By Timothy E. Dolan*My connection with William Irwin Thompson is tangential. He did a year residency at the University of Hawai’i’s Department of Political Science at the same time I was pursuing my doctoral studies there. Just after he left, I encountered his books,
The Time It Takes Falling Bodies to Light, and a year later,
Pacific Shift. I enjoyed his exuberant writing style, informed by his anthropological scholarship viewed through a New Age lens. The former book was a robust feminist argument made from an anthropological mythos viewpoint, written when feminism was just coming into its own as an ideology and bona fide political and social movement. As with many trail blazing writers, this book was controversial eliciting criticisms from feminists and non-feminists alike though for very different reasons. Feminist theorists in the 1980s were generally female themselves and products of the women’s liberation movement who tended to have little patience to being mansplained about their gender’s primal matrilinear influences on civilization. Political theorists back then were pretty wary of feminist theory, seeing it as an attack on patriarchy (because much of it was) and tended to resort to caricature, allowing for it to be dismissed as less than serious scholarship. This skepticism came up in discussion about the book with a couple of male faculty members who cited a snarky review headline: “Thompson Goes Down on History”.
I found the bits of Thompson’s works before I read
Pacific Shift interesting, but not close to leaving a lasting impression beyond an appreciation for feminism’s primal roots. It was
Pacific Shift that enriched my world view to this day. Much of it was written during his time at the University of Hawai’i, which, given the book title, seems to be at least partially the inspiration for it. Consisting of only 4 chapters, each was densely packed. Here it is summarized chapter by chapter with the understanding that it was a work of its time that, at its time, effectively fused futures thinking with global consciousness by means of his macro-historical perspective. The themes are as fresh and instructive now as it was when first written in mid-1980s it being grounded in the cyclic nature of history, but also suggesting the cycle might yet each be a spiral upward. At the end of the day an enlightened new world we might aspire to achieve will ultimately pass.
Chapter 1’s title, “Politics Unbound: The World That’s After Us” is provocative, beyond first blush. It foretells the breaking of long-held Western cultural norms, and of a transformed world out to track down old orders, much as earlier civilizational epochs have risen and dissolved with echoes still unconsciously resonate. This is becoming more apparent history continuing to accelerate, seen as the price of unbridled accelerated technological tsunami seeming to engulf all but the most proficient surfers. It’s frightening pace; manifests “future shock” that has sent many people to seek refuge in an imagined, romanticized golden age that has manifested a potent resurrection of right-wing nationalism, and religious fundamentalism that has been rising for many decades now. This chapter features a remarkable graphic that in a single page, captures the intimate connection between technological change and history’s acceleration. This “Log of Earth” shown below, reveals at a near cosmic level, quickening quantum shifts that have literally changed the world at each increment.
It is remarkable how quickly our species normalizes these shifts even while retaining archaic language to describe these novel developments. We type on keyboards originally designed to keep highly used letters from jamming on mechanical typewriters. We scroll and through pages, oblivious how the physical “keys” “scrolls” and “pages” have been relegated to scrap heaps museums, dusty shelves and unopened file cabinets. We find a kind of psychic sanctuary in retaining these material metaphors in an increasingly immaterial world. We now drive down highways at speeds that would have been terrifying to anyone a century earlier and communicate at the speed of light. We fly miles above the earth in metal tubes powered by flaming fuel complaining about pretzels. Our gene pools were once limited to mates living within walking distance, unless one joined an invading army with said pool is now literally global in range melting all traditional identities. And yet, we are still confronted with this “world that is after us” is built on ancient strata, with identities persisting most markedly in religion, specifically the Abrahamic traditions where Jewish and Muslim identities claim lineages from a common father, and “exclusive” rights to common lands, a paradox that defies any logical resolution despite literal genetic overlap. As Alan Watts pointed out via Lewis Carol, “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum agreed to have a battle.” Such are the multiple and mounting contradictions that William Irwin Thompson so astutely described in his dialectic world view.
William Irwin Thompson also references the place of the arts, which he calls “early-warning systems” that presage the shape of things to come in often upsetting ways before they are eventually come to be accepted and normalized. That most iconic of industrial triumphalism, the Eiffel Tower, was first condemned as a monstrosity to be dismantled as soon as the Paris Exposition was done. Thompson was uniquely lodged for a time in the eye of high tech as professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the centers the then emerging digital revolution. He knew that these emerging tech masters were creating virtual mechanical bulls. Thompson became the rodeo clown that, despite appearances, has an essential role in the arena of history, trying to remind the sorcerer apprentices of tech that their inventions will surely come to toss and trample. As Shakespeare employed in King Lear, it is the jester who was the only one at court who could speak truth to power. That the elites would not heed was not for his lack of effort. Remember that the accolades that Thompson gathered from peers were as a poet and not a pundit, and certainly not as a policymaker.
Pacific Shift’s second chapter, “From Nation to Emanation” was more than just a play on words. He understood that the nation-state was an invention, evolved out of a system of empires, that would come to wrack Europe with religious wars, sparked by the Gutenberg press; a simultaneously unifying and dividing technology. It is Thompson’s grasp of the dialectal process, a term he somehow doesn’t use, that makes this chapter nothing less than a must read for futurists and foresight professionals for framing historical trajectories in mythic terms. Many examples are set in the context of his times, where New Age millennialism ran up against a world view that saw our planet as an assemblage of colored jigsaw puzzle pieces. While earth from space became the icon of planetary consciousness, too few in power, (save Al Gore, exiled from the beltway for his heresies), got it. Thompson, as us all, hadn’t anticipated the venom of non-state actors like Al Qaida, even as he wrote at some length about the Ayatollah, as symbolizing the perversion of divinity, that sees virtue narrowly focused on a rigid return to an imagined golden age. Thompson was acutely aware of the mutation of planetary consciousness into spiritual cults like the short-lived Rajneesh Purim that exemplified the celebration of 1980s excess in a spiritual veneer. He couldn’t foresee how the retro-Islam outbreak that culminated in 9-11, allowed the forces behind the military-industrial complex to clothe itself in the patriotic defense of the “homeland”, elevating that ancient meme into a literal cabinet department thus institutionalizing it for generations to come. It is an inflection of history that probably ended any hope of elevating the American Environmental Protection Agency to a cabinet-level Department of Environmental Affairs that might have come with a Gore Administration.
Thompson was a contemporary of Joseph Campbell. Indeed, he speaks Campbell’s mytho-lingua fluently in describing the deep cycles of historical process. Thompson delves head-first into the mythic to chart a multidimensional unity of opposites mandala still relevant in framing the primal forces in perpetual contention. He also invokes mythic language in describing what he terms the four ages that visit humanity as “The Age of Chaos, Age of the Gods, Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men”: as the seasons of civilizational rise and fall. His charts are a highly instructive melding of New Age intellectualism with a pragmatic punchline.
Thompson’s most brilliant contribution in chapter 2, and indeed in the entire book was the basic quaternity illustrated below. It depicts the most primal of forces that drive these civilizational states. He transforms two dialectics into a quadelectic where theses and antitheses are expressed into four archetypal worldviews.
In my lectures on political ideologies, something almost everyone in the punditverse gets wrong, I apply Thompson’s basic quanternity. I point out that among the many definitions of media, one is literally that of a screen. Popular media often creates false dichotomies.
The ideological spectrum is wider than the narrow liberal/conservative band most perceive. That noted, the ideological center was, until recently, in most of the West was in the northeast quandrant below clustered around a rough 45-degree angle between liberal and conservative. Note that both liberals and conservatives are essentially institutionalists with a high degree of faith in the governing institutions that they quibble about around Constitutional interpretations. For liberals this faith involved the capacity for governance to improve via the amendment process, while for conservatives the faith was in the capacity for the systems to preserve manifested in how very difficult it is to actually amend the supreme law of the land. What happened recently was a spreading of consesus from that narrow band into the radical and reactionry realms. The Radicals share a disgust with existing political/economic systems with Reactionaries albeit for different reasons. The word “radical” means “root” as in square root, (aka radical). For radicals, the system is beyond incremental repair and must be transformed at its roots. For reactionaries the work of liberals must be ended and a past golden age resurrected in its stead.
These are the ideological world views that lead to literal disintegration extending beyond the political, to the economic, social and cultural. It is a feature of the acceleration history to singularity where a nomadic techno-corporate elite has authored a contradiction of global consequence, we are better educated, fed, and physically healthier than ever, yet filled with angst. We feel the cataclysms are out of the bag, or rather unrelentingly on our screens. In the nomenclature of Thompson, it is the Age of Man heading to its Age of Chaos.
“Chaos” is another misunderstood concept as most associate it with disorder. It is the bane of human aesthetic that seeks linearity and symmetry. That the world is mostly discontinuous and fractal is offensive to us. We selectively spot the flower, seashell or a Mount Fuji, and “eureka!” they think it is nature. We ignore wilderness in favor of parks and the tortured forms of bonsai trees that are literally bent to our will. However, as already stated, this is not chaos in the mythic sense of the word.
Chaos is void. It is without form or substance. It is the shapeless matter from which the first three Japanese gods emerged. It is Genesis. It is where Greek and Norse Gods and Titans were born. It is a womb.
The third chapter of
Pacific Shift is perhaps the most accessible and timely for its time in describing the four cultural ecologies of the West. The concept of “cultural ecology” is brilliant in its quintessential capture of civilizational context as it evolved and expanded over first millennia and then centuries, and now generations, from the riverine cultures of the fertile crescent and Nile, to the Mediterranean worlds of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the Atlantic epoch of industrial Europe/North America, to Silicon Valley (Thompson thought it would be LA), and the Pacific Rim. These geographical shifts carry the substrata of previous cultural ecologies. I recall a quote from Toynbee that described Washington D.C. as a collection of Greek wedding cakes in terms of its architecture that reflected an idealized past to justify the present. Never mind that the U.S. was never Greece. It was always Rome. It escaped Americans that Rome clothed itself in a Greek veneer to justify its own operations. It is also good to recall that when Julius Caesar brought Cleopatra over to his city, she dismissed it for being essentially a bunch of mud huts (because it was). Rome didn’t become what it became in popular imagination until Egyptian monumentalism was introduced. This was also the case with China’s shadow over its neighbors to the East where Japan continues to use Chinese characters in its amalgam of script to this day, and in Korea where a Confucian mindset still pervades and the situation of the main palace in Seoul follows the principles of Feng Shui.
Pacific Shift is a product of its time, and it might be argued that that the “shift “has already reached a climatic phase and that we are now poised to achieve a fully comprehensive global consciousness. There are certainly few “pure” cultural isolates left. For instance, it is amazing how iconic foods like Japanese tempura and Korean kimchee did not exist in those lands before they were introduced from the outside. It was the Portuguese that introduced breading. Even the Japanese word for bread, “pan”, came from them. The Japanese were never a baking culture prior to the Portuguese landing. The Koreans had a long tradition of pickling foods, but the characteristic red chilis that permeate their cuisine came from the New World. The fusion of cuisines from all over the world is now ubiquitous and normalized. It has gotten to the point that many if not most in the West had no idea where their foods come from in about every sense of that term. From that ignorance, the “you are what you eat” generation has matured along with global consciousness movement generally. For Thompson, this consciousness as it relates to agriculture problematizes industrial farming and its impacts to the soil. While farming in general and monocrop farming in particular is the most unnatural thing one does to the land, the biotech revolution was just rising with people better fed than ever in history leading ironically enough to a rising obesity problem, being addressed by, of all things, pharmaceuticals.
Pacific Shift was written before Diamond vs. Chakrabarty, 1980 where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that novel, non-human life forms could be patented. Suffice to say, Thompson would have had much to say about where that might lead humanity and life generally. Given the fast-forward company he kept, he might well have embraced the transhumanist prospect. In a 2011 interview he did refer to Ray Kurzweil, a leading transhumanist advocate, as a mensch, though skeptical of his mind downloading schemes. The biotech revolution, in all of its many varied forms as the next wave was not addressed in this work, given it was still well offshore at the time of this writing. Tsunamis are barely a ripple until they hit the beach.
The four cultural ecologies of the West have come full circle, and we are now left with the quaking that comes from the acceleration of history; speeding on unbalanced tires threatening to bend and break the chassis of institutional norms. We are now confronting the irony of a digital ecosystem insinuated into and competing with the ecosystem of authenticity. There is both fusion and fracture, globalization and tribalization, brought about social media that originators who created the digital ecosystem thought that it would unite us all, when the result has been everything but. It turns out, as chronicled by Kara Swisher in
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, that these tech entrepreneurs were nearly all men-children who regularly lied to themselves about their noble pursuits when they were, as Thompson might put it, sorcerers apprentices stealing spells from each other much like Edison did with Tesla giving little to no thought to the long-term consequences.
Thompson was all in on a New Age, but much like Alan Watts before him who lamented the descent of the flower children into the savage-but-true meme that the only difference between a hippy and a bum is twenty years, the shallow disco generation and rising greed-is-good 1980s, followed by the grunge 1990s would not lead to a new millennium of enlightenment. Instead, 911 transformed a social welfare state into a national security one. His Findhorn Foundation dissolved like the Scottish mists that enveloped its shores. As he feared, the “New Age” was highjacked by cults. And yet . . . and yet . . . the deep structures of culture and the cycles of renewal and decrepitude stand as spirals ever incrementally higher as humanity evolves quite possibly beyond itself. It is just that the 5th cultural ecology of the West is the cloud now mined by AI. This might not be where Thompson saw it going.
To be sure, myth and theory are both simplifications of the world. The former simplifies through parables, allegory, satire and other literary and narrative forms to either justify or attack the status quo (“It has been written, but I say unto you …”), and straddles the realms of philosophy and religion. The latter flirts with reductionism, often overextending findings on narrow research pursuits to universal laws to confirm reality. Science emphasizes analysis, while myth works in synthesis. We rely on Newtonian physics up to the point that it breaks down at the cosmic and subatomic levels. That Newtonian physics works so well as a practical matter at human scale is assumed at the practical level as our engineered world is literally built on its principles. Myth is about explaining the whys, while science is all about the hows. Any contradictions in either mode is upsetting. The Hebrews of Jesus’ time were alarmed at his radical departure from Abrahamic orthodoxy, as are Christians with Mohammed to this day. In science the inquisitors knew that Galileo was right, but this could not be divulged to the masses. The news that we are not at the center of God’s universe would suggest he might not be that interested in us after all.
One enduring element from Thompson in chapter three of
Pacific Shift addresses a strain of cultural forces that demand rigid monocrop uniformity against diversity, a concept now in vogue for describing the many paths to a rather utopian harmonious becoming. Thompson makes a profound point that any regime that demands unity to the point of quashing different points of view is a working definition for evil. Early in his career this reviewer was teaching young undergraduate Japanese students, who would frequently ask what was my favorite this or that. This is a question I knew well having lived in Japan, a unique culture that works rather hard at achieving consensus, and yes, uniformity that, to be clear, is in service to social harmony. When asked what my favorite fruit was, I said fruit salad. The response was so unexpected that it might have shifted some paradigms then and there. I think Thompson would have approved.
Pure types don’t exist but as a lazy way of simplifying the world. They, like pure breeds, tend to experience decrepitude as seen in the European aristocracies. Ruling families are ultimately prone to regression. There will always be a weak link in lineages over time. Meritocratic corporate entities are a means to overcome regression, but not always effective in shifting times. Sears should have been Amazon, railroads should have become airlines, and print media was so late to digitizing that most of those species have gone extinct. More than ever, organizations need to know what they are at their core. To see one as a pure type is to doom one to irrelevance.
Time was when a gene pool was almost always within walking distance. In some places such as early China, people over the next ridge might speak entirely different dialects such were the limits of time and space over most of human existence. One definition of a nation is a dialect with an army which still resonates given how the world is still de facto divided by, among other things of course, scripts employed to write languages. It is never mentioned in most historical narratives, but it seems logical that the motivation of young men to join marauding armies was as much about seeking romance (a kind way to put it) as about comradery, glory and fortune. The Iliad is a young man’s game to test one’s limits manifested in any number of practices from athletics to gang membership, to drug experimentation. The Odyssey is a spiraling path back to maturity, resolution, and wisdom. Such are the themes spun out from Thompson’s third chapter, helping to contextualize where we’ve come from and still holds us in our respective cultural unconscious.
Thompson’s final chapter is called “Gaia Politique”, a title that might be considered by some of a cynical bent to be both pretentious and condescending. While the title topic is anachronistic given that the Gaia hypothesis as originally conceived was debunked by no less than James Lovelock who first proposed it, it is not an essay to be dismissed lightly. The idea that the earth’s biosphere is a single self-regulating organism captured the imagination of Thompson, who embraced the romance of Earth as a living entity. He might be seen as taking the balance of nature and applying it to social ecologies too far. The evidence is clear enough that ecosystems are immensely complex and rely on an implicit unity between predator and prey, grazers and grazed upon, and even parasite and host. We laud to this day and routinely name our sons and daughters after the likes of Alexander the Great, and Joshua, overlooking their perpetrating mass carnage, repeated time after time by other invaders throughout the course of history. It’s how we mark historical epochs. Our empires are now far more subtle with imagined communities now extending beyond nation-states, but also down to ethno-linguistic and religious tribes. It is an echo of tensions that extend back millennia.
Consider the Alexander the Great legacy. He encouraged his troops to intermarry with the newly conquered subjects, thus melding their identities with his empire, and, in turn, be absorbed, by theirs, particularly in Egypt where the Ptolemies themselves became pharaohs. This is in sharp distinction to the fierce fidelity to their faith that was a feature of the Israelites that kept them a distinct people so dedicated to their prophets calling them a people chosen by God, that it led to the big guy sanctioning their exterminating virtually everyone else living in ancient Canaan.
To sum up the chapter, it is Thompson’s weakest of the lot, but the runt of the litter can still be charming. His seeing punk culture as an alternative economy carried interesting notions of bohemianism that has always been a feature of industrial urbanism. He could not have imagined that the actual shadow economies would be digital and come to consume the world. Cryptocurrencies would be the baseball trading cards of the techno-bros that only fortified conspicuous consumption habits manifested less on bling and far more on vanity projects from tax write-off vineyards to private space ventures. Less cynically there is philanthropy led most prominently by the likes of Bill ex-wife Melinda Gates, nominally effective in patching a few global material inequities. Yet that the world might become a fruit salad of complimentary flavors remains a dream. How ironic that Thompson thought the Reagan administration’s world a final act, led by an actor that collapsed the Soviet state, would have its props knocked out by planetary consciousness. Instead, industrialism ephemeralized, morphing from property to intellectual property, equating curated electrons to real estate; perverting the commons into a tribal cyberspace; a post-Pacific cultural ecology of polarizing anger and fear; arrayed against the utopian dream of garden Gaia; an absurd metaphor given how one spends nearly all one’s time in a garden weeding.
For those who might not be inclined to read what they might dismiss as a dated chronicle of how we have completed a shift to a more globalized social ecology no matter how elegantly written, consider its ongoing influence on the futures/foresight community. Sohail Inayatullah attended William Irwin Thompson’s courses, confirming to me that Thompson provided significant inspiration, along with other mentors like Michel Foucault, Johann Galtung, also then in residence at the University of Hawai’i, and Jim Dator, then head of the University of Hawai’i Center for Futures Studies for his development of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). This influence is clear in Pacific Shift with its numerous mythic references that can inform many inclined to use CLA in their own works.
* Timothy E. Dolan is a member of the scientific council of the Alternative Planetary Futures Institute.
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