Visit the dark side

Corruption and decay are essential ingredients of rebirth and growth. Embrace it.

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

It’s easy for progressively-minded people to be overwhelmed by corruption, from the sins in our hearts to the violence in our homes, from the villainy of our corporations to the warmongering of our nation-states. To avoid despair, we should take a close look at the role corruption plays in our lives.

We typically use “corruption” as a synonym for evil, but it can also mean decay, and it’s in this sense that corruption reveals a hidden virtue. If organic material didn't decay it would never redistribute its collected nutrients and the soil would be rendered sterile. If soil needs to be fertilized by organic corruption, then perhaps the soul needs to be fertilized by spiritual corruption. 

Corruption is a form of disorganization or chaos, and life obviously requires chaos as much as it does order. In lieu of disruption and disintegration, stability and integration would remain forever fixed at the simplest levels, without any chance for growth or achievement. Evolution depends upon flaws, upon mismatches between an organism and the demands of its environment. Without the meandering search for ways to resolve these mismatches, natural selection would stall.

A balance of chaos and order is also essential to the survival of our bodies. To avoid a cardiac arrest, the pattern of our heartbeats must be neither completely chaotic nor perfectly harmonious. The same principle applies to many of our bodies’ functions: without some chaos, the dynamic equilibrium that characterizes many of our bodies’ systems wouldn’t be possible.

On a psychological level, our minds need a balance of mental stability and unpredictability: too little stability results in psychosis, while too much predictability prevents us from adapting to our ever-changing environment.

Finally, on a social level, we require a balance of anarchy and order to prevent our societies from either collapsing in complete disorder or perishing beneath the weight of obsolescent practices and institutions. Given the importance of chaos in the evolutionary, ecological, biological, mental, and social spheres, it seems likely that it plays a similar role in the ethical realm.  

Consider Jung’s concept of the shadow. According to Jungian theory, as our egos develop we necessarily develop psychological shadows. Our egos are organized constellations of mental qualities that coalesce as we mature. This coalescence is guided by a number of factors, such as the influence of our parents and peers, the values of our cultures, our class positions, and so on. Because our minds are too complex and contradictory for any scheme to encompass, we necessarily pick and choose which qualities we’ll allow into our egos and which we won’t. Rejected qualities don’t disappear, but rather survive in a disintegrated and "corrupt" state outside the confines of the integrated mind. From this place of exile they continue influencing our emotions, thoughts, and behaviour.

Our shadows are intertwined with our creativity, which requires regular excursions into uncharted regions of the imagination. We could say that the ego is like a city, and the shadow is like the surrounding wilderness. Just as a city depends upon the wilderness for many of its basic needs, so does the ego depend upon its shadow. In the same way that overdevelopment poisons the wilderness, so does a rigid and expansive ego damage the shadow. In either case, excessive order harms the whole. Cities must, above all else, be ecologically sound; similarly, the ego must have a healthy relationship within the ecology of the total human organism.

When we disavow vital parts of ourselves, such as our feelings of fear, rage and lust, we inevitably project them onto the world around us. By projecting their shadows upon the Jews, Nazis were able to indulge their shadows’ darkest cravings upon Hebrew flesh. By viewing Muslims as “Islamofascists,” Westerners can today delight in butchering the Islamic world. The price of an unintegrated shadow isn’t only the loss of creativity and energy; costs are also borne by those unfortunates upon whom our shadows fall.

Whatever goodness arises from denying the shadow is shallow indeed. The attempt to excise the shadow results in a sort of pseudo-innocence, in which acts of cruelty and neglect are committed but ignored, rationalized as virtuous, or undertaken through the auspices of socially sanctioned institutions. Many men have tightly clung to their supposed right to discipline their wives and beat their children, innumerable ministers have emotionally traumatized their flocks by cloaking vicious emotional abuse in the guise of hellfire-and-brimstone sermons, and legions of patriots have indulged their bloodlust by supporting unjust wars. Such people rarely acknowledge the pain and anger driving them, or the injustices they commit, preferring to instead hold fast to a vision of personal purity. By refusing to take responsibility for our own corruption, we magnify its negative effects.

To avoid the perils of self-righteousness, it’s important to occasionally expose ourselves to spiritual corrosives, which, as William Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” We need to come to terms with our personal and collective shadows, temporarily foregoing enlightenment for the sake of “endarkenment,” or what the ancient Greeks referred to as katabasis. It’s sometimes good to sojourn for a while in the lightless depths of the heart, to wander in the dark night of the soul without trying to illuminate or escape it, but also without succumbing to it. The task during katabasis is to non-judgmentally understand one’s shadow as best one can, learning about both its malignancy and its glory, its strangeness and its familiarity. 

Katabasis is the crucible of revelation. For example, in the West, Queer culture has long been the quintessential venue for cultural katabasis, a zone where the uncanny is commonplace. Long despised as the epitome of depravity, Queer culture has produced lifestyles, philosophies, and artistic movements that are helping regenerate our moribund world. Katabasis can also motivate progressive political action. As the cruelty of the Bush administration reveals the rotting heart of Western culture, people everywhere are discovering a terrifying moral clarity that’s driving them to take action on behalf of universal principles of compassion and justice. Ecological horror is in a similar fashion arousing previously unimaginable levels of global ecological consciousness.

Like the Nigredo of alchemical lore, corruption is the primal matter from which all forms and levels of life arise, upon which they stand, and into which they collapse. From our souls’ zenith to its trough, this wondrous horror is the very stuff of us. When we gaze upon corruption, we shouldn’t recoil from it in fear, but rather recognize it as ourselves, and, in doing so, enjoy for a moment the nameless mystery of our being.

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