Book Review : Exploring Scheme of Things

Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science by William Irwin Thompson (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 191 pages)

Radical thought is fundamentally different from liberal thought. The two do not lie on the same continuum. You don’t get more and more and more liberal until suddenly you are radical. Radicalism is discontinuous with other viewpoints. It requires a sharp break with them, and it lives on the other side of that divide.

By this definition, “Imaginary Landscape” by William Irwin Thompson is a radical book. Not in a political sense, but as a way of thought. As Thompson tells us at several points, he sees the world differently than almost everybody else. That is both the strength and the weakness of his book.

A Unique View

It is the strength because Thompson is operating from a unique world view, which in itself is very attractive. He is his own person. It is the weakness of the book because try as I might I can’t understand what he’s talking about.

This much I get: Thompson, a cultural historian who has taught at various universities in this country, opposes the standard impersonal, scientific view of the world, which he decries as “scientific materialism.” He writes:

“An art gallery in which all the paintings were mirrors would be boring, and so would a world with only one reflection of existence. There is not simply one objective world, one fixed ground with adequate representations of it in mind; there are multiple worlds in an ecology of multiple biomes (sic) and organisms, each constituting cognitive domains of fascinating richness. Those who can live with ambiguity, complexity, and infinite variety can rejoice that there are windows to different worlds in the cognition of an antibody, a bee, a dolphin, a bird, a human, an elemental or an angel.”

I’m willing to grant that bees, dolphins, birds and humans have different cognitive experiences. But antibodies? And angels? (I pass over elementals as I’m not sure what they are.)

Science and Myth

Thompson goes on to tell us that myth-making is what culture is all about, and science is as much a part of the myth as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “Before we can ever be open to the scientific imagination of the future,” he says, “we have to be open to the imagination in the mythologies and arts of the past. If we look on myth as gibberish and art as illusion, our science will be brutal and will brutalize others in the inappropriate organization of our social institutions.”

I’m serious when I say I like his way of thinking. The world could do with more intellectual anarchists. They liven things up. So what if you wind up scratching your head in puzzlement? Better than reading the same old things, the same perspective, the same givens, the same accepted wisdom that together makes up a culture. Doesn’t everybody on MacNeil/Lehrer sound the same, regardless of his political point of view?

Thompson would never be mistaken for one of them. He is on the other side of the chasm that separates liberalism thought from radicalism. This guy may be on to something. I wish I knew what.

“In the rise of secular modernism,” he writes, “we moved away from traditionally religious modes of thought to see matter as dead and mind as divorced from nature. Now in the shift from European modernism to a planetary culture, we see that that ideology was too simplistic, that there are intriguing relationships between myth and science and that animism contains some intuitive insights that are worth exploring in the differing ways of art, science, and philosophy.”

All of this leads to what Thompson calls “a cultural history of consciousness” in which he traces the development of group thought through five historical stages from culture to “planetization,” which is where we are now.

I would summarize some of his arguments but I fear that I would misrepresent them. In general I don’t have much patience for books I don’t understand. But there’s something about this book that leads me to think that this time the fault is mine and not the author’s. Perhaps I’m getting soft (or soft-headed) with age.

Thompson concludes:

“Between the angelic heights of the macrocosm of the Gaian atmosphere and the elemental depths of the microcosm of the bacterial earth lies the middle way of the Mind, and it is in this imaginary landscape of the middle way, whether we call it the Madhyamika of Buddhism or the Christ of Steiner or the Da at of the Kabbalah, that we humans take our life and come to know our world as the dark horizon that illuminates our hidden center.”

Huh?