A Gaiain politics

AGAIAN POLITICS by William Irwin Thompson Illustrations by Matt Wuerker

IN THE SIXTIES, THE YOUNG EXPECTED REVOULTION, but the revolution did not come. So the young went back to law school and the Yippies retooled themselves to become Yuppies. In the seventies, the New Age movement expected a millenarian revolution. Looking back on the seventies, its seems as if Humanity had voted overhwelmingly for a postponement of the revelation. The alternative and ecological movements were resoundingly defeated everywhere. The new age movement ended with Reagan and not Zen governor Brown as the California President, and the spirit of the age made itself felt at every level of the culture by replacing "Star Trek" and "Kung Fu" with "Dynasty" and "Dallas," Joni Mitchell with Madonna, and "Close Encounters" with "Rambo."

THE FIFTIES resturned. The disgusting fifties that I had hated in high school, when to be an intellectual was to be labeled a pinko-commie-queer; the fifties, when girls wore wire-reinforce brassiers -- those wretched fifties returned. Never mind that things got reversed in the mirrow of time, that Madonna wears her underwear on the outside and that Reagan is a fiscally responsible Eisenhower with a two-trillion-dollor deficit. That isn't the issue. It is rather that those same people had returned. The high-school mentality is back in power and the high school (as celebrated in movies like "Porky's"), and not the university, has become the central American cultural institution.

Now the easiest way to respond to such a digusting political situation is to have a beer, slide down into sulking position, and think, "Oh, well. The good guys always lose." Intellectually, a more arousing response is to begin to wonder whether there is not something out there that one does not understand. If at the half-time of history the score is: Good Guys 3, Bad Guys 199, then perhaps something else is going on in this video game of incarnation. Historically, evil is often the announcement of the next adaption. If one is a hominid, human tools are murderous; if one is a hunter or a nomad, agriculture is wicked; if one is a farmer, industrial cities are evil; and now if one is a civilized human being, a planetary electronic culture is threatening, like some Omni magazine science-fiction illustration of flesh embedded in metal and silicon.

We have been playing a simple dualistic ping-pong game between good and evil since the emergence of writing and civilization, but now that writing is being replaced with electronics, and civilization with planetization, it also seems if natural selection is about to be replaced with genetic engineering. Very little, then, will be left of nature, and so the nature of good and evil is also most likely to change. Indeed, all our histerical fundamentalisms, whether Marxist, Muslim, or Moral Majority, seem prima facie evidence that the simple dualistic structure of consciousness is in its final, if deadly, supernova stage. If there is a chance that what we are now experiencing as terrifying and evil may be the emergence of a new adaptation, a new world, then the habitual structure of consciousness with its simple dualistic game of good and evil must be lifted up to a new level in which we begin to take responsibility for the whole range of unconscious relatedness that extends from us. In short, the unconscious polity of the world, Gaia, must begin to become a conscious polity, and this will necessitate a new Gaian form of understanding of the politics of life.

When a political policy is unsounds, one discovers it through noise. Noise is an expression of the unknown and the ignored, of the irrelevant and the unvalued. As the noise builds up it reaches a point at which it overwhelms the signal, and then one gets a reversal in which the noise begins to be heard as information, and the old signals become a background hum, a Muzak of buzz-worlds.

Environmental pollution is a form of noise in the transmission of human purpose into the wild. At the beginnings of civilization, such noise is ignored, and only now are such disturbances as soil loss, water poisoning, and atmospheric changes truly disturbing. As this noise continues to build up it will reach the point where it will overwhelm the old signal and the industrial rhetoric will become a noise mechanicially recited by people still invoking a historical envelopment that is no longer the actual historical environment.

ECONOMISTS DESCRIBE the conscious structure of a society in a language of quantitative measurement called the Gross National Product (GNP), which is an abstraction taken for reality. The unconscious process, the actual life of the culture or ecology, is ignored even though, paradoxically, its manifestations are physically visible. The industrial nation-state is the conscious polity, but the unconscious polity is the shape of things to come.

Our unconscious polity is a biome called Mexico-U.S.A.-Canada. For the life of a biome, the boundaries of the nation-stage are illusory abstrations. Our borders are melting. The land that was once taken from Mexico by the power of wealth is now being repetriated by the power of poverty. North Americans broadcast images of wealth in television commercials and programs such as "Dynasty" and "Dallas," and Mexicans respond as multitudes attracted to the imaginary land of "El Norte." Neither the flow of electronic information nor the flow of illegal immigrants recognizes the abstract boundary of the nation-state. The border is not a wall but a very permeable membrane indeed. But simply eliminating the membrane will not work, for the structure of life in a biome is formed around the difference between the two regions. In Gregory Bateson's terms, it is the difference that makes the difference and constitutes information; but I would take it a step further to say that it is difference that drives the system, that incites to motion. Like hot and cold molecules sorting themselves out from one space to another, the ultimate thermodynamic condition could become a lukewarm one in which Los Angeles becomes a Third World city indistinguishable from Mexico City. And what illegal immigration is to the south with Mexico, and acid rains is to the north with Canada.

The Weekness of liberal thinking is that it focuses on contents and not structures. If one eliminates war, terrorism and violence at sports events will spring up in its place. If one eliminates the difference between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in the arms race, then the engine that drives the scientific systems of both nations stops, and people, no longer threatened, no longer vote for the enormous subsidies that Big space requires. Here, perhaps, our imaginations can begin to evision what Reagan's Star Wars is really all about. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is the open consummation of a process that began in ancient Sumeria. Civilization is a misnomer for what V. Gordon Childe called "the urban revolution", the world should be militarization. We should not be simple-minded liberals and look at the content to get caught up in a silly debates about whether the anti-ballistic missile system will really work. Of course, it won't work, but the satellites and missiles are simply the content; the structure is a planetization and represents the present phase of the transition from a civilian economy, temporarily mobilized for defense, to a scientific economy permanently organized for research and development, an economy in which serendipity, of finding what you are not looking for, is often the most important spin-off. But the difficulty in getting a civilian population in a democracy to vote for a scientific economy is that the ordinary citizen is afraid of science; he is afraid of the mandarinism that makes him feel stupid. Consequently, the only way to get the citizens of a democracy to vote for the transition to a scientific economy is to frighten them and then deflect their fears of science onto the scientists of "the enemy," so that our own scientists can enter the picture as angels of deliverance. To motivate our enemy to scare our citizens, we must, of course, frighten him so that he will fall into the posture that is needed to hold up our economy.

So far, the Russians have never let us down. considering how few Americans have ever been killed by Russians, and considering how many Americans have been killed by Americans in our decaying cities, it is clear that our sense of direction is a little off in matters of defense. Perhaps if we put the reconstruction of the New York subways on the defense budget, we would be able to find the money rather quickly. In the meantime, I think it is only fair to recognize that the Soviet Union is a close and intimate part of the United States. We could loss a few states and still survive, but if we lost the Russians as our enemy, our industrial nation-state economy would collapse.

Star Wars is not an expression of theory but a projection of fantasy, and for this role Reagan is profoundly expressive of our new electronic body-politic. Reagan is the archetypal leader of our post-industrial unconscious polity precisely because he is not a thinker. He is almost entirely unconscious, so his theories do not map into his political behaviour. Like the old-fashioned town at the entrance to Disneyland, Reagan's theories are nostalgic artifacts, decorations, and illusions. Like artifical plants and plastic fountain at a suburban shopping mall, concepts like free enterprise, fiscal responsibility, christian values, and national defense decorate Reagan's unconscious polity in which the shadow economy of drugs, crime, and military spending exceed the conscious economy of the GNP. This economy of violence is now much greater than the old traditional business economy founded on the Reformation beliefs of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Prescisely because Reagan is not a thinker, he is able to live with these contradictions without being aware of them. As an expression of the collective unconscious in an informational society, Reagan has become the historical expression of our unconscious polity.

Reagan's Star Wars is also a historical recognition that thermonuclear weapons are militarily useless for superpowers, because nuclear winter precludes their use against continental states, and their scale of destructiveness does not enable superpowers to project their power militarily, to control a sphere of influence, or to stabilize a region of critical resources. Since superpowers can afford large military expenditures, theremonuclear weapons are not attractive investments, precisely becuase they are costly and useless and take funds that could be better spent on the artificial intelligence systems that "smart weapons" require for more surgically precise operations against global terrorism. In the bilateral hegemony in which Reagan telephoned Gorbachev to get permission to bomb Libya is a new recognition that though atomic weapons are no longer attractive for the superpowers, they are too attractive for smaller nations like Libya, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran; consequently a more limited and feasible anti-ballistic missile capability is desired by both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that could be used to prevent the firing of nuclear rockets in such critical resource areas as the Middle East or South Africa. Reagan thus finds himself in the contradictory position of needing to keep the Soviets as an enemy to support the new American economy, and at the same time sharing information with them so they both can keep the "punk" nations in line. Since both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl demonstrate that the high technologies of superpowers cannot be trusted to work without errors, it is clear that neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. can feel safe from an accidental firing on either side; therefore, anything that makes one side feel threatened enough to move up to a state of red alert is to be avoided at all cost. Inevitably, the U.S. will have to stimulate its economy with Star Wars and secretly will allow the information to be stolen by the Soviets to insure that they will not drop out of the competition or become a spoiler or a punk nation themselves. Thus we can see that the end result of the arms race is a transnational planetization that could be called the U.S.S.S.R.

The politicaly entity that is the transitional form between the industrial nation-state and the planetary Gaian form of politics is, unfortunately, the State of Terror. Because we humans are primarily motivated by fear, fear is what we get in our political gropings. Our ruling politicians terrorize us with thermonuclear mutual assured destruction, and our aspiring revolutionaries terrorize us with visions of thermonuclear war that they hope will organize the masses behind them; outside these norms, the completely powerless and hopeless terrorize us through terrorism itself. In many ways, terrorism is a form of amateur government; the real professionals in the business of terrorism are, of course, the legally constituted nation-states. If one looks back into history to read descriptions of public executions, one can see that the landscape of terror has been instrument of governance throughout the history of civilization, from the Assyrians to the Aztecs to the British. What has changed is that in an informational, electronic polity, there is no such thing as space separating the innocent from the guilty, so "innocent bystanders" in airports are chosen to attract public attention and to show that the invisible and stateless are indeed visible and able to involve those who thought that they were separate, innocent, and safe into the common lot of death.

Noise, pollution, crime, terrorism, and warefare all constitute unenlightened and unconscious forms of activity in which we say one thing and do another, in which we are one thing but act another. In each case we seek to expel an alien into an imagined external space that will permit us to continue our conscious agenda unchallenged by responsibility to the entiure pattern of biological relatedness. But if noise is attended to, if pollution is transformed, and if enemies are seen to be intimate projections of our own internal life, then our political systems will begin to change; they will move away from the mechanistic descriptions that shape our economic conceptions today to new organizations of the living taken from biology and ecology.

CONSIDER THOSE SEEMINGLY irrelevant areas of pop culture that conventional industrial economists ignore. For example, let us begin with the punks on the King's Road in Chelsea, London. The punks are an industrial prolatariat that has recycled itself into an informational proletariat. Knowing full well that they were not need by the upper and middle classes, not as slaves, serfs, or factory workers, they did not wait for the monetarists of Thatcherdom to tell them what to do with their lives, but entirely on their own, they went on to invent a lifestyle that spins off its own economy -- a music industry, a fashion industry. These, in turn, spin off a music video industry and a whole series of associated magazines and newspapers. A new informational middle class begins to live off the creative energy and innovations of the lower class. Now, if one adds up the sum of all these transactions on a global scale, and then one divides this sum by "the dole" that the punks received an unemployed members of the working class, one will begin to see what a tremendous return on investment the dole represents. Perhaps the old notion of a guaranteed annual income would not be quite the drain on the economy that industrial-age economists project.

By way of contrast, and in the British spirit of fair play, consider all the money earned by nuclear power plants and the Concorde, then dive that sum by the "dole" given to the managerial class to stimulate the economy by subsidizing nuclear energy and the development and maintenance of the Concorde. Very few people are affected by the Concorde, but hundreds of millions of people are affected by the music industry, even the starving in Africa. And yet, in spite of all this economic and cultural enterprise, and ironically, in spite of everything the punks do to become highly visible, Thatcher and her cronies cannot see them as anything but noise.

This illustration of economic development taken from popular music instead of "real" industries like coal or railroads, or oil and aerospace, is not a fanciful as it may seem. Envision two teenagers, one in Los Angeles, the other in Sydney, "jamming" together by playing self-composed, computer-antimated music videos through the use of their own personal computers, modems with satellite hookup, and VCRs. This composition would be improvisational jazz and imagery that could melt away or, if the teenagers preferred, be saved on video discs. An electronic conferencing a group of these teenagers would constitute a nightclub that was not simply located in space or time. In other words, two teenagers with personal computers and a VCR

THERE IS MORE OF A FUTURE FOR POLITICAL ENTITIES LIKE GREENPEACE THAN FOR INDUSTRIAL NATION-STATES.

Reagan is the archetypal leader of our post-industrial unconscious polity because he is not a thinker. He is almost entirely unconscious.

Pollution is a form of noise in the transmission of human purpose into the wild. would be able to create art forms that, a generation before, would have taken an entire recording and television studio. If we expand our imaginations to envision a jam session of teenagers all over the world, we will be able to see the emergence of a global polity. Such as planetary culture.

Reagan for all his fundamentalist, Moral Majority rhetoric, is no Christian avatollah, and he has done more to consolidate the shift from industrial to postindustrial than any president since Kennedy. Reagan's peculiar talent seems to come from the creative ability to entertain opposites, and perhaps this comes about because he has so little consciousness to get in his way. These apparent contradictions, however, are not so novel as one might think. Liberal, industrial England was ruled by the conservative collective representation that was Queen Victoria, and Nazi Germany was led by a Nativistic leader who created an untraditional merger of technology and the State.

If we go further back into prehistory, we can see that this pattern of innovation disguised as conservatism has always been there. For example, in the period of the neolithic revolution, when humanity, thanks to women, was effecting the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the iconography on the walls of Antolian Catal Huyuk (6,500 B.C.) celebrated hunting. The economic structure of the culture is neolithic and agricultural, but the content is paleolithic. Similarly, when we look at the shift from medievalism to modernism, we see the same archaistic features. in Renaissance Florence, Cosimo di Medici is caught up in visions of Plato's academy and neoplatonic mysteries, but the structure of the new culture is based on new forms of communication in banking and art. And when we consider the next major historical shift, the shift from agricultural to industrial society, we find the same pattern; the structure of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition in London (1851) is industrial wrought iron and glass, but the content is medievalism and romanticism.

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that Reagan is no cultural historian and has not modeled his behavior upon a study of neolithic Anatolia, Renaissance Florence, or nineteenth-century England; we must assume that whatever it is in human culture that produces this pattern in precisely the same collective unconscious force that throws Reagan onto the screen of history. In the literal Latin sense of the word, Reagan has a political genius, or is, at least, an idiot-savant. On a "Gala Night of Stars," one more reminiscent of Las Vegas than of New York, Reagan, relit the Status of Liberty with a laser. In the company of his Hollywood colleagues, Reagan give America so clear a performance of its collective representation that it is now obvious, in his second term, that Reagan's use of the media to collectivize society is even more skilful than F.D.R.'s use of the radio in the Depression. F.D.R. used the radio, Hitler used the loudspeaker, and the Ayatoliah Khomeini used the tape recorder, but no politician has ever used television so cunningly. Now even Reagan's opponents have to admit that he is not an actor become amateur politician; rather, he is the old-style politician who is the amateur public personality.

Disneyland in the 1950s foreshadowed the Reaganite politics of the eighties. By placing the old-fashioned Midwestern town at the entrance to the electronic city of Homo ludens, Disneyland followed the pattern of the Crystal Palace of 1851. It might be prudent, therefore, to wonder if Disney World in Florida, with its Epcot Center, may be foreshadowing the American politics of the nineties. The fantasy model for Reagan's foreign policy does seem to be Disney World's Epcot, a participatory movie set where nature is a miniaturized antique and nation-states have become decorative and harmless, boutiques and ethnic restaurants in an American shopping mall.

Considering that such multinationals as Shell and Nestle have transferred billions in investments from the Third World into America, and considering that America is now a debtor nation no longer owned by its citizens, it seems as if the world is saying that it believes that the U.S. is going to make the transition from civilization to planetization. In this quantum leap up to a new level, perhaps one even greater than the shift from agricultural to industrial, they do not want to be left behind in te nativistic position of an anti-American Iran. Star Wars, much like a display in Epcot, is an illusion and a piece of pure show business, but the structure of its economy could still be kept long after Dr. Teller's X-ray-laser explosions were eliminated.

In a global economy with an $80 trillion flow, it is difficult to say that this movement is backed up by anything such as land or gold. Currencies are good not because they are backed up by goods, but because people believe in the viability of the nations which issue them. Nations are now marketed and judged the way companies once were. The fact that European, Middle Eastern, and Asian capital is flowing into the United States means that some people are betting their money that the U.S. with its Harvard, Berkeleys, and the Stanfords, its M.I.T.s and Cal Techs is going to make it.

This shift is not simply a change in ideologies, but a systematic reorganization of human culture as representation gives way to participation. For John Locke, ideas were mental representations of the outside world: Parliament was the brain of the body-politic, filled with representatives of the society at large. The mind carried a little picture of the world inside its head. Parliament carried a little picture of the outside polity within its chambers. Paper money carries a little picture of national gold and land within its rectangular form. In the emerging Gaian politics, however, the brain is no longer such as the house of representatives. The isolated citizen once represented by a politician is exchanged for the participatory individual living as a symbiotic organelle empowered by information in an environment that is not structured by institutions such as church and state. A good example of this political shift is expressed in Greenpeace's ability to challenge the nation-state of France over the sinking of one of the organizations's ships (which killed a photographer in the process) and have the Secretary General of the United Nations arbitrate its case.

The economic analog of all this is that money is no longer seen as standing for reality. Money is no longer backed up by national land or gold, but by the belief in a nation's productive capacity for scientific innovation. The Gaian economy creates its own values in transactions. Since cultural transitions such as the one from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from agriculture to industry, are so unpredictable, the hehavior of this new economy is without precedent and takes on the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the debtor nations default, and if the world at large begins to believe that the U.S. cannot make the transition to a new planetary culture, the U.S. won't. Part of the Gaian politics for the nineties is, therefore, to realize that we are all organelles within a planetary cell, and that it is a dangerous illusion to think that any nation-state can make it on its own, militarily or economically.

The interpenetration of all into each argues that territorial sovereignity is also a leftover from the representationalist paradigm of the seventeenth century. Greenpeace can intrude into the politics of France, and Nestle can buy up Carnation in the U.S.A.; Chernobyl can ruin the agricultural produce of Eastern Europe, and middle-class American college students on cocaine can sustain the Shining Path along the Peruvian Andes. Voting for one's local representative in congress or parliament does not give one a handle to the door of this new world; it merely shuts one out, and the citizen knows this. That is why participatory groups such as Greenpeace are so much more charismatic than elections in our global electronic culture. Considering the power of electronic modes of communication in transforming culture, it is fair to say that there, is more of a future for political entities like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, or Africa Live-Aid, then for industrial nation-states trying to extend nineteenth-century patterns of imperial domination, from Europe into the South Pacific. But there is also a shadow-side to the shift from representation to participation. Representation expresses the culture of a civilized consensus. In the time of Thomas Jefferson, a civilized man had only to read one or two hundred books to be educated; now a hundred books are what appear in a single specialty within a year. It is in this world of global communication and total aloneness that solitary individuals can use their modems and electronic bulletin boards to form fascist or racist groups such as the Aryan Nation. It is this world of fragmentation that fundamentalism and terrorism seek to melt the bits to molten led, for, unfortunately, terrorism is also an extremist form of participation replacing representation in electronic politics.

UNDOUBTEDLY, nativistic movements that are ideologically reactionary and simplistic will continue, even in the U.S., but those in the U.S. will most likely fail. As we have seen from American TV, television evangelists are no different from rock stars or Hollywood celebrities, and as the fundamentalist viewer flips from channel to channel, changing realities from westerns to science fiction, from soap operas to news, from one part of the world to another, he is participating in and performing with a sensibility that is redically different from that of his Reformation forebears. The only way that Reformation culture can maintain the "Gutenberg Galaxy" is the eliminate television in an Amish-like purity of freezing history at an earlier moment in time. And, probably, some fundamentalist will try this when they begin to wise up to the fact that Reagan is not one of them, and that evangelist on television are not ministers of the Bible, but ministers of the media.

The U.S. of course, is too far gone (thank God) to turn back and lock itself into an Aryan Nation. The U.S. is more addicted to TV than to cocaine, and its continental polity has become even more multiracial than it was in the nineteenth century. Now it is no longer simply a case of integrating Italians, Irish, Jews, and Blacks, but also Mexicans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese. As New York was the quintessential city of the U.S.'s nineteenth-and early twentieth-century expansion, so now Los Angeles is the quintessential world city of its electronic culture; In the earlier print culture, the public school teacher could take the child away from its parents' old world culture to make it all-American, but in the multi-channel culture of television, ethnicity is reaffirmed and immigrants keep their languages, such as Spanish or Korean. In fact, Americans begin to develop new ethnic languages like jive. The world of electronics is Top and Pop culture; it is an energizing of opposites; the elitist science of Stanford, Cal Tech, and Silicon Valley and the media and musical reproductions of Hollywood.

This structure of opposites is economically very important, for one of the reasons so much of the world's capital is flowing into the U.S. to finance the planetization of huminity is precisely because the U.S. is so multiracial and is not locked into a rigid class system such as that of Britain.

The cultural symbiosis of Top and Pop is the secret of America's present strength, and this strength will most likely continue into the twenty-first century. Japan is not going to replace the U.S. as a world power, for Japan is an island culture, and as such lacks the diversity and imaginative daring to take on the role of world leadership. It is strong precisely because after losing the war it immediately chose to become an organelle within the cell of the American world economy, and in that position it could flourish and thrive. For Japan to try to reverse the situation and make the U.S. an organelle within the cell of Japan, Inc. would lead to a massive stretching and distortion that would simply tear Japan apart. Its present position is strong precisely because its present position is its strength.

If the U.S., on the other hand, is to continue to grow in the shift civilization to plenetization, it will have to relate to China as well as Japan and Korea, and in this Pacific world the white-racist mentality of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be dead wrong. American business, from Nixon to Reagan, knows this and has already decided on the Pacific shift in the economic and cultural centers of America. It is only the passed-over and uneducated "poor white trash" who feel threatened by the dynamism of the Asian people in the universities of the West and who are attracted to nativistic movements like the Aryan Nation and Posse Comitatus. It happened before when the disposessed whites who were left behind by the Industrial Revolution that swept over the North after the Civil War were similarly attracted to the Ku Klux Klan. In the historical long view, Reagan, like an inoculation that gives us a little dose of the disease to save us from a lot of it, may just have saved the U.S. from white racist fascism by playing the role of Right-Wing American President for the Moral Majority.

IF NOISE HOLDS the unrecognized signal of innovation, if evil is the annunciation of the next adaptation, if the arms race with the Soviet Union is creating the U.S.S.S.R., if drug traffic is integrating the debtor economies of the U.S. and all under a cloud that moves without respect to the boundaries of nation-states, then what is the role of the good in this cultural transformation? Is only evil all-powerful, and is the good always inane and impotent?

The point of the ancient Buddhists was, of course, that good and evil are in codependent origination, and that good is not absolute and transcendent. Those who cannot see the evil and unelightenment in themselves, in their own conditions of suffering and samsara, project it outward and inflict their goodness on others, turning a disconnected and uncompassionate virtue into an abstract kind of cruelty. This is the mode of the extreme moralist, a Rabbi Kahane, an Iran Paisley, an Ayatollah Khomeini. The person who feels compassion can sense his own internal capacity for evil, and therefore has compassion for others, even those who have been momentarily taken over by evil. In other words, the good Buddhist is like a good Christian and loves his enemy as Jesus counseled.

One needs another word beside good for this balance point at teh center. Christians would call it love or caritas, Buddhists would call it compassion or Karuna. From this new perspective, the world is essentially the same and quintessentially transformed. As in a move in the martial arts of Aikido or Tai Chi, all the inertial mass of the evil opponent is deflected, and by the slightest and subtlest of moves, the enemy is sent to the ground to find his own center.

What would be the slightest and subtlest of moves that could transform our political world from a planetary state of terror to the Gaian polity of compassion, or passing with others through the catastrophe that is the discontinuous transition fkrom one world-system to another?

The martial arts would teach us to take what is given, and slightly redirect its energies; to take the form in front of us, instead of waiting for the Messiah or the end of the world, and transform it. So, let us consider the political forms of activity that are in front of us, and imagine what their slight transforms might be. The arguments in support of present forms fill up the media, so rather than waste time on them I would prefer to give my reasons for the proposals under future transforms.

Anyone alive in this historical moment faces societies that are totally structures upon warfare. The governments, the communications systems, the sources for technological innovation, and the entire economy of the United States is held up by the arms race. Any pacificist who comes along and says "Disarm!" hasn't a chance in hell. Some pacificists love projects that fail because failure gives them a sense of sanctification in a fallen world; other pacificist are simply violently aggressive personalities that conceal their aggressions by screaming for peace. This is the kind of pacifist who thinks he is helping the peace movement by throwing blood on a military officer. Such forms of opposition only confirm the opponents in their mutual positions, and thus energize the game of pacificism versus militarism, a game as useless as that of wealth celebrating the virtues of poverty in the institution of the Papacy.

Confronted with a war economy, one has to build down slowly and shift employment to other areas. The difficulty is that citizens and politicians will only vote for subsidies under threat, and so there always has to be a threat from the enemy or the environment to mobilize a society. But if people really begin to feel threatened by the warefare system, if they really begin to see, after Chernobyl, that we cannot trust the Russians man their nuclear deterrent with a fail-safe system, then, perhaps, the citizens will begin to understand the need to have a vigorous space program as a way to keeping the Star wars Economy going with more stars and less war.

In this second presidential debate with Senator Walter Mondale, Reagan proposed sharing Star Wars with the Russians. His generous flourish of "Why not share it with the Russians?" was a brilliant rhetorical move, for it made him into the liberal and Mondale into the cold-warrior conservative, a position that Mondale could not convincingly maintain, since he could hardly upstage Reagan on talking tough to the Soviets. It was precisely these kinds of maneuvers that enabled Reagan to steal the future as political mythology away from the liberals and emerge as the new champion of futurology, scientific innovation, and the space age, which, considering Reagan's level of reading and scientific literacy, is no mean feat.

The difficulty is, of course, that Reagan was play-acting. We already have a satellite reconnaissance technology years ahead of the Russians, but we do not seem willing to share that witht em now. So if we won't share now while we are ahead, why will we share later?

Still, that uncanny intution of Reagan was right, even though his political colleagues would never want to follow him. We should share with the Russians, but now, not later. Anything that makes the Russians feel paranoid and insecure threatens our security. If we get close to building a real anti-ballistic missile system, the Russians would have to launch a pre-emptive strike before we completed it. Of course, Reagan's real Strategy is to force the Russians into an expensive arms race in the hope that their strained economy would collapse before ours. But that, too, is dangerous, considering the fragile condition of the world economy. With our $2 trillion indebtedness, it is a high-school game of economic chicken to see who collapses first, us or the Russians.

But let us assume our media leader is right: we launch into Star Wars and create, a new third industrial revolution that puts the Soviet Union back into the status of a Third World, underdeveloped country, and we interlock all the economies of Western Europe and Japan into "Trilateral" subcontractors for the new Space Age. We should recall that it was a humiliated and defeated Germany after Versailles that led to the rise of Hitler. Old Russia, no longer endowed with the face-saving position of being the equal of the U.S., a mythic identity bestowed on it by Nixon and Kissinger in the Brezhnev era, would have no choice but to play the spoiler. Since we have seen what kind of chaos spoilers with revaged pride and identity can do, whether they be Palestinians, Libyans, or Iranians, it would be wise not to push the Soviet Union down. It would be safe for all to start sharing the satellite system of reconnaissance immediately, so that every one knows what everyone else is up to.

The human gesture of shaking hands was invented as a way of showing that the hand did not conceal a weapon. It is a nice custom, one that we raised on high when the cosmonauts and the astronauts linked up in outer space and shook hand. We need to go back to that point and take it from there.

If expensive forms of mutual defense are replaced by simpler forms of mutual security, then the whole World War II structure of the world-system can, finally, change. Instead, the best way to avoid World War III is to stop fighting World War II, and this brings me to the point of my second future transform.

Part of the condition of the global State of Terror is a kind of thinking in which Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, constitutes a sound policy for national defense. Since no one is literally defended in such a situation, the result is simply that national populations are held hostage by military-technical elites: the truly professional terrorists of the world. If shared satellite reconnaissance would enable the Russians to feel less threatened behind their sacred borders, then Europe could continue to contribute to Russian security, and thereby to mutual security, by not having the offensive capacity of decapitating the Soviet Union through the stationing of Pershing IIs in Western Europe. If the German army were converted to a Swiss-style civilian militia, it would be possible to defend Western Germany without a military force that was offensively capable of distroying the Soviet Union. If the American troops were to leave Germany as a clear expression of ending World War II, then the Warsaw Pact countries would begin to have increased trade relations in the world economy, and the demands for liberalization to be characteristic for Eastern Europe as a whole. What helps the Soviet Union keep Eastern Europe under tight control is the nuclear threat from the west. If this is dropped, then Eastern Europe will begin to evolve culturally along new war of the fifties.

If Western Europe begins to participate vigorously in a Transnational Space Program, then these planetary forms of knowledge will give a new historical role for the United Nations. The United Nations is currently a postwar creation as out-of-date as NATO. It has never been able to stop a war and has been a miserable failure as a vision of men beating their swords into ploughshares, but if it were allowed to be truly a world cultural organization and not a political organization manque, it could mean more than a Manhattan lifestyle for global bureucrats.

IN THE CULTURAL evolution of civilization from print to electronics, societies need to shift from the bicameral legislatures of the days of Locke and Jefferson to tricameral legislatures. The notion of a bicameral legislature is one of balancing urgency with reflection. The lower house is intended to respond to the needs of the moment, the Senate or the House of Lords is supposed to express age, wisdom, and the longer civilizational viewpoint. In s scientific, planetary civilization, however, the longer viewpoint requires more than a gentleman's knowledge of history and the classics. When confronted with problems like the greenhouse effect, acid rain, the poisoning of the oceans, global drug traffic, world terrorism of transportation, or human rights in general, knowledge is needed along with wisdom. No nation is ever likely to surrender sovereignty willingly to a world state, and a good case can be made that a world state would be at once bureaucratic, ineffective, and tyrannical. But every nation does surrender to the information that comes to it from global forms of communication, world science, and popular art forms like music and movies. If the United Nations were to become a global Harvard-M.I.T. with bioregional resource study compuses spread around the world but communicating through electronic networks, it could become a planetary Academy of Arts and Sciences that could make reports and recommendations to the bicameral legislatures of the nation-states.

Small planetary, Gaian colleges could become the twenty-first century's equivalent of the land grant colleges that the United States set up in the nineteenth century to develop the country. One of these land grant colleges became Cornell University, which is now a wealth-producing, and not merely a wealth-consuming, world university. If the United States and the Soviet Union were to agree to build down their intercontinental ballistic missiles, one Trident submarine would more than pay for several of these Gaian colleges.

It is important to keep in mind that when I say "college," I don't mean simply Ph.Ds from Harvard on salary in Chad or Haiti. I envision something much more like the Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, or the Meadowcreek Project in Fox, Arkansas -- Institutes in which local people are colleagues and not merely subjects of research for national elites.

The former postwar development scheme was simply the Americanization of the planet. Loans would be given so that markets for American goods and banks would be created around the world. Dams would be built, jet planes would be sold to dictators, and village agriculture would be bulldozed so that American agribusiness could establish itself. Now forty years after this 1946 vision of world progress. It is time to say that this scheme for development has been a miserable failure. The rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the middle class has been eliminated in the crossfire between fascist repression and communist liberation. This scheme of development has been good only for the makers of jet fighters, machine guns, dams, and nuclear reactors.

But the lessons to be learned from the failure of these schemes of Third World development can also be brought home to the so-called developed countries. Development schemes have not worked abroad, and domestic development schemes have not worked within the U.S. The failure has come from trying to give only to favored groups or institutions, whether through oil-depletion allowances, farmers' subsidies, or the complete underwriting of entire industries, as with the case of nuclear power. A shift in paradigms would call for providing venture capital directly to each citizen as part of his participation in the national economic community. If upon reaching the age of eighteen each citizen were to be granted a venture capital fund of $50,000, it would do more to stimulate the economy than subsidizing nuclear power or the oil business. If two California teenagers in a garage can start Apple Computer Company, and if teenagers at large can create vast markets and industries in music and video, it is clear that the archaic industrial mentality that subsidizes behemoths like nuclear reactors but balks at giving money directly to its citizens is simply incompetent business.

PHOTO: In this world of global communication and total aloneness, solitary individuals can use their modems and electronic bulletin boards to form fascist or racist groups.

PHOTO: If one eliminates the difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the engine that drives the scientific systems of both nations stops.

PHOTO: Terrorism is a form of amateur government; the real professionals at terrorism are the legally constituted nation-states.

The new technologies now make it more possible than ever for a group of teenagers to band together and create their own works of art and business. Of course, some teenagers wil use the money to go into the drug business, but with a direct venture capital fund available for them, the economic motivation to be drawn into the shadow economy will be lessened, and kids in ghettos will be given a choice that they now do not have. For some, this may mean using the funds to finance a university education; for others, it may mean starting a business; for others who are not ready, it may simply mean letting the money stay put to earn interest in what would be, in essence, a citizens' national mutual fund. This "American Expression Card" would be the citizen's patrimony and the visible sign of his participation in the Gaian economy in which all invest in each, and each creates new economic worlds for all.

This pacific shift of Star Wars from war to peace would enable many more of the U.S.'s new immigrant population to participate in the economy. Star Wars is finr for places like North American Rockwell and Livermore Labs, but the rest of the population is turned into fast-food clerks peddling burgers to the aerospace workers. An economy of direct venture capital for the citizens would cost less than Star Wars, sitimulate the economy more effectively, and would be popular enough that citizens would not need to be scared to death to vote for the subsidies it would require.

IF ONE TAKES all of the five future transforms together, they form a pattern, a slight aikido move that is necessary to transform the militarism of Reagan into a new populist liberalism for a transformed Democratic Party in the nineties. If the Democratic Party remains the party of the industrial past, of labor unions and ethnic blocs, it will, like Mondale, become a fossil. And if the Democratic Party tries to become identical to Reagan's party and to woo the same constituency, it will only prove itself to be shallow, thought-less, opportunistic, and completely lacking in credibility as well as power. If, on the other hand, a new American ecological party were to try to make it on its own, such a movement on the left would generate its mirror-opposite on the far Right, and Lyndon LaRouche's thermonuclear fusionists would probably match the Greens vote for vote, with each party taking about 15 percent of the electorate. It would be far better for the Democratic Party to take the best of the ecological party and the best of American Big Science, to move the new ethnic majority in defeat of the whites surburban affluent ocnstituency that supports Reagan. Paradoxically, it is this new Latin and Asian American that is more truly expressive of the California culture that first put Reagan into power.

I doubt if the Democratic Party will aditp Gaian politics in 1988; most likely it will try to copy the Repulicans with someone like Iacocca, and our politics will be the typical American cultural situation of Avis and Hertz, Pepsi anc Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Burger King. But history is full of surprises like Chernobyl, so I would imagine that by 1992 this awful generation of the fifties, these hideous reruns of the anti-intellctual McCarthy era, will have spent themselves. Just as the sixties introduced a quantum leap in consciousness for the whole human race, so will the ninties take us up one more step. It won't take a national charismatic leader to effect such a cultural shift, for by the nineties the generation of the sixties will be spread throughout the establishment as corporate presidents, as politicians, as popular musicians and video artists, as university leaders. As they look around and see themselves in position, they will remember, and those camp-followers who now celebrate their neconservative orthodoxy will change spots and drag out their old sixties credentials and begin to boast about how many demonstrations, love-ins, and rock festivals they took part in. Once again, it will be fashionable to be idealistic and patriotic, not simply for Springsteen's "USA.," but the entire planet. Such is the fantasy of one who came of age in the sixties, and such is my fantasy of a new Gaian form of politics for the nineties.

Presents forms

1. Star Wars.

2. Pershing IIs and cruise missiles to defend Germany.

3. The United Nations as a failed world government and global police force.

4. International Monetary Fund as a "device for taking money from the poor in rich countries and giving it to the rich in poor countries."

5. Subsidies to selected institutions or favored groups, such as nuclear industry, the oil business, farmers.

Future transforms

1. A transnational program for the exploration of space.

2. Withdrawal of all Pershing IIs, cruise missiles, and atomic weapons from West Germany and the transformation of the Germany army into a Swiss-style civilian militia.

3. The U.N. as a world Harvard, a world Academy of Arts and Sciences serving as the third house in a tricameral legislature in which the nation-states have upper and lower houses, Lords, and Commons, Senate and Congress, but that all nations have the U.N. as their house to provide research and recommendations for such long-term problems of human civilization as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, drug traffic, human right, etc.

4. Establishment of planetary land grant colleges, "Gaian colleges," as bioregional resource centers to set up the beginnings of an informational economy in improverished areas like Chad or Haiti.

5. An American Expression Card, or direct venture capital to each citizens in life of guaranteed annual income: a sum of $50,000 is granted to each individual at age of majority for starting a business, subsidizing a college education, or letting money earn interest until citizens decides upon a personal investment. Citizens who did not feed competent to invest could have the money in what would be, in essence, a national mutual fund.

Historian William Irwin Thompson is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association an "intellectual coffee house for the study of the humanities." His most recent book is Pacific Shift ($18.45 postpaid from Sierra Club Bookstore, 730 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109.) It describes the emerging global culture of the Pacific Basin - especially Japan and California - and contrasts it to the older economics of Europe and the eastern U.S. He is Lindisfrane Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

This article is excerpted from a work in progress - Gaia and the Politics of Life - due out in 1987 from The Lindisfarne Press. The Gaia in the title is the Greek goddes of Earth. Her name today is connected with the Gaia Hypothesis advanced in 1975 by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, which deals with the self-regulating effects of Earth's life on Earth's atmosphere and includes the perception of our planet as a single living entity.

-- Richard Nilsen

PHOTO: The martial arts teach us to take what is given and redirect its energies.

COPYRIGHT 1986 Point Foundation
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