Dreaming on Things to Come

By Charles Elliott

AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY by William Irwin Thompson. 180 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

This book is superficial, fragmentary, tendentious, scholastically disreputable and continuously fascinating. The author is billed as a humanities professor (32 years old, Ph.D. from Cornell, now teaching at York University in Toronto). In fact, anyone can see that he is some kind of mage, adept at issuing spells and performing mind-rattling tricks with bits of brimstone. Still, the questions that he poses are enormous. Where on earth is man heading next? Where, for that matter, has he been?

Taking his cue from 2007, Arthur C. Clarke's classic science-fiction novel Thompson suggests that the seemingly solid fabric of mundane existence has gaps, where "the millennial imagination of the future is interrupting the daily news of the present." Spot the gap and you can see forward into history.

That's the theory, anyway. As Thompson unintentionally shows, the trick works best when the viewer is so sensitized (worried, infuriated, charmed) by what he sees that a flash of understanding takes place, a kind of epiphany. Setting out on a jagged perambulation of our cultural landscape, Thompson finds little revelation in Los Angeles, a prime gap candidate if there ever was one. Big Sur's Esalen Institute, another potentially numinous spot, does not produce much cosmic insight either. But it does offer some memorable scenes, particularly a moment when Joan Baez disrupts a "Future of Consciousness" seminar by angrily demanding that the participants stop talking about themselves and declare their positions on Viet Nam.

Not until he reaches the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does the author reveal his true capacities as a Jeremiah. Here he finds engineers and behavioral scientists assembling a future that they intend to inflict upon us whether we want it or not. Others before Thompson have pointed out the horrors of technocracy, but seldom with such a combination of pique and precision. (Example: "M.I.T. needs a large psychiatric clinic because the effect of technological training is to do to the psyche what industry does to the environment.") Thompson's perceptions may be partly explained by the fact that he once taught humanities at M.I.T., surely a soul-shattering experience.

Of course the technocratic millennium may be doomed anyway. In Thompson's estimation, the men who have been planning it are far too straight to see around the necessary corners, much less through gaps. Describing a conference of scholars on the year 2000, he quotes Chairman Daniel Bell's advice to "think wild." Then he shows how little wild thinking anybody dared to do, even Doomsday Prophet Herman Kahn, who came equipped with statistics, charts and projections. "What is surprising about Kahn's world view," comments Thompson, "is its utter dearth of imagination."

Thereafter Thompson proceeds to stretch his own imagination. Starting with a paradigmatic four-part diagram illustrating the most primitive division of social roles--Headman, Hunter, Clown and Shaman--he progressively elaborates it, tracing the development of human society through history. According to his calculations, which borrow from anthropology, history, psychology and Yeatsian metaphysics, we are presently in Phase III (Industrial Civilization) and moving fast into Phase IV (Scientific-Planetary Civilization).*Provided that the Bomb or the behavioral scientists do not get us first, this last phase will see reunification and integration, a sort of global retribalization. Thompson's arguments are not always easy to follow (or to swallow); yet they buzz with intelligence and an attractive likelihood.

In the last section of At the Edge of History, Thompson thoroughly unsettles those innocents who like to feel that the past, at least, is intellectually manageable. So far as he is concerned, Thompson declares, "myth is the detritus of actual history." Pursuing that line of thought Thompson makes a case for Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet" from Kentucky who predicted, among other things, cataclysmic earthquakes and coastal floods and the rediscovery of Atlantis. He also suggests that Immanuel Velikovsky's world's-in-collision scholarship deserves an objective reexamination, especially since a number of Velikovsky's theories, including the existence of a magnetosphere, have proved true.

But Thompson is clearly not an advocate at heart. His tone is neither sensational nor paranoid, which sets him apart from practically everyone else trying to crossbreed science and mysticism these days. What he seems to be asking, with wonderful persuasiveness, is only that we accept the possibility of marvels in the past, or out beyond those gaps.

*The first two phases were Tribal Community and Agricultural Society.

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