WilliamIrwinThompson CulturalHistoryandtheEthosoftheRossSchool 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, information and noise, perceptive blindness and imaginative deception, a media dumbing down and an Artificial Intelligence booting up. Like the linkage of the oppositions of continent and ocean 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 nonlinear 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 constellate themselves as unconscious networks of conscious agents generating noetic structures in what 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 the seventies, 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 new planetary culture. In the post World War II international system, culture was dyadic and split between economics 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 economic reality 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 of electronics 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 romantic artist, 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:

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 come from 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 took billions 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 of time 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 is tinkering 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 artificial now, 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 global transformation 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 the global 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 are only 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 has expressed 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 globally noetic 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 of education 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.

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 the culture 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 an inspiration 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.