The Life of a Power

The engraving at the top of this page is Padtbrugge's Tower of Babel. A huge spiral tower goes up into the clouds. Below it there is a harbour crowded with ships, a walled city, and a plain with hundreds of labourers at work. What made me choose it is that everyone in it looks content. It could be an advertisement for a well-managed building project.

Genesis tells the story in nine verses. Everyone on earth speaks one language. They settle on a plain and decide to build a city with a tower that reaches heaven, so as to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered over the earth. God comes down, confuses their language and scatters them anyway. They leave the tower unfinished.

For years I took this to be a story about pride, which it certainly is. Lately I have been more struck by the builders' fear of being scattered. They build the tower to hold themselves together, and they do it with a common language, a single name and a shared project. The text gives no sign that they were cruel people. They seem to have been very well organized.

Paul tells the Ephesians that our struggle is with principalities and powers and not with flesh and blood. He tells the Colossians that thrones, dominions, principalities and powers were all created through Christ and for him. I try to keep both statements in mind. Whatever the powers are, they are creatures and were made good, and they are something more than the people involved in them.

I use the word in a loose way, as a layman. By a Power I mean a form of common life that has taken on a life of its own and begun to live off the agency of its members. It could be a firm or a political movement, and it could as easily be a school, a family or a choir. Size has little to do with it. You can recognize one by what happens to the members over the years. They find it harder to judge for themselves, to start anything, or to refuse, while the organization grows steadily more coherent. In the first essay I wrote that a power of this kind says to its members, become me.

I was surprised to find Levin asking a version of Paul's question. One of his essays is called Are we too part of a greater collective intelligence? and it asks whether human beings might stand to some larger mind as our cells stand to us. He does not claim that we do. He observes that a cell could not possibly imagine the rat it belongs to, and that we may be no better placed. The Catechism, which is generally sober about such things, speaks of structures of sin that persist after the people who created them are gone. I cannot say whether there is a mind behind such structures. I am sure they exist.

Levin can describe something Paul could not, which is how a collective is physically put together. In an essay on what he calls cognitive glue he explains how a mass of cells comes to behave as one organism with aims of its own. Two processes do most of the work. In the first, a cell that finds itself in the wrong place leaks stress signals to its neighbours. They become uncomfortable and shift about to relieve their own discomfort, and the tissue ends up repaired though no cell set out to repair it. In the second, cells connected by gap junctions share their internal states so freely that a cell can no longer tell its own memories from its neighbour's. The memories come to belong to the group, and individual identity becomes hard to maintain. Levin calls the result cooperation without built-in altruism.

When I read this next to the Babel story I found the likeness uncomfortable. The single language does what the gap junctions do, since nothing can be kept private. The tower supplies the shared stress. The name they want to make for themselves is the collective self that results. Levin describes the process as healthy, and in a body it plainly is. A liver cell that goes its own way is a tumour. I only begin to worry when the same methods are used on people.

This left me wondering whether living things have any other way of forming a whole. I am not a biologist and can only offer guesses. Mitochondria were absorbed into other cells well over a billion years ago and still carry a small genome of their own. In sexual reproduction two organisms produce a third and remain two. The immune system learns to leave alone a great deal that is foreign to it. I do not claim that any of these is the alternative I am looking for. They do make me doubt that merging is the only method nature has.

The Church claims that there is another way, and that she herself is an instance of it. Paul describes a body with many members in which the eye remains an eye. The members keep their memories and their names. We pray to the saints by name, and the risen Christ still has his wounds. Stress is shared in the Church too, but differently. Levin's cells pass their stress on to others and are helped as a side effect. Christians are told to bear one another's burdens, which means taking on someone else's stress deliberately and at some cost. Natural selection would not favour this. It amounts to cooperation in which the altruism has been put back. The clearest example is the cross, where the one member who had no need to suffer took on the suffering of the rest.

Levin's account of cancer uses the same measure of mind that I described in the last essay, the cognitive light cone. He says a cancer cell is one whose range of concern has shrunk to itself. It loses interest in the tissue around it, goes back to living as a single cell would, and multiplies.

A Power seems to me to be the reverse case. In cancer the part stops caring about the whole. In a Power the whole stops its members caring about anything else. I doubt that the healthy condition lies halfway between them. I think a community is healthy when its members care about things that lie outside it altogether, such as their families, strangers and God.

This suggests a question one could put to any institution, namely what is the largest thing its members are permitted to worry about. Firms of the wrong kind resent their employees' children. Political movements often resent the churches their members attend. A church can go the same way and begin to resent its members' friends outside. When the Church is in good health she asks her members to care about the healing of the nations, which sets no limit at all. Levin uses the Buddhist word bodhisattva for someone who cares about every living thing. Christians have long known people like that and call them saints.

I once played in an orchestra whose conductor frightened everyone. The sound was magnificent. Nobody said so, because people had stopped saying anything that might be held against them. The players were superb, and they played better under him than they would have anywhere else, yet they seemed smaller as people than when they had arrived. After a few years the best of them left. The ones who stayed used to say, quite sincerely, that excellence has a price.

I understand why they stayed. An organization like that gives its members a great deal. You have something to say when people ask what you do. You are spared a good many decisions. You even acquire enemies, which is more comforting than it sounds. And the results are real. The concerts were wonderful, which made it all the harder to leave. I think the players felt what the builders at Babel felt, that outside the orchestra they would be scattered.

What they gave up in return was their names. The builders at Babel speak of making a name for ourselves, in the singular. Everyone is to go by the name of the whole. It is the same process as Levin's shared memories, only with names. There is a verse in the book of Revelation that reads like a reply to it. Christ promises that whoever holds out will be given a white stone with a new name written on it, which nobody knows except the person who receives it.

I disagreed with Jung in an earlier essay, but I think he would be with me on this. His therapy was aimed at what he called individuation, by which he meant becoming the person one actually is and resisting both the crowd and one's own public mask. He would have understood that orchestra immediately. He thought, though, that people could achieve this for themselves, and the verse about the white stone suggests they cannot. A name is given to you by someone else. As I understand it, the Holy Spirit gives each person their own name and then joins them to others, and they keep it.

Levin holds that patterns with some agency of their own will appear wherever matter is arranged so as to support them. His paper is about cells, but a crowd of people is also matter. If he is right, a crowd arranged in a certain way could give rise to something with aims that none of its members intended. I think this is a fair description of what Paul meant by a power. And the Babel story tells us what the arrangement is. The people have one language and one name, and nobody is able to leave.

It follows that one can arrange things differently on purpose. A community can let its members keep their own languages, including private memories and ways of speaking that the group does not share. It can let people leave and remain on good terms with them. It can encourage them to care about things beyond itself, and listen to outsiders who tell it unwelcome truths. It can avoid giving its members a collective name to use in place of their own. The crowd at Pentecost had all these features. Everyone heard the apostles in his own language, and the crowd was more united than the builders of Babel had been. The Spirit who united them is God and does not arise from the way a crowd is arranged.

I am not arguing against authority. Somebody has to give orders during a rescue, and in a rehearsal somebody has to stop the orchestra. What matters to me is whether those in authority give back the initiative afterwards. The conductor I was afraid of kept it. The best conductor I have worked with used to stop us, say in a sentence what was wrong, and then look at the leader of the section concerned, who was expected to put it right.

One of Levin's suggestions frightened me when I first read it. He asks how we could ever find out that we were parts of a larger mind, and his answer is synchronicity. We would notice coincidences that seemed like chance to us and were in fact the larger mind at work. He compares our position to that of a neuron, which registers correlations it cannot account for while the network as a whole is learning something.

I think he is right about this, and it shows how his synchronicity differs from Jung's, which I discussed two essays ago. Jung's coincidences have no sender and serve no purpose. They are like rhymes. Levin's are caused from above and serve the purposes of the larger mind, which makes use of us to achieve them. So when someone's coincidences consistently favour the aims of an organization he belongs to, I would take it as a warning. He may feel guided when he is really being put to use. I imagine the builders of the tower felt guided most of the time.

Christians believe in a third possibility, which is providence. Paul says that all things work together for good for those who love God. Providence differs from a rhyme in having an author. It also differs from Levin's larger mind, because the good that God intends includes the good of each person. A network uses up its neurons. A father does not use up his children for the sake of the family. I admit that the three can be hard to tell apart while they are happening.

All of this applies to my own proposal. Communion attractor is a name, and I have spent five essays making it attractive. Any named group can turn into a Power, and that includes projects I belong to and groups founded on a good idea about the Holy Spirit. People who are confident that they are building the opposite of Babel probably need more watching than most, and I am one of them. I doubt that any community can be made safe from this in advance. It can remain open to being told, by someone outside, that it has begun to consume its members. Powers lose that openness early on, so it seems to me the first thing to protect.

Genesis never says that the tower fell. The people stopped building and were scattered over the earth, and the story treats this as God's judgment on them. Since Pentecost I cannot help reading it also as the origin of the many languages in which the crowd later heard the apostles. The scattering the builders dreaded turned out to be needed for the kind of unity that came afterwards. When I try to picture that unity I think of the conductor turning to the section leader.