Waiting For Godlings

By Philip Herrera

PASSAGES ABOUT EARTH

By William Irwin Thompson

205 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

Yes, Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson is off again, hot on the scent of the future. Readers of his At the Edge of History (1971) know what to expect: a wizardry with words, continuous trips to the well of personal experience (Irish-Californian-Catholic), unlikely linkages of ideas, polarizations (technology v. mysticism) -- all united by the play of an original, restless, tendentious Intelligence.

Because Thompson does not believe in straight lines of logic, his thought is often hard to untangle. Yet a theme runs through his work. Edge of History laid the foundations. Initially it seemed to be the first-person adventures of an intellectual picaro charting his disenchantment with Los Angeles, the Esalen Institute, M.I.T., think tanks and other outposts of American culture. But in the final chapter, when Thompson soared into a free-form essay on myth as futurology, his intent became clear: he is a man questing for evidence of man's perfectibility.

The pursuit continues in Passages About Earth. From ample but largely gloomy evidence of rapid social change -- future shock, ecological disruption, population explosion, proliferation of information -- Thompson draws a startling conclusion: "We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution." Man, he asserts, will now either slide back into a new Dark Age or evolve into a higher, more spiritual being.

Which way will we go? The author opts for evolution. While such optimism is as welcome as it is rare these days, it is largely based on mysticism and intimations of a "new planetary culture," which Thompson shares with Philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Science-Fiction Writer Arthur C. Clarke. This is thin epistemological ice even for a skater as fast as Thompson. Indeed, incredulous readers may drop the book after the first reference to "our lost cosmological orientation." That would be a mistake. Agree with it or not, Passages is always fascinating, a magical mystery tour of man's potential.

The shape of the book is a personal odyssey. It is launched when Thompson, now 35, quits his job at York University in Toronto and heads out to visit the "prophets" who arise in times of stress "to reformulate the traditional path through the mazeway of nature, self and society." As a historian, he knows that the implications of great societal upheavals like the Industrial Revolution were first grasped by "crazies" like William Blake, whose ideas gradually percolated down to artists, savants and finally pedants.

But most of the present-day prophets disappoint Thompson. Architect Paolo Soleri, with his beehive city projects aimed at accommodating architecture with ecology, and Educator Ivan Illich, with his hope of "deschooling" society, turn out to be looking backward. Reacting to a world too full of growth, they strive to return to simpler, medieval values. (Nevertheless, both Illich and Soleri represent something Thompson admires: the achievement of authority unaccompanied by institutional power.) The Club of Rome, on the other hand, looks forward to a world of no growth. But Thompson dismisses its recommendations too because he distrusts rule by any "technocratic elite."

Far-Out Colony. That leaves the people who look inward, the mystics. Thompson approves of the effort of Yogi Gopi Krishna and German Physicist C.F. von Weizsaecker to meld Eastern wisdom with Western science. Such a union represents Thompson's ideal of Pythagorean science, involving "cosmological thinkers for whom art, religion and science are different idioms of the single language of contemplation"--in short, what Thompson regards as a means to the new planetary culture.

The book's last stop is Thompson's visit to a far-out colony called Findhorn, near Inverness in Scotland. The Findhornians devoutly believe that "matter is a condensation of consciousness." Therefore "you can commune with plants and spirits of nature if you know how to pitch your consciousness at the same vibratory level." Thompson likes the idea, in part because it appears in so many pantheistic myths and in part because his search is for just such an evolutionary potential in man.

In his own life, Thompson has done the only thing open to a scholar with such penchants but no mystical or magical experience. In 1973 he founded his own learning center in Southampton, N.Y. It is called "Lindisfarne" after an ancient monastery school in Scotland that helped keep learning alive through the Dark Ages. There Thompson and his followers are quietly preparing for cultural transformation, whatever form it might take, whenever it comes. If it comes.

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