Self and Society by William Irwin Thompson

Author:William Irwin Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Evolution, culture, consciousness, afterlife, literary archetypes, mathematical archetypes, machine consciousness, 911, Iraq War, current affairs, Barak Obama, terrorism
ISBN: 9781845405380
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2017
Published: 2017-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Introduction: Beyond the Entranced and the Intransigent

Our Zeitgeist is an oxymoron. Our new global state of emergence and emergency is a linkage of oppositions: of commerce and crime, transportation and terrorism, production and pollution, information and noise, perceptive blindness and imaginative deception, a media dumbing down and an Artificial Intelligence booting up. Like the linkage of the oppositions of continent and ocean in the thermal exchanges of the atmosphere, our linked system of oppositions can generate good harvests and tornadoes, tourist paradises and hurricanes, as well as a global warming and a new Ice Age.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, our age has been one of the failure of imperial states’ systems of military control - be they communist, capitalist, or fascist dictatorships - and the emergence of non-linear systems in which novel and emergent properties create cultural ecologies, technologies, markets, and distributive lattices of global organization that are not under any statist or imperialist understanding or control. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are archetypal expressions of this evolutionary conflict between a military empire’s ‘Central Processsing Unit’ and a sub-national noetic polity’s massively parallel distributive lattice. The neo-medievalism of al Qaeda, for example, is merely ideological camouflage for its postmodernist electronic structure. These new global cultural-ecologies constellate themselves as unconscious networks of conscious agents generating noetic structures in what the ancient Buddhists called patterns of ‘dependant co-origination.’ To track the paths of these new cultural vortices and basins of attraction, the new mathematics of Chaos Dynamics and the ‘New Sciences of Complexity’ have emerged as conscious efforts to understand unconscious processes. New cultural centers such as the Lindisfarne Association in the seventies, the Santa Cruz Chaos Dynamics Collective in the eighties, and the Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complexity in the nineties, came forward at the end of the twentieth century to help to articulate this shift from a world economy of competing and warring nation-states to a new planetary cultural -ecology of noetic polities.

In the post World War II international system, culture was dyadic and split between economics and ideology; in this new planetary culture, the system is more multidimensional, more like a tesseract in which electronic technologies, global markets, artistic expressions, and mystical states that express not a romantic escape from economic reality but a sensitivity to the interpenetration and presence of higher dimensional complexity in emergent properties, are all facets of the hypercube.

To appreciate this new planetary culture, it is simply not enough to think in terms of electronics and global markets; one has to have an understanding of the dynamics of culture and how opposites link in associations of ‘dependant co-origination.’ For example, in the first Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, it was not enough to be an economist to understand the shift from a traditional agricultural society to an urban industrial civilization. Paradoxically, the mystic and the romantic artist need to be appreciated to understand the entire cultural process.

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