ToKers:

A hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler published the first volume of his  
"Decline of the West" (in German, subtitled "Form and Actuality") and,  
in many ways, we've all been writing replies to him since (including  
hereabouts of late) . . . <g>

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Decline-2DWest-2DActuality-2DPerspectives-2DWorld-2DHistory_dp_B0016511PQ&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=qSvmHi-t8kzIdo8ZyajoqEjj0xur0obamaQFRopF9JI&e=

Arnold Toynbee picked up the ball on behalf of the West (in  
particular, the British Empire) and spent his life writing his  
multi-volume "A Study of History."  He was followed by Carroll Quigley  
(mentor to Bill Clinton at Georgetown, who wrote "Tragedy and Hope"  
&c) and Sam Huntington (with whom my partner at the Center studied at  
Harvard.)  Henry Kissinger even wrote his undergraduate thesis at  
Harvard on Spengler and T. Adorno, father of Social Psychology, wrote  
an important essay on the topic (scans available to anyone who is  
interested.)

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Clash-2DCivilizations-2DRemaking-2DWorld-2DOrder_dp_1451628978&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=iaQ9RLjjBol5T_HiAZB98AAUEeoSb3ISr8eZDpiwrRs&e=

What they all recognized, however, is that the West isn't the only  
game-in-town.  In particular, Spengler thought that Russia would  
overtake Europe and that, ultimately, China would overtake them all.   
My partner spends half his life in Beijing (and I'll likely be heading  
there in a few weeks to speak at the World Congress of Philosophy.)   
For the Chinese, Teilhard's "omega point" and Kevin's "technium" would  
make no sense -- since they have a fundamentally different  
understanding of history.

Teilhard was a "renegade" Jesuit priest.  His "heresy" is an old one  
that the Catholic Church has been dealing with for a long time.  Just  
take a look at Joachim de Fiore, if you need a 12th-century refresher.  
  Eric Voegelin called it "immanentizing the Eschaton" in his Walgreen  
lecture, "The New Science of Politics" (which then led to Marshall  
McLuhan striking up a correspondence with him on the topic of  
*gnosticism*).  Teilhard was in a hurry-to-get-outta-here, a trait  
that he shared with many who took LSD -- which is uniquely a drug of  
psychic death-an-rebirth (for which I am the "alternate" historian.)

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_New-2DScience-2DPolitics-2DIntroduction-2DFoundation_dp_0226861147&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=Nl1qC4m6KxvqfPAv50NVY-b7wmt8_eTLiYoJDyfSojc&e=

Kevin Kelly is a protege of Stewart Brand, the organizer of the "Trips  
Festivals" where the Grateful Dead played and which Tom Wolfe (who  
"discovered" Marshall McLuhan in the mid-1960s) described as "The  
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests."  Lots of LSD was involved.  Lots of  
psychic "decline and re-birth."  Reminding us that LSD is the  
*quintessential* Western drug -- tracing its origins back to the  
Eleusinian Mysteries (c. 700BC-400AD), around which Athenian culture  
was organized.  Yes, that's the "subtext" to everything in Plato, for  
instance (but not Aristotle.)

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Road-2DEleusis-2DUnveiling-2DSecret-2DMysteries_dp_1556437528&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=c123YQcXkcX1-An6vS6dzxKU2WEm5f_ATGuEGTwOKS4&e=

Brand -- about whom a friend of mine, John Markoff (ex-New York  
Times), is now writing the "offical" biography -- brought Kevin in to  
edit the "Co-Evolution Quarterly" and later "Wired" magazine (for  
which I tried to provide early financing.)  Kevin is a "born-again"  
Christian who is keen for the 2nd Coming (along with Teilhard) -- who  
has detailed his views in a fascinating "comic book" titled "The  
Silver Cord" (in which humans turn into angels to "fight the devil.")

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Silver-2DCord-2DKevin-2DKelly_dp_1940689015&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=5daPt7Alh8EfcRsG8t2c-C_MdfbIoIeCt2pA5_Imcew&e=

This "linear" view of history -- culminating in the "end of history"  
and its replacement with "truth" (aka Jesus Christ) -- became the  
Protestant goal with the invention of the Printing Press.  As a  
*paradigm*, PRINT (or what McLuhan called the "Gutenberg Galaxy") was  
incredibly "linear."  One letter-after-another on the page.   
Mechanically reproduced.  Copy after copy.  Onward-and-upward.   
Marching to the *promised* land (just like the Book of Revelation,  
which is behind both Teilhard's and Kevin's fantastic stories, told us  
it would) . . . !!

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Gutenberg-2DGalaxy-2DMarshall-2DMcLuhan_dp_144261269X&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=ONoLLFnLtaG5oyuQD5jwszhWpAAb7Nh-9lMKFSPOTiY&e=

This "linearity" is, some might suggest, the result of an  
over-development of the brain's *left* hemisphere.  While much of the  
popular material about left/right is overblown (or just wrong), Ian  
McGilchrist has put what is actually known together in his 20-year  
effort, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making  
of the Western World."  In it he summarized the difference between the  
two hemispheres as "linear" (left) and "circular" (right) and how (but  
not why) the "left" dominates in the West.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Master-2DHis-2DEmissary-2DDivided-2DWestern_dp_0300188374&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=MhkTRL-tLu0DD6Ic6yGOmlVkk-tnK1HVRMb3wPUO4gg&e=

If the West is "linear" (resulting in "omega points" &c), then the  
East is "circular."  We believe that this is largely a result of the  
different *writing* systems used in the East and West.   
Ideo/pictographs are "pictures" and learning to use them to  
communicate is likely a "right-brain" task -- begun at early  
childhood.  On the other hand, the Alphabet (invented by my ancestors  
in Phoenecian to conduct trade across the Mediterranean) is only  
phoentics, with no meaning attached to any of the symbols.  As a  
result, the East has a "circular" understanding of history, whereas  
the West thinks in terms of "end points."

Teilhard de Chardin and Kevin Kelly are both "eschatologists."  They  
point to the "end of history" because that's what their left-brains  
tell them to do, as a result of the culture in which they live, as a  
result of the communications technologies that formed that culture.   
But eschatology makes no sense in "right-brained" China.

Instead, the Chinese think of themselves as riding a 720-year  
"roller-coaster."  Taking their 60-year annual cycle and multiplying  
it by 12, they get the Chinese "grand cycle" of roughly 700 years and  
they are convinced that they will reach the next "peak" in the  
22nd-century.  Going backwards, they believe that the previous peaks  
were in the Ming (roughly 1500AD), T'ang (roughly 800) and Han  
(roughly 100) dynasties (and some would go back to C'hu, roughly 600BC  
and beyond to Shang &c.)  One way to get a glimpse of all this would  
be to study Joseph Needham's multi-volume "Science and Civilization in  
China" (with particular interest in his focus on the role of Daoism in  
Chinese history.)

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Science-2DCivilisation-2DChina-2DIntroductory-2DOrientations_dp_052105799X&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=OqadsucKkkOaN7FJqfbkrgiZMaN5Ydu4GSZrkDNVJzs&e=

As a result of all this, any cultural/psychological "Theory of  
Everything" must account for the differences between East and West --  
while dealing with underlying technologies that have generated these  
differences.  As it turns out, all "cultures" are *not* the same (yes,  
there are also many others.)  Hypothesizing an "omega point" is fine  
if you are a Westerner under the influence of Christian "revelation"  
but that's *not* the way most people on earth think nowadays.  Yes,  
the "eschaton" is an answer to Spengler's questions (which, as you  
recall, were first posed by F. Nietzsche, who was supposed to become a  
Lutheran minister) but not everyone thinks those are the most  
important questions for us to answer today . . . !!

Mark

P.S. As best we can tell, the only "elite" who did not take LSD in the  
1960s were the Chinese.  The Russians did it.  The Japanese did it.   
But not the Chinese.  In fact, it appears that the "Great Wall of  
China" was built to keep central-Asian "shamanic" culture -- based on  
taking hallucinogenic mushrooms -- out of China and some believe that  
the Chinese hostility to India is also based on the Indian use of  
hallucinogens in their "holy books."  Instead of wanting to "die" so  
that you can be "reborn" (into a transformed world), Chinese *alchemy*  
was dedicated to "elixirs of immortality" which would allow them to  
stay alive from one cyclical peak to another.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_Shamanism&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=7DH7v09kkrNaePvx5IE1I-a8dXg6bkKGOPEovB4dsnY&e=

P.P.S.  The Russians supplied most of the world's LSD from c. 1965-75,  
fueling the "counter-culture" in what they thought of as "chemical  
warfare" against the "West" in the Cold War.  The goal was to  
"disorient" Western youth and, in the process, strengthen the Soviet  
Union.  Initially, pharmaceutical LSD was manufactured under KGB  
supervision at Spofa in Prague and then they transitioned to supplying  
the ergotamine precursor for the "underground" labs.  Teilhard was  
very popular among the "hippies" and I think that I bought my first  
copy of "The Phenomenon of Man" c. 1967 -- the same year I drove  
non-stop to Haight Ashbury for the "Summer of Love," where I saw Jim  
Morrison sing his iconic "This is the End (the West is the best.)"   
Btw, "blue bus" is a metaphor for Czech LSD, since Spofa put it in a  
ampule where the liquid was colored blue.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.youtube.com_watch-3Fv-3DJSUIQgEVDM4&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=dQjvVyd66RVv9lnuLMl_ICT6rs_lZWF01AxlpdAYsrw&s=nj7XX2WD1VRo3ZVCxB4hz4xG2picaGAwBcZPdKc7MVQ&e=

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