New age: Details about 'William Irwin Thompson'
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William Irwin Thompson (born 1938) is a visionary cultural historian, social critic, novelist, yogi, and poet. He is especially interested in keeping alive the esoteric, humanistic, and spiritual traditions of mankind. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". Previously professor of humanities at Cornell, York University in Toronto, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he left for a more humanistic and spiritual quest. He has lived for part of the year in Europe in recent years. Thompson's son is Evan Thompson, cognitive scientist and professor of philosophy.
TeachingsSince the 1960s, Thompson's work appears to have been motivated by the following idea:
As fiction and music are coming closer to reorganizing knowledge, scholarship is becoming closer to art. Our culture is changing, and so the genres of literature and history are changing as well. In an agricultural-warrior society, the genre is the epic, an Iliad. In an industrial-bourgeois society, the genre is the novel, a Moll Flanders. In our electronic, cybernetic society, the genre is Wissenkunst: the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors. The scholarly fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, or the reviews of non-existent books by Stanislaw Lem, are examples of new art forms of a society in which humanity live, not innocently in nature nor confidently in cities, but apocalyptically in a civilization cracking up to the universe. At such a moment as this the novelist becomes a prophet, the composer a magician, and the historian a bard, a voice recalling ancient identities. — The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, 4Thompson has expressed admiration for the esoteric philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the mystical evolutionism of Teilhard de Chardin, the Mother Goddess anthropology of Marija Gimbutas, the autopoetic epistemology of Francisco Varela, the endosymbiotic theory of evolution of Lynn Margulis, the Gaia Theory of James Lovelock, the complex systems thought of Stuart Kauffman, the novels of Thomas Pynchon, and mystic David Spangler. He subscribes to the Buddhist metaphysics of dependent origination, which depicts all phenomena as arising in inextricable relationship to each other. Thompson is especially fascinated by Sumerian epics, including How Inanna brought the mes from Eridu to Uruk, Inanna's descent to the Netherworld, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. He sees these epics as formative of Western Civilization. He has also written on Venus figurines and the Upper Paleolithic Great Mother goddess cult, artifacts from Çatal Hüyük, and the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish; on Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, and the Book of Judges; on the Hindu Rig Veda, Ramayana, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita; and on the Tao te Ching. He has written book-length treatments of the Easter Rising of 1916 and Quetzalcoatl. Thompson considers fellow Irishman James Joyce's stylistically experimental novel Finnegans Wake to be "the ultimate novel, indeed, the ultimate book," and the climactic artistic work of the modern period and the rational mentality. Thompson is fascinated by Los Angeles, where he grew up, and Disneyland, which he considers to be LA's essence. Thompson sees the contemporary period as a dark age, characterized by unpredictable climate patterns and storms, the worldwide emergence of new viruses, and terrorism. This dark age should precede Gebser's integral period, which will be characterized by a planetary consciousness, a noetic polity, and a chaos-dynamical mentality. However, Thompson believes that another possible – indeed likely – outcome is the destruction of human civilization through techno-tribal warfare and/or environmental catastrophe. If that happens, he believes that cosmic evolution will continue, eventually lifting another species or entity to advanced intellectual and spiritual levels.
CritiquesThompson has harshly criticized the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber, postmodern literary criticism, artificial intelligence, the technological futurism of Raymond Kurzweil, the contemporary philosophy of mind theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland, and the astrobiological cosmogony of Zecharia Stichin. He has also dismissed the approaches of "nihilist" Friedrich Nietzsche, Harold Bloom, and Allan Bloom as irrelevant to the crisis of the present age. He isalso displeased by the Bush Administration: So the neoconservatives of the Bush administration are the mirror-image of al Qaeda; they are also a noetic polity that seeks to deconstruct the modern middle class democratic nation-state and replace it with a metanational corporate cartel – a capitalist al Qaeda. Halliburton, Bechtel, Enron, the Carlyle Group, and Newmount Mining are postnational formations that really care little about the welfare of any particular people or nation. The American soldiers that died in Iraq did not die "defending their country"; they died defending Cheney and Bush's interests in Halliburton and the Carlyle Group. These neocon corporate managers, very much like the privateers and pirates that helped Queen Elizabeth create a postbaronial world of naval power, are offshore pirates that care as little for the entire nation, as Texan Enron cared for the state of California it plundered. —"Al Qaeda, the Neocons, and the Transition from Nation-State to Noetic Polity" Lindisfarne AssociationIn 1972, with funding from Laurence Rockefeller, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association, which functioned variously as a sponsor of new age events and lectures, and as a think tank and retreat, similar to the Esalen Institute in California. Lindisfarne functioned through the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City for a number of years. Today the Lindisfarne Fellows House and the Lindisfarne Chapel are located in the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado founded by Zentatsu Richard Baker. According to the Lindisfarne Association website, Lindisfarne's fourfold goals are:
Members of Lindisfarne have included, among others: mathematician Ralph Abraham, philosopher of biology Henri Atlan, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, poet Wendell Berry, futurist Stewart Brand, economist Hazel Henderson, ecologist Wes Jackson, theorist James Lovelock, biologist Stuart Kauffman, biologist Lynn Margulis, Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana, New age author Michael Murphy, religious scholar Elaine Pagels, physicist Heinz Pagels, economist E. F. Schumacher, poet Gary Snyder, monk David Steindl-Rast, philosopher Francisco Varela, and composer Paul Winter. Thompson is currently offering a series of public seminars in June 2006 ("Poetry and Speculations on the Meaning of Western Civilization") and September 2006 ("Forms of Comsciousness") at the Crestone Zen Center in Crestone, Colorado . Quotations
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