Lindisfarne Association

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"The Lindisfarne Association (1972–2012) was a nonprofit foundation and diverse group of intellectuals organized by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson for the "study and realization of a new planetary culture".

It was inspired by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead's idea of an integral philosophy of organism, and by Teilhard de Chardin's idea of planetization.

Thompson conceived the idea for the Lindisfarne association while touring spiritual sites and experimental communities around the world. The Lindisfarne Association is named for Lindisfarne Priory—a monastery, known for the Lindisfarne Gospels, founded on the British island of Lindisfarne in the 7th century.

Advertising executive Gene Fairly had just left his position at Interpublic Group of Companies and begun studying Zen Buddhism when he read a review of Thompson's At the Edge of History in the New York Times. Fairly visited Thompson at York University in Toronto to discuss forming a group for the promotion of planetary culture. Upon returning to New York he raised $150,000 from such donors as Nancy Wilson Ross and Sydney and Jean Lanier. Support from these donors served as an entrée to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Association)

Discussion

Ralph Peters:

"By 1974 Thompson had taken a bold leap of faith beyond the edge of Watergate-mired American culture and became the founding director of the Lindisfarne Association, an intentional community and educational center in Southampton, New York. The name "Lindisfarne" was in honor of the seventh century Celtic monastery off the east coast of Scotland that produced Saints Aidan and Cuthbert as well as the Lindisfarne gospels. This era was the golden age of Celtic Christianity and so Lindisfarne was at once a religious base for the conversion of the British Isles to Christianity, an educational center for preserving and transmitting the best of the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions through the liberal arts and an artistic studio for the creation of beautifully illuminated manuscripts. This original Lindisfarne served as a point of spiritual light during the European Dark Ages and, like the earlier school of Pythagoras at Crotona or the later academy of Ficino in Renaissance Italy, housed a small creative minority that would one day have an impressively large cultural effect on the majority. Referring back to such models as his inspiration, Thompson hoped that his postmodern Lindisfarne would be both a unique source of culturally-transforming education and part of a universal network for the fostering of what he called the "new planetary culture".

Thompson claimed that this so-called planetary culture was energetically emerging in numerous marginal places in our midst in salient contrast to the powerful-appearing but actually declining urban-industrial civilization of militarized nation-states. What he and his Lindisfarne associates wished to do was to provide a setting (in 1976 they moved from Long Island to Manhattan) and the intellectual impetus to retrieve classical Western science from its dominant contemporary tendencies toward narrow reductionism and military applications, reenchant and resacrilize art in contradistinction to its current narcissistic tendency to nihilistically indulge or financially invest in art for art’s sake and recall religion to reembody its grandest universal visions and deepest esoteric practices rather than merely criticize its twin tendencies to slide toward reactionary fundamentalisms or dispirited liberalisms. Each cultural pursuit for a variety of reasons had become increasingly dissociated from the other two during the course of the twentieth century to the detriment of each and all. The end result was a set of separate and highly specialized subcultures, each with their own discipline—specific jargon that did not and could not serve as a vehicle of wider communication, let alone communion. In conjunction with the critical projects of multicultural, class and gender deconstruction and an increasing concern with pragmatic careerism, what used to be thought of as the shared "sacred" heritage of Western high culture began to experience a widespread meltdown in the very institutions of higher education that once endeavored to preserve, protect and promote it. Consequently, the only common culture left was popular and our pop culture had a disturbing tendency to maintain its shock value and stimulation intensity over time by moving cumulatively downward toward the lowest common denominator of base impulses. In the face of all that, the dream behind Lindisfarne’s strategy for cultural regeneration was to one day bring to multifarious expression a sensually beautiful and spiritually compelling "Planetary Renaissance" which would be nourished by a revitalized science, art and religion cross-fertilizing each other in a mutually enhancing dynamic of "triple circularity"."

(https://earthlight.org/2002/essay47_peters.html)

More information

• Lindisfarne Tapes from the Seventies on Decentralising Culture and Economics