From the book "Kinds of power : a guide to its intelligent uses" by James Hillman. Copyright © 1995 by James Hillman. Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
PART 1: The Changing Heroics of Power
Introduction
Efficiency
Growth
Service
Maintenance
p. 45
Growth
If efficiency seems the road to power and the method of maintaining its hold, so growth seems the proof of power. Therapeutic jargon speaks of "inner growth" that leads to psychological maturity and which translates to mean "in control," taking charge of your life, empowered.
Yet when the word "growth" appears, at least six distinct notions converge. They can be put into a list.
1. Increase in size (expansion or getting bigger)
2. Evolution in form and function (differentiation or getting smarter)
3. Progress (improvement or getting better)
4. Conjunction of parts (synthesis, integration or wider networking)
5. Temporal succession in stages (maturation or getting riper, wiser)
6. Self-generation (spontaneity or becoming creative, independent)
These ideas of growth glow with the hope of betterment, although we all know that getting bigger is not always better, that maturation also means withering and dying and that independence also brings solitude.
Nonetheless, growth remains freighted with positive implications like fertility, hope, good health, progress, optimism, strength, invulnerability, conquest and even life itself: "grow or die." The positive implications persist, despite the fact that a countercurrent has been discrediting the idea of growth in recent years. The six main meanings of the term have lost some of their grip. What once was a sacred cow in both psychology and Wall Street can now be dismembered. We can put the dissecting knife to the term, just as government and industry are putting the pruning knife to growth all through their hierarchies. Growth is becoming a more subtle idea than the naive version suited to a child, where indeed getting bigger, getting smart, getting better, etc., has to be the one indubitable path that leads upward and onward. Nowadays "more" can no longer equate with growth because "more" actually can restrict the possibilities inherent in growth.
I like to think that this loss of faith in one of the basic metaphors of the American belief system, that of unending improvement through expansion, could have resulted from the sophistication brought about by psychology. For we know that our individual personal "growth" did not follow the path we imagined as children: constant progress from four, to very nearly five, to six and then on and on to double digits, teens . . . We each know intimately that the psyche grows through defeats, divorces, depressions, and that every change for the better was paid for by concomitant loss.
That the gears are now in reverse cannot all be attributed to psychological sophistication. Quality has been replacing quantity throughout the nation's desire. Wherever we see increase we feel its weight. All the numbers going up no longer portray the optimistic spirit, but instead indicate monstrosities, epidemics, ugliness, future disaster, extinction. Growth has taken on a cancerous tinge. To use the word now sends a message of potential danger, whether the growth be in the debt, the population, the underemployed, the homeless, the dimension of cities, the size of government, the particles in the air, the tax rate, the cost of living, the cholesterol count, even the rising numbers on the bathroom scale. Going up now means decline. What before was the measure of progress has become a sign of problems.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the reversal suffered by the idea of development---a favorite word both in the economics of urbanism and in psychology. Here, psychology lags behind; it still teaches and promotes development.
The basic lessons of developmental psychology come out of the Victorian armoires of social Darwinism and its version of growth: get big, get strong, win out. Progress is a natural process. Don't get left back; take on your problems like a hero and work them through. These ideas teach psychological capitalism: how inferiorities are overcome and impairments integrated into an ever growing ego that is getting it all together. Developed personalities can do whatever they want. They take charge of their fates.
Psychology is no more aware of the shift in value of the idea of development than are landowners and real estate promoters. For today when the rumor spreads that developers are moving in, citizens cringe and protests form. The developer who once was only the improver has now also become the destroyer, and "developed" land means cut trees, bulldozers, access roads and eventually fast food. We no longer are quite sure which term carries the more ecologically negative connotation: underdeveloped or overdeveloped. Maybe it's neither, but rather that same childish view of growth as good.
But something else is sapping the idea of growth as a healthy solution to the nation's ills. Our hearts have turned in another direction and our heads are following. The lingering aftermath of Vietnam, the diffidence [Latin: 'failing in trust'] and corruption in high office, the faces of the hungry and the bodies of the dying have shifted our focus. Victorious conquest and the grandiosity of expansionism no longer carry the national honor. Smart bombs do not compensate for dumb kids. We have begun to consider our losses altogether differently, so that the attitudes in business offices are no longer as separated as they once may have been from the emotions in therapy offices. Sitting still, reflecting, remembering, grieving and giving in now carry the flag forward---because "forward" is not where it used to be. Going on now means going downward into the faults of our culture and backward into the griefs of its memories. Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment. Mentors, not cheerleaders; mentors, not boosters or Babbitts. Better sadness in high places---Lincoln as example---than endemic depression in the population and the economy. The legendary heroes of the ancient world---Ulysses, Aeneas, Psyche, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysos and even Hercules---all descended into hell to learn other values than those that rule the daily business of sunlit life. They came back with a darker eye that can see in a dark time.
The Vietnam Memorial is black in a dominatingly white-walled capital. That memorial is dug downward, unlike the aspiring needle of the Washington Monument and the growth charts whose arrow always goes up. Visitors today to the political shrines of the nation often aim toward that dark mirror of memory before they climb the stairs and stare up to the oversize images of Presidents in their white Apollonian temples. Can we revise the idea of growth so that the progression it implies can be incorporated into a more matured notion of growth itself? "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things" (I Corinthians 13:11).
Let me propose, then, a second list of kinds of growth that correlates with some of the changes in both our psychological and historical conditions:
1. Deepening
2. Intensification
3. Shedding
4. Repetition
5. Emptying
1. Deepening: The downward direction cannot simply mean decline, since organic models insist that things can't grow upward unless they grow downward at the same time, like most plants. The downward direction differs from downsizing, because downward refers to depth, to the deepening of feelings and relational insights. Thirty years of self-help, marriage counseling and recovery have been influencing the entire nation toward deepening. Deepening in organizations can take many cues from these lessons in the private sphere without following them literally.
Deepening starts with staying with what is happening, staying in the mess. Staying power. This could translate into staying with the organization and in the job. Career advancement would not require transfer and moving elsewhere to broaden and gain experience (or to get out of the present mess). "Gain" is anyway part of the naive growth model. Deepening insists: no avoidance and no escape. Stay planted. No leave of absence. Clean up the mess. Gary Snyder, the poet and philosopher of Nature, declares that the best way, maybe the only way, to change a situation is to imagine, even to declare, that you will stay where you are, in your locale, the rest of your life.
Deepening forces an organization, like a marriage, to go into itself to get to the bottom of its troubles. Going to the bottom does not stop at the bottom line, but goes into those supporting myths and philosophies on which an organization---again, like a marriage---rests. What will be sacrificed to achieve its aims and to whose cost? What corners is it willing to cut? What deceits does it practice? Can it ever be content, or must it be perpetually under pressure for ever more growth, called success?
Eventually, deepening gets down to bedrock ideas and the moral grounds which, like marriage, make partnership in the organization possible. Does this organization have a fundamental vision which I can share; does it desire the same goals; do we practice similar principles? What, truly, realistically, are its principles---and what are mine? Are we joined in a marriage for money? Is our partnership a utilitarian relationship---that is, are we useful to each other, and therefore do I use the business as it uses me? The more I stick with these issues and the more the organization can stay with its own self-questioning depths, the more both I and it may be actually growing (in the sense of growth as evolving and maturing). This growth could be called growth of soul. [For expositions of making soul in daily life, see two books by Thomas Moore, "Care of the Soul" and "Soul Mates," both published by HarperCollins] As in a garden or a marriage, deepening brings ugly twisted things out of the soil. It's a work in the dirt.
2. 'Intensification' in economics refers mainly to those kinds of production that use lots of hands, like intensive farming on small paddies and terraces by peasants as opposed to extensive agriculture over thousands of acres by harvesting machines. I want rather to import the idea of intensification not from the economics of labor but from the mental work of poetry.
Poets in German are called 'Dichters' and a poem is a 'Gedicht,' a 'Dichtung.' 'Dicht' means thick, dense, so that 'verdichten' means to thicken, condense. Poetic language intensifies by packing lots of implications and references into the small space of a word or a phrase. A poem miniaturizes. It is like a computer chip or an optic fiber that carries many messages simultaneously. Such are metaphors.
However, so long as we have not shed the mentality of the child, we tend to be more impressed by expansion. We are a nation with a fondness for grandeur, the biggest cave, the widest canyon, the tallest building. One of the characteristics of an American is this romantic predilection [Latin: ‘to select’ ‘in advance’] for immensity. Intensification goes against the national grain. We can make a comparison with the Japanese psyche, of which it is said, and by the Japanese themselves, that they have invented little. They only made things smaller; for example, the fan, invented in China, but folded and pleated first in Japan.
Corporations intensify by squeezing more return from each hour of labor, each tiny TV bite, each linear foot of marketing space, each dollar of capital investment. They aim to tighten up and crowd more into a single unit. From one perspective this is economic, from another it's poetic.
Going about reductions, cost cutting and doubling up on jobs inspired by a lean-and-mean philosophy isn't the same as intensification in the discipline of art. If it's art, then the intensification must be measured by benchmarks of another kind---that is, quality rather than efficiency. Long-lasting value rather than immediate profitability. A cost-benefit analysis of the labor of art might have to declare it a total loss---or an astounding value-added product (burlap, bottle caps, scrap wire and black acrylic from the hand of a painter who becomes "hot" owing to the efforts of a Manhattan gallery). What makes art compressed is neither the frugal use of materials nor hastening the time of production.
Although business and art both use intensification to achieve their ends, their philosophies widely differ. Whereas business cuts for efficiency, the arts use similar procedures for complexity, meaning and beauty. Could business continue its methods of intensifying but shift the philosophy which the method serves? Could we imagine business tightening and condensing to enhance the beauty of its performance, to offer more interesting complexity to its staff and customers, to contribute meaning to the world its serves? This aesthetic approach offers a more subtle meaning to the idea of growth than simple expansion and suggests the incorporation of values other than those measured by the corporate financial officer.
What counts in art's intensity is the artist's dedication, passion, enthusiasm, ecstasies and sweat. There is a devotional focus to what you are doing---an intensive concentration that seems like obsession to some who declare you a workaholic or job-possessed, especially by those possessed by "family values." But nothing intensifies more than being in love---the love brought to the art of your work and the love in which the work is done. Nothing makes one leaner either, for the whole psyche is concentrated upon the object of desire. Lean, yes, but not mean.
3. Shedding: The customary metaphors of shedding come from the cycle of nature and they feel comfortable: the fall of autumn leaves, serpents slipping their skins, crustaceans leaving their hard carapaces in order to grow larger and the old habits humans renounce on New Year's Day. Other sheddings are less comfortable. They hurt: the pink slip, the closing of a unit or a department, the removal of an entire assembly plant to foreign shores. In both these sheddings, one brought about by necessities of nature and the other justified as economic necessity, only extrinsic (external) activities have been shed. The corporation may cut the payroll by a thousand and the government disband some programs but the intrinsic viability of the whole is not fundamentally touched. The snake, in fact, is now in better shape.
I want rather to suggest 'intrinsic' shedding, not a reduction of frills and perks, not just letting go of nonessentials for the sake of renewal. It's easy to cut fat, especially pork. I mean radical shedding. I take my model again from depth psychology rather than from the cyclical revitalization of nature or from the sort of puritan asceticism that enjoys tightening the belt every now and then and that witch-hunts business, government, research and academic institutions with ethical-cleansing fervor. I am not trying to redeem the pain and loss of shedding by tying it to efficiency, productivity or hope in future growth.
Radical shedding happens in those crises that move in on the soul and cannot be easily fixed. They come often unannounced, at any time, especially as one hits midlife. They may have a specific and immediate cause, such as bankruptcy, divorce, illness; or no apparent cause at all. The very essence of one's organized life is suddenly under fire, or swamped. Like a natural catastrophe.
Can we think in a similar way about shedding essentials in an organization? Can a corporate organization, like a human life, go through a similar sort of shattering insecurity, reevaluation of purpose, decline in self-esteem? Can the organization's identity be placed in question, the principles that govern its daily activities, the accountability of its accounting procedures---that is, the values by which it takes stock of itself? Can it examine ruthlessly its direction, its relations with employees, the public and the environment? Can all that it conceives to be its individuality be shed? Not literally, of course, even if most seriously, just as the crises that assail the individual person are most serious though they do not entail a literal jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. But they do demand radical shedding of those identities to which one is unquestioningly attached.
Think of shedding in terms of the ugliness of rigorous clear-cutting rather than just cleaning up the undergrowth. Or think of it as a forest fire. The catastrophe model does not intend something better, some future growth, although we like to soften the blow by predictions of a positive outcome. I am reaching here for kinds of crises beyond the familiar ones business must face: relocation, incompatible mergers, lawsuits, wholesale desertions, pirating, patent infringements, delayed start-ups, stockholders' rebellion, cost overruns, fraud, embezzlement and so on. I am trying to describe an organization's soul crisis which has no definable cause and therefore cannot be dealt with expeditiously and resolved. The essential shedding seems to be a kind of autonomous natural process of disorder and decay affecting the soul in a corporate body just as it does in a human body. The crisis which forces shedding also forces a philosophical re-visioning, as if the crisis were demanding a discrimination between what must be held and what can be let go, a paring down to the bare-bone reasons this organization exists. Sometimes management tries to head off these breakdowns by means of group retreats, psychological consultants or open sessions aiming to reformulate the mission statement. They may not work because the timing is off---preemptive becomes premature, abortive, if it is not in tune with the seasons of the soul.
What makes shedding so difficult is fear. Like a person, an organization accumulates systems, equipment, procedures, sections---all sorts of redundancies to protect it from the naked fear that it might be steering a wrong course, or worse, failing. So the task of shedding is much like facing the fears in therapy. It is a task of imagination. A patient worries that her husband will leave her; another worries that he is becoming impotent; a third fears going crazy; another believes he has cancer. Therapy says to each of these fears: "Go on." What would it be like to lose your husband, to be impotent, to go crazy, to have cancer? Follow the morbid fear, the irrational fantasy. Take imaginative risks; or as Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent psychologist who has studied holocausts and catastrophes, says, the task is to imagine the real, or to imagine as realistically as possible the consequences of shedding, to visit with the mind the scenarios of catastrophe and letting go of all security structures, comforting identities, realized achievements, forward planning. See what remains, for only what remains can be truly relied on for growth.
4. 'Repetition' has long been a bugaboo of industrial mass production, supposedly turning humans into machines as in Chaplin's 'Modern Times.' But for all the advancement of robotics in factories and electronic processing in offices, the repetitious work of the production line still turns out the goods America consumes. Just think of Chinese and other East Asian assembly stations, or the chicken dressers and migrant farm laborers that give us our daily bread.
Growth carries a positive sign because it is dynamic and organic like a tree, whereas repetition is considered negative because it is static and inanimate like a machine. Freud, too, put repetition on the side of death, seeing the compulsion to repeat as the primary activity of the death instinct. Our common notions of repetition are so haunted by horrible fantasies of deathlike machines that we visualize, as in the movies, the organic life of beetles, ants and cockroaches as kinds of machines whose main fearful characteristic is repetitive motions. (For a far more subtle analysis of machines, beginning with the very first machine---the Egyptian social, political and religious structure that could construct the pyramids without actual machinery---see Lewis Mumford's great work, 'The Myth of the Machine.')
Let's think about repetition from another, less offensive angle. Repetition is fundamental not only to machines; it is the fundamental method in both ritual and the arts. Instead of a drive toward death, the compulsion to repeat is an instinct toward art. It shows the soul's pleasure in practice, in polishing, in precision.
Something in human nature demands performing in exactly the same way again and again, like the rituals that greet the sun or those that put the children to bed with the same story told with the same inflections, night after night. It's practicing your golf swing or the catcher's throw to second base---over and over again. We become artists only when we enjoy the practicing as much as the performing. Until then we are caught by the limelight rather than the art. It's not the opening in the gallery that makes the painter (although it may make his or her career); it's the repetitious actions in the studio. Over and over again, not to get it finally right, not for the sake of perfection, but simply doing it as if for its own sake, freed from 'having' to do it. The work working by itself, mechanically, repetitiously, impersonally.
Could this idea of disinterested repetitiveness---one of the highest aims of Zen, mystical contemplation and religious practice, as well as the practice of the arts and sports---transfer to administration, sales, production, accounting? We cannot begin to imagine how this transfer might affect these activities until we at least entertain the idea of repetition as the essence of craft. Why not imagine all the repetitive unprofitable actions of sales calls, number crunching and office forms as essential to the craft of business, not as undignified routines but as modes of care for accuracy and as signs of vocation. Then repetition will be conceived not as a compulsion, a slavelike dehumanizing burden, but as the way things become beautiful. Does this help to understand the interlocking connections of the Japanese between their mechanical repetitive style of work, their sense of ritual and beauty and the quality of their product?
5. Emptying: Let me draw your attention to a very different notion of growth that seems almost its contrary [Latin: contra 'against']. I place its start with Goethe and see parallels with Buddhist thinking. Goethe's examination of leaf growth in plants confirmed his intuition that the shape of the plant as a whole was determined in some way by the negative space around which the leaves unfold. Let's say that the leaf doesn't just push its way into optimal expansion and round itself out, occupying the most space possible for absorption of sunlight. If this were the case, then all leaves would take on the same round shape. No. The leaf takes on the specific shape of oak, maple or serrated cut-leaf birch because something in the surrounding emptiness governs the leaf's shaping into a species-specific manner. It's not all in the genetic code; or, let us say, the genetic code unfolds in response to emptiness.
Goethe's ideas about plants, whether botanically accepted or not, nonetheless invite our attention to what is 'not' there. Even further: what is not there characterizes the particular nature of each kind of plant. This idea claims that emptiness has an invisible power that plays a determining role in what appears. Patterns emerge and grow out of the empty, much as the potter's jar forms itself around the active presence of a hollow. Each container---pot, vase, jug, cup---is simply the external shell of a specifically shaped void. The power is in the void. That nature abhors a vacuum may be only a modern Western idea of nature. Different schools of Buddhist thought, for instance, consider the seeds of all existing things to be contained in a substratum void, so that care for emptiness is what allows the seed to emerge. Absence takes precedence over presence, or better said, is the first form of presence.
The Italian thinker Gillo Dorfles presents similar ideas regarding music. The toneless pause between notes makes the rhythm and melody possible. Music is the result of specifically spaced and timed moments of silence. Dorfles transfers this idea of the interval to all kinds of motions, including factory work, and the process of thinking itself in which the empty moment originates the shape of things to come. Growth would focus on the not-yet, the voided out, the empty---those places in a day which are not filled, like the empty page in the schedule book, the vacant moments in the production line we now would eliminate as "waste." Instead, they might better be called, as in music, "rests." They are starts as well as stops; not breaks; empties.
We can apply these ideas of emptying to the aging of people and of systems. Then we would understand the decline and shrinkage that accompanies aging as "value-added" rather than as literal loss. The forgetful mind and lapses of attention, the vague fumbling of motor skills, the closing down of feeling responses and impoverishment of language may not be only as they seem to young eyes. Perhaps space is being made, the rest for a different music, a voiding of the usual for the sake of the unusual.
Similarly with aging business, "downsizing" far-flung conglomerate enterprises, selling off divisions, sunsetting worn-out programs, pulling in the outposts of ambitious hopes and stocking up the larder for pension plans---these events reported in the business news are of course metaphors for older age in men and women. More than that, these events can be imagined as the opening of gestalts from their habitual frames into new and untried spaces. An experiment is going on. To read these processes as signs of contraction and decay forgets one of the oldest ideas in the world, ideas of how the world itself "grew" into being: 'creatio ex nihilo,' creation out of nothing. What comes first is nothing.
This view, as I said, accords so well with some Eastern philosophies that we are again brought to realize that ideas serve archetypal powers: the Western idea of growth as I presented in the first list above suits the child, while the one of Goethe, Dorfles and Buddhism suits the aged 'senex' (Latin: 'old man'). Again my point is simple: we cannot view anything except through archetypal glasses. What is growth to the "wisdom of the East" looks like pathological decay to the archetypal vision of the developing child. What to the optimistic naturalism of the child looks like healthy expansion of networking and improved facility seems to the octogenarian foolish distraction, a disintegration into what Oriental philosophy calls the "ten thousand things," a cancerous metastasis of proliferation.
What I am calling the "archetypal perspective of the developing child" lies at the root of the heroic growth idea; for heroes---Moses, Jesus, Hercules, Perseus, David, Oedipus---begin as endangered, vulnerable, abandoned infants or children. Bigger=Better offers a grandiose defense that seems to protect against, even overcome, the inherent insecurity at the heart of heroic strength.
If our national notion of growth remains tied to the archetypal perspective of the child and therefore blinded to more complex sophisticated kinds of growth, then the emphasis by the psychology industry on the "inner child" and on personal childhood sufferings supports the very archetype that determines the nation's naive ideas of growth. To keep the economy growing and country moving forward into another century requires not only passing through the ending of this one but also a 'stance that welcomes endings.' I like to remember Ulysses in the 'Odyssey,' who wants only to put an end to his twenty-year career of wandering by finally coming home. Homer's whole epic is dedicated to the end. And I think of Prospero in Shakespeare's 'Tempest,' who finally is able to put away his magic, break his staff and drown his book, welcoming the end.
Endings do not belong to the consciousness of the child; the child looks forward. And the first of these endings is putting closure on American childlikeness itself (which does 'not' imply tough-minded, hard-hearted, unimaginative "realism"). To open the next century, we shall go through---in fact are already going through---the rituals of closing this one, the memorials of loss, the mournings and the remorse for having held too long to the childish kinds of growth that indeed "made this country great"---but not only great. Growth now and to come will depend less on what programs we initiate to bring about growth during this closing time than on how this closing time helps refashion the idea of growth itself.
Therefore this chapter has elected to retain the idea of growth rather than to reject it whole hog. However, we have tried to rework "growth" by separating it from the childish innocence and simplistic optimism which have led its main critics to belittle growth in favor of limits, smallness and no-growth, zero-sum models. I do not believe that these critics have struggled enough with the idea itself, and so their dismissals do not satisfy the deep human wish that the term "growth" symbolizes. To discard the idea only represses this archetypal desire and leaves it still encased in childish simplistics.
I have been trying a different approach. Rather than exchanging growth for no-growth, I am adding to the list of notions with which this chapter began. I am filling in the shadow of these notions, by taking the idea of growth into profounder regions of intensification, repetition, deepening, shedding and emptying. When growth takes on these further meanings which darken its innocence, it is no longer incompatible with the actualities of America's demographic, social and psychological conditions. Then our difficult, even tragic, individual, corporate and national dilemmas can be understood as necessary to the loss of addictive optimism and to the growth of soul. And we can encourage growth's own maturation into a more fully formed and subtly differentiated idea that comes provided with its own inhibiting limits even as it remains a term of inspiration.
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