The Myth of Balance
I want to explore the myth of balance. I am using the word “myth” in two senses. First, in its colloquial sense, the sense that myth is something that is not factually true—it is fantasy. Second, in its more profound sense, which is the idea of the mythical. The great myths are universal stories about dimensions of the gods, of ourselves and of nature. Usually they are stories in which the origin of a thing can be perceived. They are stories of what cannot actually be told. A myth is a narrative. For instance, you have the myth of Genesis, with Adam and Eve in the garden, or the story of Odysseus who got lost and was on his way home for thirty years. Myths and fairy tales are profound communicators of wisdom in very subtle ways. All the folk cultures, even the most ancient ones, always had stories about the way everything began, and these stories in some way were the first attempts to balance people’s precarious presence in a strange world. This ties in with the notion of cosmos, which is the idea of order. The Oxford English Dictionary includes these two aspects in its definition of “balance.” First, balance is “an apparatus for weighing consisting of a beam poised so as to move freely on a central pivot with a scale pan at each end,” or second, balance is “the stability due to the equilibrium of forces within a system.”
I believe that balance also includes passion, movement, rhythm, urgency and harmony. Balance is not a dead notion. Balance as a monolithic thing would not be balance at all; it would be total imbalance, because there is something in balance that, in order to be what it is, requires the loyal weight of the opposite and opposing force. When you talk about balance, you are talking about the discovery or the unveiling of things, of a secret rhythm of order. I believe that balance can never be merely subjective or monological.
I want to sketch briefly in philosophical terms a cognitive theory of balance. Most theories of balance are non-cognitive and inevitably end up as either strategies or platitudes. There are two main ways of looking at balance—the conservative and liberal views, or the empiricist and the idealist views. The first one is that balance is a strategy. You hear people saying that you must have balance in your life. If you do not have balance, everything will turn chaotic. Balance, then, is an external frame imposed on experience from the outside. It controls things and keeps the chaos away.
Such strategies of balance are often no more than veiled repression. For instance, you may feel a deep complexity of feeling, but you pretend that you do not feel. You bury everything in the basement of your mind. Jung used to call this “the return of the repressed.” No sooner have you expelled something that you cannot accept about yourself out the front door than it has made its way in the back door and is waiting there to confront you again. It is a strange thing about consciousness that if you try deliberately to get rid of something or to stop thinking about something, you only end up reinforcing it.
This idea finds humorous expression in a story I heard somewhere. A man went to see a guru as he was finding it difficult to meditate because his mind was scattered. The guru said to him, “I want you to go home and not think about monkeys.” Surprised at the advice, because monkeys never figured in his mind, the man nevertheless returned home intending to carry out the advice. Once at home, he started to try not to think about monkeys. First there was one monkey and then there were two monkeys, then there were ten monkeys. Within two hours he was back to the guru as his mind had become an exclusive monkey jungle. Thus, there is a strange thing in consciousness, in the mind, that if you make an issue of something it can expand and possess you. This seems to be what happens with bitterness. A bitter person cannot decide to be bitter between 7:00 and 7:30 on Saturday evenings, because if you are bitter, it is within you everywhere. Resentment is exactly the same kind of thing. Resentment, bitterness, defeat, despair, even depression—all of these share this pervasive quality. When I sit in front of somebody who is clinically, chronically depressed, the feeling that I have sometimes is that the person is not actually there. The fascinating question is, where are they? So repression is often the outcome when balance is approached as a functional, imposed strategy.
Another dimension of balance as a functional strategy is fear. If you are afraid of things, you will stay in line; this often has to do with authority. On German television, in the last six or seven weeks, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of East Germany, they have been replaying old news excerpts. It is unbelievable viewing. Two days before the whole thing started, there was Honecker, leader of East Germany, with all the leaders of the Communist world, and they were all paying tribute to one another. Ceausescu was in the middle of them. And the whole facade was within inches of collapsing, never to return. Flexibility is balance and balance is flexibility. When a thing hardens it cannot bend. It can only break. When a thing or system becomes totally atrophied, the smallest incision can cause the whole thing to vanish as if it were a false garment.
Another dimension of balance as a functional strategy, one that also keeps people in line, is the whole world of religious edict and theology. Many people in Ireland held their lives in a certain kind of balance because they were theologically terrified. We are coming out of that now. This theory of balance, which is a frame from outside, usually works with an unexamined belief in the given facts. It is very empiricist, it is one-dimensional, and it is usually ideological. It is non-cognitive in the sense that it is never worked out nor its deeper grounding ever questioned. It is given, and because it is given, it is always in the service of some elite group or some vested interest that wants the balance to hold for some ideological reason.
The opposite view of balance is that balance is a purely subjective invention—I can invent, sustain and implement my own order. This, of course, is equally false. Literary tragedy, for instance, unmasks this as illusion. Tragedy presents great passionate individuals who attempt to establish their own order and their action brings them into total conflict with the hidden order, which uncoils on top of them and completely changes the world they inhabit. Therefore, balance is neither a fixed empirical thing nor an invented, subjective thing. Rather, balance is an implicit equilibrium that emerges in the fair play of opposing forces—opposing sister forces.
Balance yields itself in the dialogue and dialectic of passionate forces. It is not monological. Much of what passes for conversation in post-modern culture is merely intercepting monologues. If you watch television programs or listen to the radio, you hear little true conversation. When you yourself are involved in a really genuine conversation with another person, you will remember it for weeks because something unexpected shifts or happens in the dynamic of conversation. It is no accident that at the infancy of Western culture we have the great models of conversation in Plato’s dialogues. In true dialogue something truly other and unexpected emerges. What I am talking about here is a theory of growth; not economic growth, but the growth of life and experience that works in this shifting balance between dialogue on the one hand and dialectic on the other hand.