The Danger of "Single Vision"

The world of the horizontal axis is in peril. Some 200 years ago, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, William Blake spoke of this danger, penning these words,

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep!

More than thirty years ago (1972), Theodore Roszak wrote a breakthrough book based upon William Blake’s visionary poetry and prophetic voice, which foretold where, as a society, he felt certain we were heading. We are either there now, or dangerously close. In Where the Wasteland Ends Roszak warned that western society (and American society, in particular) was moving in a direction in which some form of the “Single Vision” might overtake and so dominate us that it would begin to ruthlessly stamp out any other way of seeing or being, destroying all pluralism and the rich diversity that makes life itself possible—crushing real creativity.

Whether natural, scientific, political, or religious, we see evidence everywhere of the fulfillment of the double warnings (Blake’s and Roszak’s), and the rise of Blake’s “Single Vision and Newton’s sleep.” We live, it seems, in a world where tolerance toward diversity and pluralism is suspect and in danger of being trampled out by various forms of fundamentalism. Fundamentalist forces (the Single Vision) have joined together to assert themselves. This is particularly true in the current marriage of religion and politics so prominent today in American culture, where the religious right has made bed-fellows with the political establishment.

At the hands of Neo-conservatism, religious Fundamentalism, Scientism, Capitalism, and all the other “—isms” that stalk our social landscape, we are at risk of succumbing to the Single Vision that Blake so feared and becoming a kind of social “mono-culture” where only politically correct doctrine is allowed public space, and behavior is controlled by emphasis on national loyalty. Beginning in the Greco-Roman world as the religious agenda of imperial Christianity under the auspices of the Emperor Constantine, uniformity and conformity became the hallmark of western society. Ever since, the institution of the Church, in league with the State, has been governed by this overarching principle. This “psychology of single vision” which was carried forward by Christian civilization in the West entered into the Scientific Revolution, says Roszak, where it achieved cultural supremacy in the modern world, betraying its brightest ideals (107). Now under duress and the threat of terrorism, even democratic institutions and ideals, which the American republic was founded upon, have begun to fall prey to this same ideology. So, Roszak wrote his own critique and warning, in which he says,

… I will be calling the orthodox consciousness of urban-industrialism by the name William Blake gave it—single vision. It was his term for the narrowing of the sensibilities we often refer to as “alienation” today. My main interest is in the cultural transformations from which this psychic style stems and the force it exerts upon our politics (76).