The Mechanists and the Mystics

Four years ago when he was 30, William Irwin Thompson left his teaching post at MIT, dismayed at what he called the "mindless, liberal technocratic managerial vision" he found there. At York University in Toronto he became a professor of humanities and wrote At the Edge of History, a provocative little book greeted variously as "dazzling" and as "not so much an analysis of the decadence of our civilization as a symptom of its decline." Wrote one reviewer: "Thompson's Edge is to Charles Reich's The Greening of America what chess is to Chinese checkers." In a lengthy interview, TIME Correspondent John Wilhelm pursued further Thompson's ideas about technocracy, beginning with the Club of Rome, the international organization of scientists and industrialists that has called for zero population and economic growth (TIME, Aug. 14). But Thompson's remarks about economic growth were only the starting point for an amazing, freewheeling discussion that ranged from education and art to mysticism and evolution. Excerpts:

IN At the Edge of History I said that there would likely be an invisible college surfacing in the '70s or '80s after the exhaustion of the protest movement, and I was surprised to see it come up faster than I expected. I was, however, thinking more in terms of a Cromwellian protectorate than a bunch of behavioral engineers round the world who would be trying to consolidate their power. The intriguing idea about the Club of Rome is its incredible sophistication as a prestige structure. They finesse the whole power situation by not even trying to go for power, but they say: "We're going to show you in our computers that disaster is ahead of us. However, we happen to be just sitting here cornering the market on disasters, and so we're ready when you want to buy disaster control. We'll solve the planet for you."

I think it's probably useful to try to plan ahead, and I don't object to that. My ambivalences stem from the bureaucratic, technocratic and managerial structure of the group. I'm suspicious. In order to solve our problems, we have to use the structures that they're almost putting in our hands, so in some sense, I think it's a plea for a shift of power toward technocratic international managers. Now the only thing managerial people will respect is power blocs, like the ability of the Third World to disrupt. The managers will pay attention only to violence, which is why the Archie Bunkers of the world were fed up with the Kennedy-liberal Democrats, who would eliminate the white working class and listen only to the blacks.

I am frightened by the political implications of leading people into the promised land, moving them away from politics to political management, from being citizens to becoming subjects. Futurism, I think, is ideological camouflage, and should be very, very suspect.

Yet nobody talks about the end of the citizen. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler writes about participatory democracy and the future of it, and yet everything in the new technology is antidemocratic. If you've got computers, you don't have to share information with the bureaucracy; you just give the elite access to instant information. All the information coming in from different sides--economic, political, religious, social--has one common thing and that is that it is antidemocratic, which is one reason why the kids keep talking about participation democracy. Because when something is about to go, it has its sunset. It has its most beautiful, passionate colors and then disappears. When the railroads are coming in, people write poems to trees. When people are talking about sexual automation and the elimination of motherhood, that's when you have a sexual explosion. Now that democracy is going, every naive kid says "participatory democracy," and it's an absolute fantasy.

Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute is a think tank. You would imagine that they would be able to be at least five years in advance of themselves. Yet in their book The Year 2000, which was written in 1967, there was not a thing about pollution, nothing about the Club of Rome. Already that book is ancient history. So in some sense it shows the kind of bankruptcy of that sort of imagination. It's so lineal.

They are either glowingly optimistic or they are intensely pessimistic. There is no tragic sense of endurance and strength. That comes from a more cyclical and spiraling vision of history that doesn't flip back and forth between this kind of shallow optimism and shallow pessimism. It has a greater sense of the realities of human strength and growth.

With a tragic sense of history, you can see the limits to your own growth in technology without feeling that you've reached the end of the world. You can see other dimensions of possibility. It's the kind of strength that the blacks have had to see them through 400 years of suffering, that the Irish have had for 700 years to see them through the mess that's still going on, and the Jews throughout millenniums. It's a kind of capacity to endure. But now that we have reached the limits of one kind of technological expansion, there is a tendency on the part of progress-oriented thinkers to flip totally out and see lines going up or lines going down. It is more likely that the disintegration of one cultural structure is going to occur at the same time that the creation of another is going on, and that these things will be binary and paired and it won't be an either/or situation but both.

What's going on now is that the culture has split into mechanism and mysticism, and the people who are thinking of problems on a planetary scale are moving in opposite directions. Their solutions are different in content but have similar structures. So that planetary mysticism--the countercultural movement, Yoga, Zen, Subud, Sufism and all of the other newly popular religions--is trying to create an ideology for the planet that can relate to the limits of growth: non-aggression on nature; different relationships between men and women; a mysticism that is rooted in the physical, as it is in, say, Yoga. These things, new, mythic forms of imagination that seem to be unrelated, should be included in books like the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth. But in that book there is nothing about any of the imaginative, emotional, spiritual or deeply intellectual forms of human culture.

What's a nonpolluting culture, a non-growth, a non-Faustian Western culture going to be like? The people who have really been doing the research and development on that kind of culture have obviously been in the counterculture. The non-growth culture is closer to the Hopi Indian way of life* than it is to that of the jet-setting industrialist's. Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi is the most directly relevant book to something like The Limits to Growth. It's very clear that if you are going to humanize technology, you're not going to be able to do it within the limited terms of books and civilization and the other older containers. You've got to go very far out. In this sense, the people who really understand electronic technology, bio feedback, new forms of consciousness where you don't have to keep up by reading 36,000 books a year are the mystics. Seemingly you move away from culture and technology and become a world-denying mystic. But in reality--in a spiral--you are coming back into the heart of the post-technological culture.

It is a continued paradox that the only way to get to the center is to move in the opposite direction and then find that somehow or other there's been a contrary swing and you're now in dead center. In this sense the yogis and the mystics are world-activating, planetary men of action. The ones that are irrelevant are the managers. The mechanists are so busy with the machines that they can't see that the gods that they think are their opposites are really just picking up the other half of the culture.

Some of our problems stem from the fact that authority today pretty much comes from those who have power. What we need is a clear distinction between authority and power --as in the days of Christ and Caesar before the papacy. We must realize that there are areas of human culture in the imagination, in religious instincts, in the full dimensions of human culture rather than its mere technocratic husk that are important and that have to be affirmed. If we look upon our Presidents as colorless managers and develop alternative systems for cultural regeneration, then I think we have ways of creating new institutions that aren't weighed down with institutional inertia. So the attempt to create a Club of Rome is useful, but it's such an imperial model. First it's a club, and it's also the idea of Rome again: the old Roman imperial model of the center of civilization sending its structures out into the provinces.

There are only two models when you are in a disintegrating civilization, the Roman and the Lindisfarne. Lindisfarne were the monastery schools in Britain that held on to knowledge during the Dark Ages. They had no power. Each abbot, each visionary, was the guru of his particular place.

And then Rome came in and said, "No, you can't have it this way. You have to have a bishop, you have to have management, you have to be related to the central Roman structure, and you're now going to belong." And so they consolidated all these monasteries and put in their own kind of men. The battle between the Irish anarchist vision of cultural change and the Roman imperial one was a fascinating kind of collision. Now that we're in the Dark Ages all over again, I think back to this particular collision and see in it more of the problem of the difference between authority and power. But the trouble with separating authority from power was that it was only temporary. Later on Caesar and Christ were brought back together again and the papacy was created. And, you know, none of the early, really patristic Christians anticipated that.

But in the Dark Ages the Lindisfarne schools were trying to take the old Greco-Roman knowledge and miniaturize it by copying it, and in the process of copying it they created a new medium. They illuminated manuscripts, so that even in the act of transmission there was transformation. They put the old civilization as a content into the new larger structure, which was Christian civilization. Today if you take the old civilization--which isn't working --and you miniaturize the old knowledge, it will probably be done two ways, mechanistically and mystically. The mechanist will miniaturize it in terms of microfiche, and the mystics will miniaturize it by moving to a certain core of books and developing consciousness. By putting our old industrial civilization as a content into a new structure and devising new forms for the transformation of consciousness through Yoga, Sufism, Zen--I don't care, pick the one your personality likes the best--and by a new recognition of the body, I think it's more likely that one can create the kind of deeply individuated self where technology isn't a problem any more. But if one tries to work in the bureaucracy, being a student, being job-trained to go on to teach English majors how to teach English majors, or computer programming --there's such an utter futility in it that that kind of education is really irrelevant.

The universities are no longer on the frontiers of knowledge. A lot of students are leaving, professors are leaving. The universities won't die or disappear, but they'll lose their charisma and their imaginative capacity to innovate, which means that they will become the kind of places where you learn the past, where you consolidate, and then, when you're ready to really get into things, then you'll say, "O.K. I'm gonna go and work with Soleri, or I'm gonna work with Piaget, or I'm gonna study with Gopi Krishna, or I'm gonna go to India or go to the Lama Foundation in New Mexico--*and if civilization is still holding together, you might have an education credit card like an American Express card. We could give every adolescent $3,000 on his 18th birthday, and say, "Here. Open up a boutique and become a hippie capitalist, or blow it on a trip round the world, or finance your first rock album or your own book of poems, or have a channel on cable television or let it sit in your bank until the interest is sufficient to finance your whole Ph.D. after you go to college at the age of 28, which is the right age for university." This would probably put more energy into society --would be more truly capitalist than any kind of state-goliath-socialist system that we have reached.

I think that I would basically subscribe to the thesis that we have reached the limits of the growth of the Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, the system of industrial nation states. And the danger that's built into this is that it's like a return to the Middle Ages. Many contemporary technological critics are medieval thinkers. Soleri is a medieval thinker, Ivan Illich is a medieval thinker, Marshall McLuhan is a medieval thinker, Jacques Ellul --they're all medieval Christians.*Basically they're seeing the end of the modern era and the return to the Middle Ages, which they prefer.

They think in terms of culture, hierarchy, cathedral cities, the concentric universe and the integration of science, religion and art. Their vision is the Middle Ages reachieved on a higher level of order, with a new content but a similar structure. And that may be what's happening, because after a period of enormous creative expansion we're moving into a period of consolidation. And the medieval vision, Ptolemaic or what not, is a vision of consolidation, of structure, harmony, and correspondence rather than expansion. So most thinking this way is conservative.

A lot of this was anticipated in The Shape of Things to Come, where H.G. Wells envisioned that out of a military apocalypse, somewhere in the world, hidden during the period of tribulation, would emerge a freemasonry of scientists, engineers and technicians who would create a new rule of efficiency and would clean up the world after the mess. They would put away the old artist, the old military warlord and the politician with his raging ideology. Well, when we do put away these people, we can't kid ourselves that we're not also putting away the bourgeois middle-class democratic system.

Now some of this is O.K., because middle-class democracy meant freedom for the middle classes but not for the lower classes. And it meant the destruction of the culture of the upper classes. So that from top to bottom, there's a kind of revulsion against middleclass, bourgeois industrialism.

This is why many intellectuals like T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner or D.H. Lawrence would be disgusted by the modern world, and why the peasants would not like it either, and the top and bottom would come together to get rid of the middle classes. Except: the intellectuals are always betrayed, because the peasants basically want to become middle class, and so there's a slippage. Many of the intellectuals now are so hungry for order that they would be willing to see the end of democracy and some new kind of Napoleonic order coming in. Arnold Toynbee, in his recent book Surviving the Future, says that as far as he can see we have a choice between a world federal state with an Alexander at the helm or nothing --annihilation.

I think that the intellectuals will be the first people to make accommodation with the new power structure. As long as they can still have their elitist sense as professors and computer scientists, they will be quite happy in an aristocratic promanagement system. They don't stand to lose that much. Thus the ones who cry the loudest for freedom might not be all that much in favor of it.

These political implications are nowhere being discussed.

Even the mystics don't really discuss the meaning of their intensely hierarchical system. All these mystical religions have

gurus at the top and disciples at the bottom, and they're very much men.

They are graded according to their state of consciousness and evolution, and there are some who are more highly evolved than others.

If we're moving toward limited growth and toward staying in your place, doesn't that mean no upward mobility? If we are going back to the Middle Ages where the little guy stayed in his place, we have to remember that the one thing that kept the guy in his village was the large cosmic vision of Christendom.

The only thing that can make you small is to have eternity in a grain of sand, you know. Some religions would say one can strive, but Zen would say even to strive is to miss the satori. The goal is being rather than becoming. This is again where I feel that the mystical movements are the most technologically sophisticated political movements now operating. They make everything in Herman Kahn and the Club of Rome seem incredibly naive.

Incidentally, it's very interesting that any guru who has any kind of thing going for him is heading for the U.S.: Tibetan, Indian--all of them. They've all got this heavy message: "The planetary transformation and human evolution are going to occur through the instrumentality of the U.S." The blacks too are more into the culture in the U.S., bad as the problems are, than in Africa. Even the American Indians are coming back in with the Indian cultural renaissance. It seems to me that the one place where the four continents and the four races come together in any kind of planetary intermingling and transformation is the States.

We are again moving into a very hierarchical, mystical, Pythagorean, antidemocratic system. Half of me is in favor of that. The other half does not want to go through the Middle Ages all over again. Will it be good or bad? Take the Industrial Revolution. It may be that the Industrial Revolution was an ambiguous event that was equally good and equally evil. And this new revolution, which is not just a technological but a cultural transformation--probably the biggest one we've ever seen since we were hominized--is equally going to share those ambiguities.

*The Hopi way of life is deeply religious, with esoteric prayers and ceremonies that are supposed to maintain the harmony of the universe. *Paolo Soleri: an architect working with student apprentices in Arizona on schemes to redesign cities. Jean Piaget: eminent Swiss child psychologist. Gopi Krishna: Indian philosopher who has written about the evolution of man toward a new state of consciousness. The Lama Foundation: a commune devoted to the study of Eastern mysticism. *Ivan Illich: brilliant priest who believes in deschooling society but founded a school of his own in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Jacques Ellul: French historian and lay theologian of a Calvinist persuasion.

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