Some notes on importance of experiential pluralism for democratic societies

One of the most important features of a contemporary democratic society is its allowance of pluralism of perspectives. The term perspectives designates various viewpoints through which we are looking and co-constructing the world. The great postmodern revolution of the recent times includes dramatic deepening in our understanding of how pluralistic systems of society actually are beneficial for its growth and development towards greater goodness.

Human rights movement of 1960's liberated human consciousness for more encompassing modes of interrelations among people of different sociocultural, psychological, and biological backgrounds, with an emphasis being made on equality among people no matter what their social status, race, creed, etc. are. Recent trends in social sciences, hopefully, point towards emergence of even more sophisticated forms of liberation that emphasize equally both individual differences and commonalities in coherent fields of global unitas multiplex. These newly emerging systems of perspectives allow complexities to appear in people's judgments regarding relative depth and value of various occasions. They increasingly take into account developmental data that points to the fact that human beings and, hence, societies are not simply heterarchically-organized entities (where everyone is absolutely equal in all aspects to everyone else); humanity also develops hierarchically, with each new level in its evolution becoming an even more liberated opening towards both autonomous freedom and active social inclusion simultaneously.

This hierarchical nature of evolution, which dialectically brings new freedoms and challenges, can be illustrated by the very history of the humankind. For instance, slavery blossomed in the premodern epoch as a necessary evolutionary adaptation for various human societies to survive in the times when there was main emphasis on agricultural modes of production and the societies themselves had not developed complex sociocultural structures to support individual freedoms yet. Later on, when modernity was brought forth by the Age of Enlightenment, the development of machinery allowed more evolved industrial modes of production to undo the adaptive necessity of slavery, which freed space for new insights into the nature of individual freedoms (hence the famous "all men are created equal"). With the information revolution of the postmodern turn, humanity's capacity to linguistic self-reflection once again was deepened; and the basic notions of what being human actually means underwent the process of major re-visioning, resulting in conscious expansion of freedoms toward groups that previously were minorities and whose interests did not count at all in the eyes of the dominating sociocultural structures. "All men are created equal" now is interpreted not as "all white men of European descent are created equal" but as "all men and women, regardless of race, creed, color, nationality, political standings or personal background, are created equal."

The next step in the liberation movement is going to be the emergence of capacity to make complex moral judgments so as to preserve and encourage these newly developed freedoms. That is, on the absolute scale all men and women and phenomena are equal, but on the relative scale in order to preserve these newly achieved freedoms we, the people, have to coordinate and manage historically more ancient worldviews, which according to developmental science are still present throughout the world and in your very own development (every person in his or her development has to go through narcissistic clan-mentality stage first, then through mythic-sociocentric slavery stage, then through rationalistic stage, then through pluralistic stage, and so on), from unrestricted self-expression because it would limit others and eventually undo the hard-won freedoms of increasingly pluralistic society, which by definition allows these various worldviews and worldspaces to exist without oppressive discrimination. Therefore, everyday we have to make quite sophisticated moral judgments and apply complex forms of non-oppressive discriminating wisdom so as to support healthy equilibration of the entire (hieroheterarchical) evolutionary spiral. (For further information see, for example, works of J. Habermas and K. Wilber.)

Sociocultural liberation that includes increasing openness to pluralism brings forth multitudes of lifestyles and worldspaces, with each of them being a domain of relatively unique experience shared in the consciousness of those who co-enact this particular worldspace. Emergence of pluralism of perspectives means inclusion of pluralism of experiences into the system of experiential phenomena that are allowed to be experienced by today's human beings. In contemporary forms of democracy I am no longer obligated to exercise and publicly worship a single system of beliefs and dogmas, and I am given the right to publicly defend my perspectives in the face of my community (even though, developmentally, some of my higher intentions can be interpreted as lower ones). Had it not been the case, it would have been a characteristic of a totalitarian society. Any worldview that I exercise includes certain attitudes and perspectives molded by the meshwork of intentional, biographical, biological, social, and cultural influences. These perspectives shape my consciousness; and the more open the system of my beliefs is, the more open I am to different phenomena in consciousness, and the more abundant my being-in-the-world becomes.

Just as certain political or philosophical attitudes and perspectives can be favored (encouraged) or prohibited (discouraged) in a certain society, any other experiential phenomena whatsoever can suffer the same fate. Some of them are quite obvious. E.g. various criticisms successfully showed that the worldview of extreme scientific materialism, that is scientism, that is physicalism, is a system that favors solely extroverted formal-operational cognition and the myth of the given in its modern form (the latter means ignorance of the tetra-constructed nature of reality and lack of linguistic self-reflection and self-criticism about one's own foundational scientistic beliefs). Scientism can be characterized by rigidity, sometimes pathological, in the way how a person perceives the self and the world while being unconscious about his or her exclusive attachment to that particular worldview. Usually, such an individual does whatever he or she can so as to stay agnostic (i.e. unknowing) about one's own limitations, fixating at the rational structure of consciousness and doing the best at attaching to it. That person harshly attacks and ridicules anybody else who doesn't exhibit the same beliefs he or she identified with. Such kind of people tend to form their own societies and social groups and strive for obtaining dominance in the sociocultural sphere. 

When they actually start dominating, as it happened with psychology during its unfortunate regression into naive behaviorism and reductionism in the 20th century, this may result in a dramatic narrowing of consciousness towards its most materialistic and gross appearances. Anything resembling psyche, soul, and even consciousness fearfully disappears from the discourse; and the system of scientistic totalitarianism starts to prevail. Charles T. Tart in his recent book The End of Materialism explores this kind of worldview which he calls the Western Creed, for it is a type of worldview that is largely practiced in the today's society. He even provides a very simple exercise that brings more awareness to essential aspects of this point of view (it can be accessed online). This simple exercise experientially demonstrates that attitudes and perspectives we entertain directly influence the state of consciousness we are in. And here we probably come to the main reason why I started writing this post.

A truly democratic society allows multiplicity and pluralism of perspectives to be exercised. Perspectives include not only ideas and political gestures but also states (and structures) of consciousness. The more a given society is tolerable to varieties of expressions of consciousness, the more it is democratic in the best sense of this word. On the other hand, if a particular society chooses to cultivate a limited and outdated perspective on allowed states of consciousness, this may limit a lot of its creative potential and negatively affect its overall health. Historically, experiencing altered states of consciousness has been a crucial component of human life and growth; furthermore, it is dynamic variability of states of consciousness that significantly facilitates the process of dis-identification from earlier stages of development, thus allowing new, more evolved perspectives to emerge (e.g. see a useful article on the higher stages of human development: Hartman & Zimberoff, 2008).

It is interesting that just as we can speak of an individual psychograph, we can probably draw a psychographic portrait of a culture in terms of average states distribution. In Russia, for instance, there are very few socially legitimate sources of altered states of consciousness induction. The only consciously encouraged states of consciousness are the state of gross wakefulness (which has very limited creative potential) and the state of alcohol intoxication (which is the only allowed widespread mind-altering drug). In terms of illegal drugs, there is a catastrophic epidemic of heroin consumption (there is a lot of corruption in police related to illicit distribution of opiates, which is a huge illegal market). Even though opiates are as illegal as other psychoactive substances in Russia, it is unfortunately the most common drug. 

Basically, what we have in Russia is the lack of culture of altering one's own consciousness by safe means. The only two accessible and widely used psychoactive substances are alcohol (legal) and heroin (illegal). (Of course, poor-quality illegal hashish is also widespread.) According to some estimates, these are in the top 5 most dangerous and harmful drugs to consume (along with cocaine and some other substances) (Science and Technology Committe, 2006; see also the 31 July 2006 BBC article). So if we are to draw the cartography of drug-induced altered states of consciousness that are allowed in the Russian culture, we can actually deduce some of essential features of the average Russian consciousness out of our knowledge of these substances' psychopharmacology. Let's look at a very useful diagram (© David McCandless, informationisbeautiful.net):

Alcohol is considered a sedative hypnotic; heroin belongs to the category of narcotic analgesics. Both substances are depressants (the yellow circle) and that means that they diminish certain aspects of mental and physical functioning. Alcohol intoxication is considered a socially accepted norm in Russia (cf. information on long-term effects of alcohol, especially on the nervous system); heroin intoxication is more in shadow but nevertheless pretty common, too (the statistics is devastating [cf. Rigbey 2009; Illicit Drug Trends in the Russian Federation (UN Report) 2008]). Therefore, as we can see, the band of accessible drug-induced states of consciousness is very narrow. This is very sad because Russia actually has a good tradition of altered states and psychedelic research (Spivak 1991), the knowledge of which could be put into good use (while the current social politics concerning drugs is too simplistic, unprofessional, ignorance-based, and indiscriminate).

Now, doesn't it make you wonder how this rigidity in terms of accessible altered states shapes  consciousness of a common Russian and contributes to the sociocultural catastrophe in that culture?