THE MAKING OF MEANING • 229condition more often than we are. The inner harmony of technologically
less advanced people is the positive side of their limited choices and of
their stable repertory of skills, just as the confusion in our soul is the
necessary consequence of unlimited opportunities and constant perfecti
bility. Goethe represented this dilemma in the bargain Doctor Faustus,
the archetype of modern man, made with Mephistopheles: the good
doctor gained knowledge and power, but at the price of introducing
disharmony in his soul.
There is no need to visit far-off lands to see how flow can be a
natural part of living. Every child, before self-consciousness begins to
interfere, acts spontaneously with total abandon and complete involve
ment. Boredom is something children have to learn the hard way, in
response to artificially restricted choices. Again, this does not mean that
children are always happy. Cruel or neglectful parents, poverty and
sickness, the inevitable accidents of living make children suffer intensely.
But a child is rarely unhappy without good reason. It is understandable
that people tend to be so nostalgic about their early years; like Tolstoy’s
Ivan Ilyich, many feel that the wholehearted serenity of childhood, the
undivided participation in the here and now, becomes increasingly dif
ficult to recapture as the years go by.
When we can imagine only few opportunities and few possibilities,
it is relatively easy to achieve harmony. Desires are simple, choices clear.
There is little room for conflict and no need to compromise. This is the
order of simple systems—order by default, as it were. It is a fragile
harmony; step by step with the increase of complexity, the chances of
entropy generated internally by the system increase as well.
We can isolate many factors to account for why consciousness gets
to be more complex. At the level of the species, the biological evolution
of the central nervous system is one cause. No longer ruled entirely by
instincts and reflexes, the mind is endowed with the dubious blessing
of choice. At the level of human history, the development of culture—of
languages, belief systems, technologies—is another reason why the con
tents of the mind become differentiated. As social systems move from
dispersed hunting tribes to crowded cities, they give rise to more special
ized roles that often require conflicting thoughts and actions from the
same person. No longer is every man a hunter, sharing skills and inter
ests with every other man. The farmer and the miller, the priest and the
soldier now see the world differently from one another. There is no one
right way to behave, and each role requires different skills. Within the
individual life span as well, each person becomes exposed with age to
increasingly contradictory goals, to incompatible opportunities for ac