The Evolution of Conciousness and Culture
Self and Society, William Irwin Thompson's trim collection of six essays, is both profound and delightfully provocative. The cover's subtitle 'studies in the evolution of culture,' is replaced on the inside title page by 'studies on the evolution of consciousness.' One wonders if this is a deliberate statement that evolving culture is a manifestation of evolving consciousness. Knowing Thompson one suspects so. By coincidence, after teaching my University of Colorado class on The Evolution of Consciousness for ten years, I had just independently changed my class title to The Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, prior to seeing Thompson's book. So now, I have a handy new, student-friendly reading to offer.

The first essay - The evolution of the afterlife - is vintage Thompson (1981). With his historian's eye he traces afterlife beliefs and traditions from Sumer and Egypt - through the axial age to Teilhard de Chardin and James Joyce. He notes the axial transition from thymos to psyche as individuals first began to distinguish their individual souls, as separate from cosmic life forces. Thus, with Orpheus we see instructions to individuals on to how to make the passage to the realm of the dead, notions of posthumous rewards and punishment and aspirations to escape the cycle of reincarnation to a state of perfected divinity, or 'stellar spirituality.' As many have noted, Orphism likely has its roots in the east (India) from whence it borrowed dualistic notions of the dichotomy between this and other divine worlds.

We can group the next three essays on The City, Literary and Archetypal Mathematical Mentalities, and Artificial Intelligence (The Borg or Borges?) as much more contemporary commentaries on manifestations of the evolution of consciousness, which are nevertheless solidly rooted in the broad sweep of history. In the first essay, Thompson selects Paris, New York and Los Angeles, respectively, as emblems of past, present and future consciousness in the late 19th, early 20th and late 20th centuries. Taking 1889 as a pivotal date when Poincaré recognised that time was chaotic and not linear, Thompson sees Bergson's preoccupation with durée and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu as further manifestations of a shift in time consciousness. (One might add that Lewis Carroll and Edwin Abbott also set about disrupting spatial and temporal dimensions with adventures through the looking glass and in Flatland). The Eiffel Tower also became the first building to exceed the height of the pyramids of Giza. Moving on to 20th century New York skyscrapers became the emblems of corporate pragmatism in the here and now. King Kong's fall symbolises the death of nature, and a break with the past. And now we have Los Angeles, with its single industry of entertainment and future fantasy, outsourced to the suburbs of Las Vegas and Disneyland. (Perhaps Ali G was prescient in asking Boutros Boutros Ghali if Disneyland was a real country with UN membership)!

In the wake of da Vinci Code mania, Thompson's ruminations on literary and archetypal mathematics are particularly interesting. As culture evolved from Early Sumerian through Egyptian and Greek to Arab and Medieval, so the paradigm shifted, respectively, from arithmetic (cuneiform lists) to geometric (temples) and algebraic (abstract, allegorical codes). Even love evolved from the sexual to the courtly and abstract.

For those drawn by world events into a new and earnest political dialogue, the last two essays Ð We become what we hate and The myth of American democracy pull no punches in reflecting on the undemocratic motives and undercurrents of corruption and cynical political machinations that have manifest in the post 9/11 war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.

Thompson tells it like it is, drawing a stark line in the sand between honest, conscience-influenced intellectualism - what Rumsfeld called that 'old' European kind, and the cynical, corporate driven, hyper-capitalistic and media-manipulated Bush Cheney anti-intellectualism that pillages education, health care and social services in the name of democracy and 'Amerika Inc.'

What I personally like about Thompson's broad sweep of history vision, not to mention his impressive scholarship, is his recognition of the primacy of changing Gebserian consciousness structures and their manifestation in constant cultural transformation. For these reasons he dismisses the reductionism of Dennett, Dawkins and the Churchlands as 'eliminativist cognitive science [that] is the Kansas monocrop of consciousness sameness held in place by the machines and chemicals of agribusiness.' Poor Edward Wilson, despite his worthy championing of biodiversity, has his 'sociobiology' and 'consilience' severely criticised as a 'scientistic ideology that irons out the complexity of space, time and mind onto a flat surface that becomes the political base for the ambitions of a new scientific elite a new kind of scientific Taliban [that] would create a new scientific Sharia law for the technological society.' Whew!!

Thompson does suggest alternatives to Wilson's consilient aspiration for unity under the banner of a dominant scientific magisteria. His vision is pluralistic and multi-faceted, embracing differing beliefs and intellectual orientations, and a post religious spirituality of the type 'articulated by writers such as Albert Einstein, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, Owen Barfield and Sri Aurobindo.' He sees Einstein as the embodiment of the archetypal 'shift from traditional Judaism to scientific mysticism' and sees the Dalai Lama in much the same role - taking 'traditional religion and traditional Western science up to a new level of global spiritual understanding.' These transformations do indeed seem pivotal in the evolution of consciousness and culture, and they may not be easy or comfortably realised. The old Chinese curse 'May you live in interesting times,' is apt, and like the character for crisis-which means 'dangerous opportunity,' reminds us that transformation can be painful and discombobulating.

Thompson, W. I. 1981 Time Falling Bodies Take to Light,
St Martin's Press.