reason to dismiss change, or we can see it as a complex dilemma that needs our attention. The dilemma is how can we sit with these emotional responses, give them the space to be seen, and with time, for a natural transformation to eventually emerge.
When these difficulties emerge, numerous psychological strategies can be evoked to avoid. By far the most prevalent in my experience, is a silencing. Topics unconsciously deemed “unspeakable” by the collective are completely avoided. More visible are unconscious collusions and defences. Anger and denial spill over to maintain power structures. And intellectual defences can be evoked to rationalise away from the unspeakable divide and often to defend one’s own systemic power. Perhaps the most common in psychospiritual circles is an idealism, “that we are all one” as if cultural complexes don’t exist. While at the level of the eternal there is an inherent oneness to humanity, the danger is in clinging too tightly to this, we dismiss anti-racial movements as “a world gone mad” without ever engaging in the power distortions we carry through our own cultural and institutional inheritance.
So, can we sit with the divide, withstand the tension, without resorting to a for or against? This, I fear, has become a rather revolutionary idea in our current world where the once decades long ebb and flow of sociocultural movements has become compressed into unthinking moments, where a defensive tribalism demands an immediate conclusion as to whether the other is “with or against”. This “friend or foe” assessment occurs in society at large, on social media particularly, and also within psychological disciplines themselves. Yet, when we suppress debate and feeling to adhere to simplistic narratives, we continue the intergenerational oppression. We hold on to the divide, because we’ve found it insurmountable within ourselves.
I would see this frequently in my culture of origin. On the rare occasions the racial genocide was brought up, very quickly, it would be dismissed. The tribe spoke. It wanted unconditional immunity, from any prior wrongs. And if I wanted to belong, I too made these matters unspeakable. It takes great courage to look at past mistakes, it requires a commitment to self exploration, a comfort with mess and making mistakes. And yet, as I shall now explore, it offers the possibility of great reward.
Beyond old divides, toward new evolution
For those of us who have travelled into our own inner divides, it is easy to fall into a belief that “we’ve done the work”. That our “wound” was discovered during our initial training and then, is something that can be maintained within a known frame. This sounds good, and allows us to occupy a position of the knowledgable therapist. Of course, this position is a trap. The truth is that we are all, always, discovering. The antidote to this trap is a willingness to re-examine. In the case of race, class and power, the focal point for that examination must be to look inward, at distortions of the archetypal masculine and the impact this has had our relationship with the archetypal feminine. When these dynamics can be explored, we might find shame and avoidance. We might find an immaturity related to sacrifice. We might find grief and rage, for past failures and current injustices, some of which we have and do perpetuate. And over time, perhaps, a movement toward an inner reconciliation.
Importantly, as expressions of consciousness evolve, and as society grapples with the deeper subtleties of power, we must re-engage through that emergent frame. We need to remain open to cultural movements. To withstand the distortions they inevitably carry, in order to find the good they also contain.
Journeying toward transcendence, through not away from the difficult divides, provides for a new and profound opportunity. Instead of fuelling the divide, could we fuel further inner and outer reconciliation?
The destination of this journeying, is what Ken Wilbur refers to integral (teal) stage of consciousness evolution. That is, a movement beyond the postmodern (green) stage, but one which includes the necessary lines of development to authentically move to the teal. The postmodern stage cannot be bypassed. It is asking us to look at lines of development around ethical, emotional and spiritual intelligences. In this respect, the divides surfaced by post-modern social movements must indeed be the subject of our introspection, and at the same time in order to maintain an integral perspective, we must balance the tension between the various post modern movements. We must work through what each of them brings up in our own psyche, then we must integrate that energy. Hopefully, and eventually, to arrive at a more pluralistic perspective. This approach reinforces the idea that collective change happens through individual psychological work and lines up with the Jungian idea that the most effective form of social activism is personal shadow work.
We can do this work by looking at how we live our lives and the assumptions we make around race and power, but also in the lives and assumptions we may have inherited from our forebears. This examination doesn’t need to be performative, nor an immediate call to action or activism. At least, not as a starting point. Psychologically, the activism is an internal one: to look our own ancestral masculine in the eye. To recognise how he lives on in us, through our actions and relationships to power, race, sexuality and ethics. To embody him, and to offer him a seat at the table of our own wholeness, so his actions no longer live in shadow and can instead be integrated into a greater whole. In this way, other energies, including the archetypal feminine, are resurrected from shadow, where they can facilitate integration and aid deeper, more resilient and rich living.
Psychologically, we might consider the end state goal of this work to be an archetypal masculine who is willing to sacrifice power and who recognises the overt and the subtle ways he keeps another in darkness. More broadly, it is the development of an ability to hold tensions between knowing and not knowing. In allowing, and not responding, and in staying with moments of tension and difficulty. These characteristics at first may seem abstract to the work of this divide, but relate to a balancing of the tension between archetypal masculine and feminine functioning. The meta-question which is being asked, is can the masculine act not for individual benefit, but toward a greater good. To use power for others, and to return the archetypal masculine to its harmonious position of guardian and protector of the archetypal feminine. And in that, can we again begin to recognise the life giving value of the archetypal feminine.
This, clearly, would benefits those around us. It could contribute to a lessening of the burden placed on racial minorities. Extrapolated globally, it could decrease the burden placed on the biosphere. Getting there is work, but it might be seen as the penance for the deep burdens etched by colonialism.
This penance also has an inner reward. For in bridging this divide, we are seeking a return to wholeness which heals the devastating split between our inner masculine and feminine inheritances. This divide, in men and women alike, keeps a painful wound cleft. It denies our own capacity to heal and to love wholly. It not only keeps the other in darkness, it denies a brighter light within ourselves. For in bridging the divide, we are seeking to again know the beauty of the human whole, in ever deepening truth. And in that, we might again know, in body and in mind, that the mother of creation and the planet herself, are not of across the divide, but in fact, are of the other that lies within.