From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter)
Subject: Re: William Irwin Thompson
Keywords: William, Irwin, Thompson ;)
Organization: University of Denver, Dept. of Math & Comp. Sci.
Distribution: inet
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 11:06:06 GMT

[unfortunately I do not seem able to edit Follow-ups - they should perhaps
be set only to rec.arts.books]

lizi@hermes.berkeley.edu (Cosma Shalizi) writes:
>In article <1992Nov9.040747.24800@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu 
  (Mitchell Porter) writes:
>>After a year on the net I have yet to see anyone anywhere mention William
>>Irwin Thompson's ideas. Is anyone aware of a place they are discussed?
>   It would help a bit of you mentioned (very briefly) what said ideas are,
>and might (might!) even get some of us interested...
>	Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
>	In Real Life: lizi@soda.berkeley.edu
>	larval physicist

  I was hoping you wouldn't ask that! This guy has so many ingredients to
his thought that it's hard to do justice to them. He has my respect
largely because he keeps evolving his ideas and thinks critically about
everyone, in the mainstream and on the fringes, *including* his own
previous notions. People describe him as a "cultural historian", and
(according to his bio) he's lectured in "various departments of the
humanities and social sciences" at a few universities; but as I understand
it, he basically quit that in the early '70s to create the Lindisfarne
Association, which was then a sort of elitist club for all sorts of
"alternative" thinkers, with what would now be called a stong "New Age"
component; but in the early '80s he changed tack and started looking at
postmodern philosophy, the "new biology" and dynamical systems theory, and
so now Lindisfarne includes chaos theorists and cognitive scientists
alongside some of its perennial fellows.
  As for explaining his ideas... I really don't feel up to that but I *do*
have to hand a transcript of a very brief essay that he wrote last year
just after the end of the Gulf war. I intend to tack it on to this message
and hope I don't get too many flames. In a sense it might be a bad
introduction as it is somewhat more... spectacular than his average
writing, but at least it might give some impression of the different
themes this guy weaves together. 

THE WAR IN THE GULF - William Irwin Thompson - March 7, 1991
[reproduced without permission from "Reimagination of the World"]

  Politics has been called the art of the possible. War is the politics of
the impossible. What was not possible in peaceful compromise becomes
possible through the exhaustion of violence. Incarnation for most people
is unconscious; they do not know how they got here, and they only begin to
feel the meaning of their incarnation when they come to its edge near
death. Societies throw themselves into wars with total fasination and
astonishing organization because war is incarnation made conscious; it is,
after all, waged with the flesh.
  Wars frame more than the interval of peace; they remap our cultural
territory. New lines are drawn, old lines are erased. From the enormous
investment in violence, a new longing for the impossible is created, as
what was invisible before the war becomes part of the new landscape of
peace. After World War II, the United Nations and the state of Israel
became the impossibilities that took their proper places in the sun.
  Before the war in the Persian Gulf, the elemental was invisible to the
human. The first creatures to live on this planet were displaced by the
last, and this displacement generated an invisible noosphere of hatred and
rage. The humans who became possessed and taken over by this hatred were
the Arabs. Historically treated with contempt by the Ottoman, French and
English empires, the Arabs have felt attracted to the West, while filled
with rage that it was a world closed to all but the wealthy few who could
buy fleets of German cars or even entire London department stores such as
harrod's. The red man had been turned into a figure of shamanic wisdom and
magical power by popular culture, and the black man had been transformed
into the musical hero of the world; but the poor Arab was the real
primitive of our global electronic society, and he was reduced to
attacking the airlines as once the Plains Indians attacked the railroads.
  Having no place in the scheme of things, the Arab was displaced from the
geopolitics of the visible world to the Gaian politics of the invisible
elemental world. The paranoid insanity of Saddam Hussein created an
opening to a state of elemental possession. The hundreds of burning oil
wells in kuwait are an outward sign of an inward state: a visible
transformation in which the elemental underworld is released into the
upper world through fire and smoke. The blue sky created so long ago by
the photosynthetic activity of the cyanobacteria, the elves, is now
threatened with the revenge of the elementals, who were thrust down into
the underworld to prepare the world for the coming of humanity. To prepare
the world for the coming of posthumanity, the elemental is being released
in a fury of rage and revenge. The transformation of the atmosphere has
been accelerated by decades.
  In Grimm's fairy tales, such as "Rumpelstiltskin", the revenge of the
first against the last is often expressed in the form of a dwarf that
demands the sacrifice of the firstborn. Since the elementals were the
firstborn of Earth who were sacrificed to make room for humanity, it seems
only fair to them that humans should be asked to sacrifice their
firstborn. In the parable of the vineyard in the New Testament, the
workers of the first hour wonder why the workers of the last hour should
receive the same wages. They are not comforted when Jesus says that "the
last shall be first, and the first shall be last." In the fires of the oil
wells in Kuwait, the insanity of Saddam has provided the elementals with a
form of incarnation. And what these bodies are demanding is the sacrifice
of the firstborn children of the modern world economy, the world cities of
Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York. It is precisely these cities that
will be the first to be flooded and destroyed by an atmospheric Greenhouse
Effect that can raise the water level of the oceans. In the exoteric
hatred and revenge of the poor against the rich, an older and more
esoteric hatred has been bodied forth.
  Findhorn and the New Age sought to teach us about the presence of the
elemental kingdoms through gentler and more loving means - gentler and
slower. Now the world economy and its embeddedness in the world ecology
will become clearer to all. As a merchandised fad, the New Age movement
came in the interval between two wars, Vietnam and the war in the Persian
Gulf. After the burnout of Vietnam, after all the violent protests,
bombings, and drug escapes of the sixties, people in the seventies turned
to less Dionysian and more Apollonian forms of spiritual exploration.
Findhorn, Auroville, Arcosanti, Lindisfarne, and Naropa - these were the
sorts of educational experiments that expressed the zeitgeist. Of course,
these were marginal experiments of a subculture, and the dominant culture
moved on into the greed of the eighties with Reagan and Bush, Trump and
Milken. Money was in, idealism was out. In American politics as the art of
the possible, things like Arcosanti and Lindisfarne were impossible dreams.
  But war is the politics of the impossible, and the war in the Gulf has
remapped our cultural territory. This time, however, it is not simply
lines in the sand that have been redrawn, but lines in the sky - lines
dividing the visible from the invisible. Now there can be no "us" or
"them", whether rich or poor, New Age or Old Age, Israeli or Arab, human
or elemental - we are all passing through this catastrophe together. What
was once merely mystical idealism has now become the political reality of
the United Nations of Earth.


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