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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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68. William I. Thompson

Professor William I. Thompson teaches humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1938. He attended Pomona College in California and received his Ph.D. at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1966. He has taught at Cornell, MIT and is now at York University. His sharp criticism of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology is summed up in Chapter 3, ‘Getting Back to Things at MIT’ in his latest book At the Edge of History, Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971).
He has written in recent years numerous articles, on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, and for various magazines, among them Harpers, ‘The Individual as Institution,’ September, 1972.

Would you agree with Erik H. Erikson1 that man can no longer afford to cultivate illusions about his own [nature] or about that of his species or for that matter about those [pseudospecies] he calls his enemies?2

 

I think the threat of planetary annihilation is generating a response in terms of what Toynbee3 called ‘challenge and response.’ Some of the illusions about the nature of reality we have are part of the old kind of industrial-managerial period, namely, that nature is dead, that you can work your will upon it, that nature is a void to be developed and turned into parking lots and Tokyos and things of that sort. As we move in a different direction of culture we are coming up with a radically new concept of a nature, mind, self and society. It's a question of a quantum leap in human evolution.

For example, one of the old illusions maintained by industrial society was that the world was split between nature (which was dead, inert matter) and consciousness (which was subjective and unreal and full of mere feeling). Feeling was never to be trusted because feeling was not real. Feeling would tell us that a forest was pretty and should be preserved, but reality with its economics showed that there was a profit to be made. Therefore, man was trained in industrial society to ignore his feelings, his body, the lower classes, the problems of poverty and things of this sort, and to move in a brave, masculine way, developing reality everywhere he could. Now, the illusion that reality is the split between matter and consciousness is absolutely false. It's more like a continuum in which there is mass, there is energy and then there is consciousness. You can slide back and forth in this continuum. Consciousness can now have a direct effect upon mass.

The way we've discovered this is the way human beings generally do, negatively. For example, take the planet: There is clearly negative feedback, coming in the way of pollution, telling us we are destroying the planet. We can see we're having an effect on nature because we

are poisoning and destroying it to the point of destroying ourselves. Yet we cannot imagine that this is a situation in which there are linked opposites. We can see the feedback of consciousness on nature; we call it culture. In more positive ways, we can how detect the emergence of a new planetary culture which is totally redirecting the relationship of the mind and nature.

The Hopi4 in their ancient culture could grow corn in the deserts through the focusing of psychic energy. Uri Geller is a psychic from Israel. He is here in the United States at the present moment working at various think tanks and scientific research facilities, proving to the satisfaction of physicists - of, say, Feinberg in New York - that through psychic energy he can twist and bend and break metal bars. This was performed in the office of the president of Kent State University. It was performed in New York and there is now research going on in California. How can this be? This violates the whole notion of the mind's relationship with nature. Nevertheless, scientists, some fifty years ago, in the quantum theory in physics, told us that the observer interferes with the system that he observes, that we must take the mind's relationship to nature into reality in any kind of science.

Now, industrialists have constantly distorted science and have said: ‘No this is not true. Nature is economics. Nature is strictly dead matter. Fancy theories and quantum mechanics should be ignored.’ The problem we have is not that the humanists are not being scientific enough, but that the people who apply and use science for power are prostituting science and totally ignoring the implications of science itself to create a kind of managerial technology that has very little to do with nature.

When people talk about solving the problem of human culture through the application of science - say, in the terms of Skinner5 or Delgado's6 psychocivilized society - they are continuing this abuse of true science. Science, as it has been institutionalized in the structures of an industrial managerial society, is a great threat to human culture, because for the first time in human history we're seeing an elite group of people attempting to replace human culture with management and behavioral science. This is part and parcel of industrial society.

Let me give an example: When industrial society first celebrated its own power in the great exhibition in London in 1851, there was a great crisis in the city about what to do with the trees in Hyde Park. What they decided finally was not to cut them down but to build the whole iron and glass structure around the trees. What happened in fact on an

unconscious level was that human culture was saying for the first time, ‘Let culture surround nature.’ We can put nature in the park inside culture because we now control and dominate nature.

 

It was McLuhanism?7

 

Hegel actually. Earlier than McLuhan. McLuhan has never given Hegel the proper credit. The particular dialectic that goes on by which the sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in a new environment is Hegel.

Now, there is research going on at Stanford Research Institute about how to deal with crisis management and how to anticipate the future. What are the forces of cultural change? How do the system of values, motivation and mythic images of man determine man's behavior and interrelationships with one another? The purpose of this is to create a larger structure, called management, and through this management science will better understand the image of man, how human culture works and then be able to take a system-analysis approach to it and draw into the structure of management everything that used to be other to it. Culture will then operate on terms dictated by behavioral science.

 

You are referring to Platt's8 work in Stanford?

 

Yes, John R. Platt is a perfect example of this. He is a man of good will. This is not enough anymore because men of good will have illusions, and their illusions can generate greater problems than the ones they try to solve. Platt's approach in What We Should Do is that we have to have a kind of crash program on the planet. A Manhattan project. Get together all the experts who really know the problem, and they will fix the planet up for us. In many cases the experts are the very ones who create the problems we have. It is like a physician attacking the body with heart transplants and then when the body rejects these, the physician comes in and starts injecting powerful drugs and continuing the attack on the body until eventually the patient is practically at the edge of death. Never at any point does the physician turn back and say, the body is a harmonious, organic system, I am actually with my cures antagonizing the whole disease itself. Platt's is a classic example of this. I think he is definitely a prisoner of the old paradigm. (In the use of the word paradigm I am of course thinking of Thomas Kuhn's Structures

of Scientific Revolutions.9 There is clear evidence that there is a new paradigm emerging in which the mind's relationship to nature is different.)

Let's explain this in another way: If we had a universe that was all nature, all matter and no minds in it, it would be a sort of smoothly indifferent universe working according to mechanical laws, which is pretty much what most people think the universe is anyway. Minds on earth are the casual byproducts of dust in an insignificant planet in an insignificant comer of the universe. If we took this material universe and we introduced into its system minds that had a consciousness of nature and nature's laws through mathematics and science, the new universe could no longer be the same universe. Because now there would be a being in it conscious of it and that would radically alter and totally change the universe itself. It would become a totally new system. Minds generate feedback on nature and begin to change nature. What we call the feedback of consciousness on nature is culture. Now culture, according to the old paradigm, is emotional, is feeling, is subjective and isn't really very important; what is important is the economic, technical and material base of the culture. This constitutes the ruling notion for all the social and most of the physical sciences. The difficulty is we don't realize - or perhaps we are now only beginning to realize it now because of the ecological crisis - that the impact and feedback of culture back on nature is so powerful that it can actually change the structure of nature itself to the point of, say, nuclear energy or nuclear fusion.

We're seeing this in the planetary crisis because our culture is now visible in the polluted air. It was never visible before. When we used to talk about culture, it was located in some island or in some city. There wasn't any sense of a planetary culture. Therefore, the planetary feedback, the negative feedback of pollution, is making everyone critically aware that culture is, that it is intensely powerful and if we are not careful that it can actually destroy nature. In this sense human culture is a system of consciousness, of mathematics and forms of pure symbolism. We think nothing material can affect the very structure of matter itself or can change it. But this is an invasion of reality. We can almost say that the object of the universe is almost not as important and powerful as the subject of the universe, because by manipulating symbols we can imitate stars through thermonuclear fusion and can change the finite.

This should really send us back to the drawing board to say, ‘All right, if the mind's relationship to nature is so critically important, how do we best understand this relationship? John R. Platt would say, ‘We get

together all the scientists because they clearly understand the manipulation of symbols and mathematics.’ But what do we do with those anomalies outside the scientific paradigm like the Israeli psychic who is twisting metal bars through psychic energy? I don't think the technocrats, the managerial people, see the anomalies. They reject them and say, ‘The old paradigms are adequate.’ But they are prisoners of industrial society. All they can do is have greater and greater government grants for greater and greater think tanks, for greater and greater confusion in terms of paper and xeroxing machines and the endless multiplication of data until they burn themselves out in an informational overload.

 

And the Skinner theory of engineering the environment?

 

I don't think this is going to solve the problem at all because the problem is simpler and more elegant. I don't think culture can be managed. When you have cultural engineering, you have a reduction of culture. We always seem in a sense to be talking about merely social structure. Culture is more than social structure, it is forms of consciousness and art. In many ways the truly cosmic perception that understands the relationship of mass, energy and consciousness is not really contained within the paradigm of, say, behavioral engineering.

I was talking to Carlos Castaneda,10 recently, who has written the three very popular and significant books on the ancient Yaqui way of knowledge, of the views of the sorcerers of archaic Mexico. He is one of a number of esoteric thinkers that are introducing us into a new planetary culture, the hitherto secret techniques of small cultures. What's going on now in this planetary culture is that the old, esoteric techniques for the transformation of consciousness, the Hopi, the Indian, and now even the ancient British, are all being reintroduced into public knowledge. We now will have an understanding of things that were kept very secret. As has happened with Carlos Castaneda's books - now half a million people have read about the techniques of sorcery of a very old Indian in the north of Mexico. (He is called Don Juan.) I think it really is very significant. This Don Juan tells us that the trouble is when we die, we die with the totality of ourselves. Unfortunately we only live with a very small, insignificant fraction of ourselves. We will have to learn to live in the moment with the totality of ourselves and balance the enormity of our death with the enormity of our life.

If we take this on a planetary scale and blow it up, we can see that

the planet in the next fifty years (I am quoting the Club of Rome) is dying with the totality of itself. Through Anglo-Dutch Petroleum and Standard Oil, people in villages in India and everywhere will die because the air will die. Once we go down, mankind goes down with the totality of itself. The difficulty is that at the moment we are only living with an insignificant portion of ourselves. We are living with the elite sort of industrial notions of the few technocrats and managers and experts, who are attempting to replace the vast panorama of all human culture with a single kind of vision, that of the multinational corporation.

This is not the totality of culture. Ironically, it's an illusion. It's an extension of the managerial vision, the multinational corporations are obviously going to continue to develop, to pollute and to think in industrial terms. They cannot stop. They cannot change their minds. The young scientists who are now coming up will simply shift their allegiancies to the new paradigm and begin to create a whole new revolution in science.

Young graduate students and scientists are doing precisely this. While World War II warriors like Walt W. Rostow11 or Herman Kahn12 are projecting simple managerial trends, the graduate students in science are shifting to Sufi'ism, Zen, yoga and psychic healing. These are the five hundred thousand people that are reading the books of Carlos Castenada. These people are trying to put nature, culture and consciousness into an entirely new relationship. There's greater promise for the future in this new blend of science and mysticism than there is in the behavorial approaches of Delgado, Skinner or John Platt.

The problem is that we have been denied our birthright in science; the tradition of science in the Western world from the seventeenth century is the great mystical tradition of men who had a truly cosmic consciousness. I am thinking of Kepler,13 who was a mystic; of Newton,14 who was a mystic involved with the computations of the prophecies of Daniel15 and the measurements of the temple in Jerusalem; of Pascal;16 of Descartes.17 All of these men were ‘spaced out,’ in the jargon of the contemporary world. What happened is that when these charismatic visionaries passed on their birthright and their heritage, their descendants inherited the results, which routinized their charisma and created institutions where the mediocre could be trained.

Out of this entire process the greatness of science was made effective on managerial development and technology. That was very useful for a while and helped spread the scientific tradition around the world through the British empire. Yet, we have now reached the point when

this has become a threat. We have to go back to our original scientific tradition of the seventeenth century, which Whitehead called the century of genius, and realize that there's more to science than just simply managerial behaviorism. The irony is that those who are spokesmen for the scientific solution of our planetary crisis are, in terms of, say, the physical sciences, very bad scientists. If you were to take the theory of science in the philosophy of Skinner and you attempted to relate it to, for instance, the philosophy of nature, you would see that the assumptions in Skinner are incredibly naive, very nineteenth-century mechanistic and have very little to do with, say, quantum mechanics or the most advanced scientific thought of today. Even nowadays there are many great scientists who are, for a lack of a better word, very mystically oriented.

Many of the hippy young students are rejecting science because they think it's evil. When they look at science, they think of industrial science and see Skinner, Delgado, Platt and Herman Kahn. This is a tragedy because they are moving into a groovy mindlessness as a solution to our planetary problem, getting involved in drugs and other sorts of things. If they really were properly educated about the spaced-out traditions of mystical and contemplative science, they could see that there is not really a conflict between the best of the human tradition in art and mathematics.

The aim should be to bring science and mysticism back together again. To do this we have to change totally our forms of education and move away from industrial education. This is why I have criticized MIT18 so much. MIT is, if anything, responsible for the illusion that science is mechanistic and positivistic and has attempted to deny the creative, the imaginative and the visionary in science for the sake of making a profit. We have to gather up all these anomalies in mysticism, psychic healing and psychokinesis and build together a new image of man and a new sense of the relationship of mass, energy and consciousness. This is what is happening. It is very clearly going on in the planetary city of Auroville in India. It is going on in the community of Findhorn in the north of Scotland. We don't have to worry about it, in the sense of asking the question, Can we get a committee of experts to recharge culture? Culture is taking care of it.

 

This is what Soleri19 tries to do in his Arizona experiment -

 

That's right. Soleri himself is attempting to take a planetary, a visionary sense of what must be done in terms of remaking the city of man -

And Illich20 for the educational angle -

 

Illich is trying to change it without changing it in terms of consciousness. It is not enough to move away from schools and have experts fly down to Cuernavaca. They remain the same kind of educators. Cuernavaca turned into another think tank, a humanistic think tank. A think tank just like Herman Kahn's think tank. We have to speak in terms of the specific forms of the transformation of consciousness by which we relearn: Who we are and where we come from and where we are going.

 

And you feel that the East might have a very strong influence in achieving these goals in the West?

 

We cannot simply go back and become Indians. This is why we have to search for mysticism in our scientific tradition by rediscovering that Newton was a mystic. If we would really understand the relationship between mass, energy and consciousness, we can see three states of being in it. For most people mass is what their body is, a hunk of meat. They have no other consciousness than being reduced to mere organs. Some people regain respect for the body through yoga, and learn that the body is a field of energy and vitality. They discover a whole new system of awareness. If you continue this process and become aware of subtler and subtler forms of consciousness, then I think the individual begins to discover the feedback of consciousness on nature and that nature can be redirected through consciousness. This is very much related to the work of Paolo Soleri, who talks about the spiritualization of matter. This is also related to the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin.

There are places in the planet, spaces, where this new paradigm of nature, self and society is emerging. I myself see a greater hope for the future in Auroville in India, which is not just an Indian city. A French architect is building it. There are three hundred American students there doing the physical labor. It is a planetary city dedicated to planetary culture. I see more hope for the future coming out of Auroville than the Stanford Research Institute or John R. Platt's Manhattan Project of technocrats who are going to solve all our problems by designing the final cultural container for man - his tomb.


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