Once again, I am studying collective personalities.

Personality is an old interest of mine, rooted in two sources: 1) a pathologically obsessive study of Jungian personality theory, and 2) a practice of Vipassana meditation.

From these sources, I learned to question our conventional notions of personality as a unitary, essential, unchanging, stable, enduring mind-being (soul) that neatly zips into a person’s body. I came to understand and experience most souls as non-unitary, contingent, changeable, unstable, ephemeral and mostly independent of bodily boundaries.

A unitary, unchanging, stable, enduring soul is almost miraculously exceptional. Such souls not essentially this way, but a hard-won accomplishments of cultivation. And such personalities almost never stay inside the frame of a human body, but rather radiate beyond the originating person, crystallizing whole communities into living cultures that last centuries or millennia.

(I say “I came to understand and experience” this truth. Another way to say it is that this idea of personhood became a given truth for me, once I learned to perceive and conceive it this way. It was not merely a theory or belief. It was not part of a belief system that could be applied. It is an intuitively self-evident feature of my enworlded reality.)

One of my early experiences of direct perception of this phenomenon came in the late 90s, when I observed personalities forming across individuals — personalities composed of semi-autonomous fragments (at the time I misused the word “homunculus”, but I could have called them “complexes” or “sub-persons”) within individuals, merging to form new emergent “inter-persons”, who possessed more energy, integrity and coherence between them, than existed within either individual. The remainder of each person outside this new shared interperson had no influence over this new interperson, nor did any friend of either of the scrambled former persons. When people fall madly in love, friends can be estranged.

This is just one example. Another can happen on a much grander scale. Moods can overtake entire societies. (This is the phenomenon of zeitgeist.) Or societies can have total personality shifts. Or, as Nietzsche (a man supremely attuned to the workings of superpersons) observed “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda in 1994 are examples of collective madness, where self-perceived victims of other groups turned murderous.

Today, though I’m thinking about personality shifts in disciplinary fields. I think my own field of service design is shifting. Perhaps the whole field of design is shifting. And because Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is still fresh in my mind, I decided to reread this passage, because it explains some of the very unmystical social mechanisms that bring such collective personality changes about.

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon….

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic, ” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

And it was.

I think times when personalities are not cultivated, where independence of thought is rare (yet, everyone unanimously and uncritically believes that their unanimous uncritical beliefs are independent and critical thought!), where each person is taught deep self-mistrust (cognitive bias!) and excessive trust in expert authority and techniques for calculating perspective-neutral truths and ethics — that bundles of subpersons who mistake themselves for persons can be conveniently subsumed and used by superpersons who care nothing about anyone but their collective, solipsistic superself.

What I have called enception is the substance of personhood at all scales.