William Irwin Thompson on the Three Simultaneous Disintegrations of the Body, the Nation-State and the Planet
Discussion
William Irwin Thompson:
"McLuhan not only commented on fads and trends, he also made a prophesy on the future evolution of humanity. Ironically, good Catholic that he was, in his Playboy interview in the 1960s, McLuhan went back to Dante and prophesied a time when the broken fragments of a retribalized humanity would be gathered up into the mystical body of Christ.
What McLuhan recognized, but did not explicitly state, was that our new highly advanced electronic media if used by evolutionarily unadvanced mortals will lead to cultural annihilation. These new media that work with the speed of light require a new spiritual consciousness of Light. They are so fantastically efficient that they cannot work to the good unless we are good; they only can be safely used if we tell the truth and live in the Truth. If we try to check and control them for lesser purposes, such as power, gain, misrepresentation, and the accumulation of wealth for private property in cyberspace, then blockages in the flow will generate distortions, noise, and a generalized cultural entropy in which no human relationships are possible. We end up in caricatures of religion in the form of demonic states of possession or William Gibson's dystopian nightmares of corporate dis incarnation. Only now, thanks to cyberspace, these states of possession are not simply psychic states, they have become virtual states that are not restricted to virtual reality. Nothing less than truth, goodness, and a Buddhist universal compassion are going to get us through this transition from industrialization to planetization. Our level of consciousness has now be come the biggest obstruction to the continuity of human existence. We have made normalcy nonviable, so we have opted for an "up or out" scenario in cultural evolution. We either shift upward to a new^ culture of a higher spirituality to turn our electronic technologies into cathedrals of light, or we slide downward to darkness and entropy in a war of each against all.
What the news should be reporting is the way in which three cultural transformations are so interlocking that the feedback of each on all is creating a condition that is not easily responsive to government control.
The first transformation is the disintegration of our atmosphere.
Because of massive industrial production of new gases, we are experiencing an increase in global warming and a thinning of the ozone layer. The increase in heat affects the currents in the ocean and the virulence of storms, and so hundred-year floods become annual events. The increased frequency of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes means that government emergency funds and insurance companies become exhausted right at the time that industrial deforestation is kicking up new airborne viruses and causing an increase in plagues that also draw down on medical insurance funds.
The invisible polity is really the atmosphere, and its globally chaotic system sweeps over all the boundaries of the territorial industrial nation states. So American acid rain destroys the Canadian forests on which the New York Times depends for its paper stock. To the south, in Mexico, the exported television images of wealth stimulate a repatriation as armies of the poor try to take back the land the United States took with armies of wealth. Meanwhile, in offshore strongholds and Monaco penthouses, currency traders shift dollars back and forth into yen and deutsche marks, making money only from "the difference that makes a difference" in seconds of time. These traders are beyond the control of any president, and so the fluctuations of dollars and pesos are as unstable and chaotic as the weather. As the industrial marketplace expands to planetary dimensions, and as the time of a transaction contracts to microseconds, a singularity is created in which the global marketplace, like a black hole sucking up a star, devours entire nation-states. As the currents of the biosphere interact with the currencies of the 'world economy, we get not an international politique, but a Gaia Politique in which an enantiomorphic polity emerges. Enantiomorphic means the shape of opposites, so this polity is like the atmosphere that emerges in the opposing but coupled systems of the ocean and the continent. The result is a shifting, chaotic, complex dynamical system that we call the weather. Climate may be predictable, but the weather is not. The state of the weather is much more than a territorial state of land: as a chaotic system, it is more of an archetypal image of our contemporary condition than the fixed earth of farmland and pastoral landscape. No longer is it a question of identity through Blut und Boden, the blood and soil of the Fascist's patriotic state, it has become the archetypal image of light and air. Political states are now much more like clouds than clods of dirt, for we have so sped up time with our nano-second electronic technologies that nations can now come and go in decades rather than centuries. Psychotics and paranoids sense this destabilizing shift and see their chance to make a state of being out of their obsession, and so cult tries to become culture in organizations like the Aryan nation. Since the Bible is the book of choice for these political extremists, the Bible provides the imagery through which they can think of themselves as the new Hebrews who will be led out of another mighty Egypt into their own promised land.
The third transformation that is interlocking with the disintegration of the atmosphere and the disintegration of the territorial nation-state is the disintegration of the body, especially the immune system's ability to identify the body in the chaotic flux of blood and air. We live in an invisible ocean of electromagnetic and chemical noise. With industrial gases everywhere, television transmission towers, microwave ovens, electronic watches, and cellular phones, the old evolutionary body has become chunks of meat floating in a planetary Mulligan stew of radiation and noise. Allergies abound, autoimmune diseases proliferate, and plague viruses take red-eye rides on jumbo jets. Now, as these three systems of meltdown interact with one another, they have a bootstrapping effect that enables them to magnify their influence in a runaway or positive feedback fashion. No American president can simply go on television to give a speech to tell reality in no uncertain terms to stop and return to normal.
So now we can see why this shift from industrialization to planetization involves a meltdown and disintegration of the literate, civilized, middle-class culture of the past. In the shift from the territorial nation-state to the noetic polity, there is a breakdown of bourgeois society that results in a shift to a new variant of medievalism. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The citizen-soldier is gone; replaced by SWAT antiterrorist professionals.
Noetic polities are not territorial; they are nonlocal. So the increase in omnipresent environments of noise indicates a shift from mental solitude and reflection to gnostic lattices of network connectiveness. Inevitably, in any transition to a new level of organization, there is loss.
Indeed, the fertility crisis within the populace of the technological world may signal just such a shift to larger forms of organization. As the biologist John Maynard Smith has pointed out about the major transitions of evolution:
- "Entities that were capable of independent replication before the transition can only replicate as parts of a larger unit after it.' The disintegration of the body is, therefore, one signal that evolution is no longer taking place at the level of the single organism. Evolution is now multi-organismic just as once it was multicellular. Once the cell enclosed molecules, then organisms enclosed cells, and now something else is enclosing us in distributive lattices of light. Christian mystics would call it the mystical body of Christ, Buddhists would call it the jeweled net of Indra, and fundamentalists would call it Satanic possession. Clearly, some new kind of religious knowledge and discrimination is called for, one not easily gained in our materialistic, techno logically focused society."