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William Irwin Thompson

Cultural History and the Ethos of the Ross School

Our Zeitgeist is an oxymoron. Our new global state of emergence and emergency is a

linkage of oppositions: of capitalism and crime, production and pollution, informationand noise, perceptive blindness and imaginative deception, a media dumbing down and

an Artificial Intelligence booting up. Like the linkage of the oppositions of continent andocean in the thermal exchanges of the atmosphere, our linked system of oppositions can

generate good harvests and tornadoes, tourist paradises and hurricanes, as well as a global

warming and a new Ice Age.

Since 1989, our age has been one of the collapse of totalitarian systems of societal

control, be they fascist, communist, or Third World militarist, and the emergence of non-

linear systems in which novel and emergent properties create cultural ecologies,technologies, markets, and systems of global organization that are not under any statist or

imperialist understanding or control. These new global cultural-ecologies constellatethemselves as unconscious networks of conscious agents generating noetic structures inwhat the ancient Buddhists called patterns of "dependant co-origination." To track the

paths of these new cultural vortices, the new mathematics of Chaos Dynamics and the

"New Sciences of Complexity" have emerged as conscious efforts to understand

unconscious processes. New cultural centers such as the Lindisfarne Association in theseventies, the Santa Cruz Chaos Collective in the eighties, and the Santa Fe Institute for

the Study of Complexity in the nineties, and now the Ross Institute have come forward to

help to articulate this shift from a system of competing and warring nation-states to a newplanetary culture.

In the post World War II international system, culture was dyadic and split betweeneconomics and ideology; in the new planetary culture, the system is more

multidimensional, more like a tesseract in which electronic technologies, global markets,

artistic expressions, and mystical states that express not a romantic escape from economicreality but a sensitivity to the interpenetration and presence of higher dimensional

complexity in emergent properties, are all facets of the hypercube.

To appreciate this new planetary culture, it is simply not enough to think in terms ofelectronics and global markets; one has to have an understanding of the dynamics of

culture and how opposites link in associations of "dependant co-origination." For

example, in the first Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, it was not enough to

be an economist to understand the shift from agricultural society to industrial civilization.Paradoxically, the mystic and the romantic artist need to be appreciated to understand the

entire cultural process. William Blake was a man who was both mystic and romanticartist, and the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum has warned his colleagues about the

dangers of ignoring the artists and slipping into the simple-mindedness of economic and

technological reductionism:

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Few men saw the social earthquake caused by machine and factory earlier than William

Blake in the 1790s, who had yet little except a few London steam-mills and brick-kilns to

go by. With a few exceptions, our best treatments of the problem of urbanization comefrom the imaginative writers whose often apparently quite unrealistic observations have

been shown to be a reliable indicator of the actual urban evolution of Paris.

One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks

the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off. The

evolution of the universe, from Big Bang to the formation of our solar system tookbillions of years, but with the emergence of life there was an acceleration of planetary

evolution and the bacterial bioplasm soon began to take part in shaping the formation of

the Earth's atmosphere. Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not

billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration oftime and the rate of change. With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted

from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a

way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries. Now with the

interaction between electronics, nanotechnologies, and genetic engineering, humanity istinkering with shifting the gears of evolution from first to second, or from evolution by

natural selection to evolution by cultural intrusion. Not all intelligence can be artificialnow, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an

institution or a national culture. Clearly, it is time that we understand that consciousness

itself, and not simply technology, is constituent of the phase-space of this globaltransformation of culture.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural

transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in theglobal transformation of human culture. We have been taught by the Quantum Theory

that our descriptions of nature, expressed as measurements of elementary particles, are

interactive parts of nature, that natural history is embedded in cultural history, but we areonly now beginning to realize that the culture of our descriptions of the universe is also

powerful enough to affect the nature of the universe we will inhabit.

To be equal to our age, it is not sufficient for education to retreat from spiritual vision

into job-training or become simply an apologist for technological innovation and

investment in artificial intelligence. We need a human intelligence to express a culture

equal to our present condition. In previous moments of cultural change, philosophy hasexpressed a visionary imagination and come forward to articulate the transformation of

tribe into polis (Plato and Aristotle), or kingdom into republic (Locke and Jefferson).

Now as we shift from a world of conflicting nation-states into a biospheric and globallynoetic polity, we need to have a new articulation of philosophy that goes beyond the old

marching divisions of fearful thinking that splits consciousness into objective and

subjective, technological and mystical, academic and unprofessional. A reimagination ofeducation is called for, one that is not captured by a narrow academic discipline but is

expressive of our new planetary culture in which our consciousness matters simply

because consciousness is the material condition of the universe in which humanity is

seeking adult membership.

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The Ross Institute and School should give voice to this new interaction between

conscious evolution and the evolution of consciousness. The teacher of history's work

should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of theculture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being. The teacher should

present a vast mural of human development to show how the past evolution of

consciousness is asking us to take the next step. Such a teacher should not simply be aninspiration to a new generation of students in East Hampton, but a voice to the world

through which the Ross School envisions its place in the dynamic of global cultural

transformation.