ESCAPE FROM MODERNISM
Technology and the Future of the Imagination
by Frederick Turner
Consider the process by which a modern integrated circuit is made. A wafer of silicon is doped with impurities, exposed to light that is shone through a template to form a pattern of shadows, treated with new impurities that differentiate between the irradiated and unexposed areas, etched by a bath of corrosives, blanketed with a new surface of silicon, exposed to another pattern of light, and so on, until marvelously complex three-dimensional system of switches, gates, resistors, and connections has been laid down. This system may be destined to become part of a computer that will in turn help design new integrated circuits. The technical term for this process is “photographic.” An integrated circuit is essentially a very complex silicon photograph. Photographic techniques are now being used to make all kinds of tiny machines—solar energy collectors, pumps, and measuring devices.

We normally think of a photographic process as one that makes pictures of things rather than things themselves. A photograph is significant only as a record; as an object it’s just a bit of sticky paper. But our silicon photograph doesn’t merely represent something; it does what it is a photograph of. In sense it is a miraculous picture, like that of Our Lady of Guadalupe: it not only depicts, but does; it is not just a representation, but reality; it is not just a piece of knowledge, but a piece of being; it is not just epistemology, but ontology.

Consider, moreover, the digital, or Soundstream, method of reproducing music. The music is scanned every forty-four thousandth of a second or so, and the sound wave activity in that forty-four thousandth of a second is given a numerical value. This value is recorded in terms of a binary sequence of laser-burned holes and unburned spaces on a record. To play the record you just scan the holes with another laser and synthesize a sound that corresponds to the number you get every forty-four thousandth of a second.

A digital recording is really just a sophisticated musical “score”. It in no way reproduces the actual shape of the music, the way the grooves in the plastic of a normal record do, any more than the five parallel lines, the clef, and the little black ellipses with tails reproduce the sound of the music - or, indeed, than the letters on a page reproduce the sound of speech. In a sense, the digital recording harks back to an antiquated device for reproducing music: the player piano.

The interesting thing is that digital recordings are much more accurate than any analog recording could be. They are literally as accurate as you want: you could scan music every hundred thousandth of a second - though it would be useless, as the highest pitch we can hear is less than twenty thousandth of a second in frequency. Moreover, a digital recording is theoretically almost invulnerable to wear, whereas an analog recording must suffer and shriek to give up its music.

Paradoxically, an analog recording, which is the actual reverberation of a performance of a piece of music - as if we were to put our ear against the wall of the Sistine Chapel choir - is less accurate than the entirely new performance generated by machinery from the meticulous numerical score of a digital recording. It is as if, knowing the right language, you could write the names of foods so that if you ate the paper on which they were written it would be more tasty and nourishing than the foods themselves.

So: photographs can now, magically, do what they are pictures of; and a score of a piece of music can give a more accurate recording than the sound of the music itself. We live once again in a world of runes and icons, efficacious and full of virtue; a world in which the distinction between how we know and what we know, statement and referent, meaning and object, has begun to break down. Indeed, quantum physics tells us that we are all made out of numerical likehoods called electrons, photons, and so on; and the Big Bang theory says we are all made out of lights.



Our children are growing up on computer programs and fantasy role-playing—Voyager, Wizardry, Dungeons & Dragons. The space program was too slow to bring those other worlds to them, so they constructed them right here on earth. Play has become increasingly practical: it is almost as if an evolutionary necessity dictated that from our most infantile and unnecessary behaviors would come the solid future of the species. Just as it began to seem that political, economic, and technological forces were combining to organize the human race into a rational, centralized, and anonymous unity, and that the world was, as they say, becoming a small place, counterforces started taking us in completely new directions. the new electronic technology is by nature playful and individualizing. The strong hand of the corporation and the still stronger hand of the state, which was once able to coerce the population into service by cutting off the sources of energy and information, are losing their hold. Quite soon a family with its own solar power generator and its own computer will have the kind of practical sovereignty once possessed only by nations.

Remember the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the kids' mechanical toys all wake up and, in their dim electronic awareness, run about on the floor and clap their hands and flash their lights? and how the music of the aliens is actually a variation on the Disney tune "When You Wish Upon a Star"? We have met E.T., and he is our toys, our animated cartoons, our computer programs. We are re-entering at last the ancient animist universe, populated by genies and geniuses of place, in which every object possess a demon that one might control and use. but the nymphs and dryads are now microprocessors inhabiting our cars, our clocks, our chess sets, and our typewriters. Soon everything will have its own dedicated intelligence, its own nisus, or animating will.

We are at a curious juncture in the history of science and technology. The empiricism of the Renaissance gradually flattened out the ancient hierarchy of the universe and broke up the Great Chain of Being. But just when the world seemed to have been reduced to a collection of objective facts—the world view of modernism—a new order began to come into being.

The new Great Chain of Being, unlike the old one, is dynamic and fluid: it is the great branching tree of evolution. As long as evolution was confined to the realm of biology, it did not seriously threaten the modernist vision of the world as “value-flat” it simply made of life a mystical anomaly, a “fever of matter” in the “frozen chastity” of the inorganic, as Thomas Mann put it. But now we can create viruses out of “dead” chemicals, proving they were not as dead as we thought. The link has been made. All of the world is alive. The destruction of the old coherence is best illustrated by the collapse of the meaningof the word “art”. In The Tempest it is Prospero's “art” that makes temporary sense of the airy nothing the world is made of, rendering it into cluod-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples, even the Globe theater itself. For Shakespeare “art” meant sience, philosophy, technical power, craft, theatrical sleight of hand, liberal education, magic, and “art” in our modern meaning, all at once. The moment of The Tempest was the last moment off full cultural health and intigrity.“Art,”the word, was gradually torn to shreds, until in our century art and sience, sience and technology, philosophy and sience, art and philosophy, magic and sience, craft and art, education and art, have all been set against one another, like demons bred out of the corpse of the great mother.

But coherne is swiftly returning. The indeterminacy of principle, which destroys the distinction between observation and action, makes all sience into technology and all technology into sience. Academic philosophy has died and passed its inheritance on to the theoreticians of sience and the art critics. Anthropologists have revealed other cultures: magic as sience and our own sience as magic. In all the arts, the death of modernism has given birth to rapprochement between craft and art, and art is, once more, properly equired to be moral. All of these assertions are more propheticthan scholarly, but watch out.

Not that the empirical detour was unnesseacry. Shakespear:s magic did not work outside the theater, and we need three centuries of self-imposed alienation, of tearing things to pieces to see how they worked, to be able to come back to a coherent world, this time with the poers and knowledge we had mimed with magic. But now that we have come back we must cast away the habits of exile - the self contempt, the illusion of alienation, the hatred of the past, the sterile existentialism, the fear of the future, the willful imposition of meaninglessness on a universe bursting with meaning.



Another way of saying the same thing is that we are undergoing a religious revolution. In about 1600 a new religion, materialism, appeared on the scene. Its practice is what we usually call economic activity, and its workings, and a sense of triumph in technological achievement. Its theology is atomistic: like God, the atom of matter is indivisible, eternal, invulnerable, responsible for all events in the world. Unlike God, though, it is not conscious or personal. As with other great religions—and it is a great and in many ways noble religion, and much of our best and most significant behavior consists in its observance—it has given rise to magnificent heresies, moral systems, and even good science: dialectical materialism, existentialism, the theory of evolution.

If someone were to protest that materialism is not a religion, a cross-cultural view would rapidy convince him. Medieval people did not call their everyday rituals religious, or even rituals. They were just the way one lived one’s life. Totemists, before contact with Europeans, would have said the same thing about their own practices, their own value systems. What enabled materialism to triumph was precisely the fact that it did not claim to be a religion at all, but labeled other systems as religious; and there are elements of materialism in all human value systems, just as there are elements of monotheism, polytheism, animism, totemism, and ancestor worship.

But materialism is now going through the same crisis Christianity went through 400 years ago. Christianity resolved its crisis by determining to coexist with the new religion, to the enrichment of both, while accepting certain limitations on its relevance, the chief of which was the recognition of itself as a religion, rather than “the way things are.”

The main challenge to materialism was the discovery that the atom is not irreductible, and the consequent dissolution of matter into event, relation, and information. One of the advantages of materialism is that the further one goes in explaining the complex and ambiguous behavior of the apparent world in terms of simple atomic events, the more concrete and unambiguous it seems to be. Religion seeks certainty, and for a long time materialism delivered it. But one more reduction, one last simplification, spoiled everything. Suddenly the world, as it was revealed by quantum physics, became utterly ambiguous again.

Much that is good can be salvaged from the old religion. The world of matter, throuh it has been shown to be a provisional one, without the appealing absolutness it once possessed, is still beautiful and exquisitely ordered and surely we should give it a share of worship. But if we do so, we must give a greater share to ourselves, both as the supreme product of matter given the chance to do what comes naturally and as the supreme observer and sharper of the material world. That aspect of religion that appeals to the desire worship something outside of, and superior to, ourselves will not be satisfied any longer with materialism.

And materialism has always carried a dangerous flaw: its fundamental parts, the atoms of matter, are impersonal, insentient, and unintelligent—that is precisely what makes them intelligible. But the elevation of matter implies the superiority of those characteristics — impersonality, insentience, unintelligence. The personal, the sensible, and the conscious came to be seen as a second-classe reality that must face up to the impersonal «reality principale»: the blind forces of economic change, the dialectics of class struggle, the survival of the fittest. Perhaps our great political and technological monsters — communism, fascism, the hydrogen bombe — are the final expression of that suspicion of the personal; they promise to eradicate persons from the face of the earth.

The world is becoming a bigger place, more densely packed with information. A few years ago the amount of information stored in the worlds libraries, computers, and so on doubled every ten years; now the doubling time is eight years, and it is continuing to shrink. This process has a cosmological significance, because the univers itself is made of information — matter and energy decay according to the laws of entropy, paying for their durability of form by their eventual death and transformation into more primitive states of organization, information is both immortal and self-propagating. On the level of matter and energy, the world is running down; on the level of information, the world is growing and becoming more elaborately organized. And our activities, tiny as they appear in space and time, are significant part of that growth.


A fascinating analogy suggests itself: Perhaps our traditional ways of storing and passing on information, through speaking, writing, and data proprocessing, are now taking over the genetic tasks of our species, just as, if Caiens-Smith's theory is correct, the organic melecules that were once its tools superseded the genetic functions of the clay.

To Descartes and Berkeley, the distinction between being and consciousness was so absolute as to require divineintervention to enable them to communicate. That distinction is now only a matter of degree. Being has disolved before our eyes as we have examined it more closely, until, in quantum physics, matter proves less durable than the light in which we see it and evaporates into energy, pure event, if we try to take it apart any further.

The nature from which we are supposed to be alienated never existed.The great quantum experiments--the parallel-slits light experement, the polirizing-filter light experement--show that nature has not made its mind about what it really is, and is quite happy to have us help it do so. The tradition of philosophy that saw us as cut off from our “true” way of being has collapsed, although it hasn't realized it yet. We are nature, and we are as at home here in the world as anything has ever been. For the whole world is made up of such as we; its physical components are, just as we are, tourists, outsiders, amateurs, getting by on a smile and shoeshine, and deriving what being they have from the recognition of their fellows. All nature is second nature.

The new quantum theories of cosmology suggest that the chance-governed behavior of elementary particles is a sort of “living fossil” of the state of the entire universe in its first moments of existence. In other words, the order of the physical world as we know it through conventional physics and chemistry did not at first exist, but evolved out of chaos.

At the very beginning there existed an in_nite number of possible states, each with a probability of one in in_nity. Nothings was one possibility, sharing with the others the same in_nitesimal likelihood of being true. The fact that one cannot pin down an electron simultaneously in any one time and place is a remnant of that indeterminacy. The sharpness of reality is a result of the harmonious synchronization of many fuzzy events.

Technology is the continuation of the process of evolution by which the inde_niteness of the world gave rise to greater and greater certainty. It is that goes back through our bodies, the persisting organisation of crystals and stable molecules, and the durable coherence of elementary particles to that first moment when possibility resolved itself into a burst of identical photons.

In the heyday of high modernism the world of the future seemed impersonal, cool, centralized, inorganic, tidy, sharp-edged: a world-state with equal prosperity or all, tall rectilinear buildings, cool atonal music, abstract art, imagist free verse, novels puri_ed of the fetishism and hierarchy of plot and character; a world-state without repression, alienation and ego, free from the shibboleths of honor beauty sexual morality, patriotism, idealism, religion and duty.

This future now appears dated, even dreary. It has been shown that yes, indeed, humankind does have a nature; there are cultural universals. There are rules include not only the grammar of language, but also the classical laws of harmony, melody, color, proportion, rhythm, and balance. The modernists believed those classical qualities to be arbitrary and tried to seep them away, thereby damaging the art forms they were trying to liberate and depriving them of their audience. But we are beginning to discover the nature of our humanity as well as the humanity of nature. To put it aphoristically: We have a nature; that nature is cultural; that culture is classical.



I suspect that some readers winced when I gave a list of values: honor, beauty, sexual morality, patriotism, idealism, religion, and duty. That re-flex indicates a reaction to values and reward systems that has rarely been examined.

In the nineteenth century, materialist ethics came together with materialist biology and agreed that there were only two types of rewards: this obviously associated with survival and those obviously associated with reproduction. Two brilliant value systems﹘Marx’s, which reduced all value to the economics of survival, and Freud’s, which reduced all value to libido﹘were the results. Existentialism struggles between accepting these rewards as preferable to the more complex value systems of a society and rejecting them, and all rewards, as bribes to make us give our freedom.

Under the pressure of these theories, which postulated very coarse rewards even for very refined behavior, our value systems changed and coarsened. When people wince at the words “duty,” “honor,” and “beauty,” they are doing exactly what Victorians would have done upon hearing the words “passion,” “desire,” and “sexuality,” or even “money,” “fees,” and “honoraria.” The Victorians, in a last-ditch defense of the older, more complex value system, would naturally have been pained by references to the enemy’s rewards﹘the joy of duty, the satisfaction of honorable conduct﹘that we have given up. Not that we are not, often, honourable and dutiful. But we are so in a spirit of taking nasty medicine with good grace, and we are deeply suspicious of those who enjoy doing their duty.

But new discoveries are forcing on us a new value system. The pleasures of eating and sex are not the only rewards. Scientists studying the chemistry of the brain have begun to uncover a remarkable variety of rewards, suppressors of rewards, suppressors of the suppressors, and so on. The pleasures of achievement, of insight into the truth, of heroic exertion or sacrifice, of good conscience, of beauty, are real pleasures in themselves, not repressed or sublimated derivatives of libido. Certainly the higher pleasures enlist the coarser and more obvious ones as reinforcement; and indeed society uses the coarser and more obvious ones﹘for example food, for children﹘to train the higher reward systems, to “prime the pump,” so to speak. But the “endorphin high” is as real a reward as orgasm, or as food to a starving man.

Nor are hunger and sex the simple survival drives they seemed to the materialists. The study of evolution shows that the division of food played a central role in the religious rituals that defined the human community. What food represents has long been more important than the 2,000 calories a day required for survival. And the comparative study of sexual behaviour shows that, far from possessing a feeble and watered-down version of brute sexuality, we are the most sexual of all animals,we are in the heat all the time, we copulate face to face, our females have as powerful a libido as our males. Our sexuality is much more powerful than that of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and gorillas; it is far more powerful than is needed for reproduction. Many anthropologists suspect that our sexuality evolved in tandem with our brains, and that it took on the important function of encouraging the creation of family and social groupings that could nurture the young and promote cooperation through affection. Nevertheless, without the discovery of the higher reward systems, the theories of sublimation and repression would still wash. It was the brain chemicals that broke the old ideology. Who can forget those rats that would ignore females in heat and food, pressing the pedal that would deliver their shot of happiness? But there is a terrible tragedy here. Endorphins were discovered because certain scientists studying drug addiction asked the obvious, and brilliant question: Why does the brain have receptors designed precisely to respond with extreme sensitivity to the sap of an Oriental poppy? What was the evolutionary necessity? The answer, of course, is that those receptors were designed to respond to something else entirely. The poppy resins simply happened to possess a molecular resemblance to that something else an opiate produced by the brain to reward itself for doing very hard work. The tragedy is this: the materialist theory of value has resulted in the cutting off of many of the pleasures produced by the brain chemicals. We are starved for the pleasures of the mind and spirit and soul. The twentieth century is full of angst, which has its source in a thirst for things like glory, sanctity, conscience, and heroism, things with counterfeits; and as the doctrines of materialism triumphed, first among intellectuals, then among the population at large, so did the use of opium; cocaine, mescaline, cannabis.(Of course those individuals at the bottom of society, who have always felt cast out, have always used such drugs when they could get them.) We are only beginning to realise the horrible effects of tampering with the brain’s own reward system by means of drugs. That realisation touches us, with the hard thrill of permanent damage, in the very center of our will, our freedom, our selfhood. Who can forget those rats that would ignore females in heat and food, pressing the pedal that would deliver their shot of happiness? Or the teenage mugger, sniffing and shaking with his addiction, interested in nothing but the high?
But - turning again to the future - as the theory of reward expands to include endorphins, we will once again educate the young to create their own high, and the demand for the substitute will decline. After all, the real thing is, chemists say, fifty times more powerful than the false, though harder to obtain. Any good teacher will recognize a gifted student whose capacity for self-reward has been stunted from birth by parents and teachers who would not challenge him and who feared to nurture in him an undemocratic pride and pleasure in achievement. As you force the unaccustomed juices of pleasure - in learning, in truth, in beauty, in work - to flow, the student is almost incredulous. Surely you can’t mean him to enjoy it? It’s obscene. You’re teaching him vile and monstrous joys. In fact you’re letting him into his inheritance, an inheritance paid for by millions of our ancestors, who humanized themselves by ritual, by claiming kin, by the agonizing and delicious effort to articulate the wordless.

Paradoxically, then, materialism as the supreme religion began to sicken when we began to make thinking machines, and died when we began to see ourselves as machines for the production of spirit, soul, value. Materialist politics is dying too, and we have come to see our traditional cultures as machines that support the process of soul-making. All over the world, revolutionary forces are championing complex and traditional value systems - ethic, religious, and political - against materialism, whether it be liberal, fascist, capitalist, socialist, or communist. What makes the Vietnamese, the Poles, the Afghans, the Palestinians, and the Irish such dangerous adversaries is not a materialist ideology but religion, traditional education, blood ties, patriotism, a sense of beauty, honor, heroism, duty, and all the rest: the endorphins blazing in the head like a lantern, more fiercely than any sexual passion, or thirst, or hunger for bread.

To a materialist all those beliefs are only distracting games by which we hide the knowledge of death and the reality of our worldly condition from ourselves. But the human race is more deeply motivated by a game than by a reality and fears losing more than it fears death. From the point of view with wich I began - the collapse of the distinction between knowledge and being, information and reality, representing and doing - the paradox is no paradox. Reality has always been a game, and our games continue the evolution of reality. We evolved as idealists, teleologists, essentialists, because, by golly, we survive better that way. Teleology is the best policy. Less idealistic animals have less control over the future.

ESCAPE FROM MODERNISM
Technology and the Future of the Imagination
by Frederick Turner
Consider the process by which a modern integrated circuit is made. A wafer of silicon is doped with impurities, exposed to light that is shone through a template to form a pattern of shadows, treated with new impurities that differentiate between the irradiated and unexposed areas, etched by a bath of corrosives, blanketed with a new surface of silicon, exposed to another pattern of light, and so on, until marvelously complex three-dimensional system of switches, gates, resistors, and connections has been laid down. This system may be destined to become part of a computer that will in turn help design new integrated circuits. The technical term for this process is “photographic.” An integrated circuit is essentially a very complex silicon photograph. Photographic techniques are now being used to make all kinds of tiny machines—solar energy collectors, pumps, and measuring devices.

We normally think of a photographic process as one that makes pictures of things rather than things themselves. A photograph is significant only as a record; as an object it’s just a bit of sticky paper. But our silicon photograph doesn’t merely represent something; it does what it is a photograph of. In sense it is a miraculous picture, like that of Our Lady of Guadalupe: it not only depicts, but does; it is not just a representation, but reality; it is not just a piece of knowledge, but a piece of being; it is not just epistemology, but ontology.

Consider, moreover, the digital, or Soundstream, method of reproducing music. The music is scanned every forty-four thousandth of a second or so, and the sound wave activity in that forty-four thousandth of a second is given a numerical value. This value is recorded in terms of a binary sequence of laser-burned holes and unburned spaces on a record. To play the record you just scan the holes with another laser and synthesize a sound that corresponds to the number you get every forty-four thousandth of a second.

A digital recording is really just a sophisticated musical “score”. It in no way reproduces the actual shape of the music, the way the grooves in the plastic of a normal record do, any more than the five parallel lines, the clef, and the little black ellipses with tails reproduce the sound of the music - or, indeed, than the letters on a page reproduce the sound of speech. In a sense, the digital recording harks back to an antiquated device for reproducing music: the player piano.

The interesting thing is that digital recordings are much more accurate than any analog recording could be. They are literally as accurate as you want: you could scan music every hundred thousandth of a second - though it would be useless, as the highest pitch we can hear is less than twenty thousandth of a second in frequency. Moreover, a digital recording is theoretically almost invulnerable to wear, whereas an analog recording must suffer and shriek to give up its music.

Paradoxically, an analog recording, which is the actual reverberation of a performance of a piece of music - as if we were to put our ear against the wall of the Sistine Chapel choir - is less accurate than the entirely new performance generated by machinery from the meticulous numerical score of a digital recording. It is as if, knowing the right language, you could write the names of foods so that if you ate the paper on which they were written it would be more tasty and nourishing than the foods themselves.

So: photographs can now, magically, do what they are pictures of; and a score of a piece of music can give a more accurate recording than the sound of the music itself. We live once again in a world of runes and icons, efficacious and full of virtue; a world in which the distinction between how we know and what we know, statement and referent, meaning and object, has begun to break down. Indeed, quantum physics tells us that we are all made out of numerical likehoods called electrons, photons, and so on; and the Big Bang theory says we are all made out of lights.



Our children are growing up on computer programs and fantasy role-playing—Voyager, Wizardry, Dungeons & Dragons. The space program was too slow to bring those other worlds to them, so they constructed them right here on earth. Play has become increasingly practical: it is almost as if an evolutionary necessity dictated that from our most infantile and unnecessary behaviors would come the solid future of the species. Just as it began to seem that political, economic, and technological forces were combining to organize the human race into a rational, centralized, and anonymous unity, and that the world was, as they say, becoming a small place, counterforces started taking us in completely new directions. the new electronic technology is by nature playful and individualizing. The strong hand of the corporation and the still stronger hand of the state, which was once able to coerce the population into service by cutting off the sources of energy and information, are losing their hold. Quite soon a family with its own solar power generator and its own computer will have the kind of practical sovereignty once possessed only by nations.

Remember the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the kids' mechanical toys all wake up and, in their dim electronic awareness, run about on the floor and clap their hands and flash their lights? and how the music of the aliens is actually a variation on the Disney tune "When You Wish Upon a Star"? We have met E.T., and he is our toys, our animated cartoons, our computer programs. We are re-entering at last the ancient animist universe, populated by genies and geniuses of place, in which every object possess a demon that one might control and use. but the nymphs and dryads are now microprocessors inhabiting our cars, our clocks, our chess sets, and our typewriters. Soon everything will have its own dedicated intelligence, its own nisus, or animating will.

We are at a curious juncture in the history of science and technology. The empiricism of the Renaissance gradually flattened out the ancient hierarchy of the universe and broke up the Great Chain of Being. But just when the world seemed to have been reduced to a collection of objective facts—the world view of modernism—a new order began to come into being.

The new Great Chain of Being, unlike the old one, is dynamic and fluid: it is the great branching tree of evolution. As long as evolution was confined to the realm of biology, it did not seriously threaten the modernist vision of the world as “value-flat” it simply made of life a mystical anomaly, a “fever of matter” in the “frozen chastity” of the inorganic, as Thomas Mann put it. But now we can create viruses out of “dead” chemicals, proving they were not as dead as we thought. The link has been made. All of the world is alive. The destruction of the old coherence is best illustrated by the collapse of the meaningof the word “art”. In The Tempest it is Prospero's “art” that makes temporary sense of the airy nothing the world is made of, rendering it into cluod-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples, even the Globe theater itself. For Shakespeare “art” meant sience, philosophy, technical power, craft, theatrical sleight of hand, liberal education, magic, and “art” in our modern meaning, all at once. The moment of The Tempest was the last moment off full cultural health and intigrity.“Art,”the word, was gradually torn to shreds, until in our century art and sience, sience and technology, philosophy and sience, art and philosophy, magic and sience, craft and art, education and art, have all been set against one another, like demons bred out of the corpse of the great mother.

But coherne is swiftly returning. The indeterminacy of principle, which destroys the distinction between observation and action, makes all sience into technology and all technology into sience. Academic philosophy has died and passed its inheritance on to the theoreticians of sience and the art critics. Anthropologists have revealed other cultures: magic as sience and our own sience as magic. In all the arts, the death of modernism has given birth to rapprochement between craft and art, and art is, once more, properly equired to be moral. All of these assertions are more propheticthan scholarly, but watch out.

Not that the empirical detour was unnesseacry. Shakespear:s magic did not work outside the theater, and we need three centuries of self-imposed alienation, of tearing things to pieces to see how they worked, to be able to come back to a coherent world, this time with the poers and knowledge we had mimed with magic. But now that we have come back we must cast away the habits of exile - the self contempt, the illusion of alienation, the hatred of the past, the sterile existentialism, the fear of the future, the willful imposition of meaninglessness on a universe bursting with meaning.



Another way of saying the same thing is that we are undergoing a religious revolution. In about 1600 a new religion, materialism, appeared on the scene. Its practice is what we usually call economic activity, and its workings, and a sense of triumph in technological achievement. Its theology is atomistic: like God, the atom of matter is indivisible, eternal, invulnerable, responsible for all events in the world. Unlike God, though, it is not conscious or personal. As with other great religions—and it is a great and in many ways noble religion, and much of our best and most significant behavior consists in its observance—it has given rise to magnificent heresies, moral systems, and even good science: dialectical materialism, existentialism, the theory of evolution.

If someone were to protest that materialism is not a religion, a cross-cultural view would rapidy convince him. Medieval people did not call their everyday rituals religious, or even rituals. They were just the way one lived one’s life. Totemists, before contact with Europeans, would have said the same thing about their own practices, their own value systems. What enabled materialism to triumph was precisely the fact that it did not claim to be a religion at all, but labeled other systems as religious; and there are elements of materialism in all human value systems, just as there are elements of monotheism, polytheism, animism, totemism, and ancestor worship.

But materialism is now going through the same crisis Christianity went through 400 years ago. Christianity resolved its crisis by determining to coexist with the new religion, to the enrichment of both, while accepting certain limitations on its relevance, the chief of which was the recognition of itself as a religion, rather than “the way things are.”

The main challenge to materialism was the discovery that the atom is not irreductible, and the consequent dissolution of matter into event, relation, and information. One of the advantages of materialism is that the further one goes in explaining the complex and ambiguous behavior of the apparent world in terms of simple atomic events, the more concrete and unambiguous it seems to be. Religion seeks certainty, and for a long time materialism delivered it. But one more reduction, one last simplification, spoiled everything. Suddenly the world, as it was revealed by quantum physics, became utterly ambiguous again.

Much that is good can be salvaged from the old religion. The world of matter, throuh it has been shown to be a provisional one, without the appealing absolutness it once possessed, is still beautiful and exquisitely ordered and surely we should give it a share of worship. But if we do so, we must give a greater share to ourselves, both as the supreme product of matter given the chance to do what comes naturally and as the supreme observer and sharper of the material world. That aspect of religion that appeals to the desire worship something outside of, and superior to, ourselves will not be satisfied any longer with materialism.

And materialism has always carried a dangerous flaw: its fundamental parts, the atoms of matter, are impersonal, insentient, and unintelligent—that is precisely what makes them intelligible. But the elevation of matter implies the superiority of those characteristics — impersonality, insentience, unintelligence. The personal, the sensible, and the conscious came to be seen as a second-classe reality that must face up to the impersonal «reality principale»: the blind forces of economic change, the dialectics of class struggle, the survival of the fittest. Perhaps our great political and technological monsters — communism, fascism, the hydrogen bombe — are the final expression of that suspicion of the personal; they promise to eradicate persons from the face of the earth.

The world is becoming a bigger place, more densely packed with information. A few years ago the amount of information stored in the worlds libraries, computers, and so on doubled every ten years; now the doubling time is eight years, and it is continuing to shrink. This process has a cosmological significance, because the univers itself is made of information — matter and energy decay according to the laws of entropy, paying for their durability of form by their eventual death and transformation into more primitive states of organization, information is both immortal and self-propagating. On the level of matter and energy, the world is running down; on the level of information, the world is growing and becoming more elaborately organized. And our activities, tiny as they appear in space and time, are significant part of that growth.


A fascinating analogy suggests itself: Perhaps our traditional ways of storing and passing on information, through speaking, writing, and data proprocessing, are now taking over the genetic tasks of our species, just as, if Caiens-Smith's theory is correct, the organic melecules that were once its tools superseded the genetic functions of the clay.

To Descartes and Berkeley, the distinction between being and consciousness was so absolute as to require divineintervention to enable them to communicate. That distinction is now only a matter of degree. Being has disolved before our eyes as we have examined it more closely, until, in quantum physics, matter proves less durable than the light in which we see it and evaporates into energy, pure event, if we try to take it apart any further.

The nature from which we are supposed to be alienated never existed.The great quantum experiments--the parallel-slits light experement, the polirizing-filter light experement--show that nature has not made its mind about what it really is, and is quite happy to have us help it do so. The tradition of philosophy that saw us as cut off from our “true” way of being has collapsed, although it hasn't realized it yet. We are nature, and we are as at home here in the world as anything has ever been. For the whole world is made up of such as we; its physical components are, just as we are, tourists, outsiders, amateurs, getting by on a smile and shoeshine, and deriving what being they have from the recognition of their fellows. All nature is second nature.

The new quantum theories of cosmology suggest that the chance-governed behavior of elementary particles is a sort of “living fossil” of the state of the entire universe in its first moments of existence. In other words, the order of the physical world as we know it through conventional physics and chemistry did not at first exist, but evolved out of chaos.

At the very beginning there existed an in_nite number of possible states, each with a probability of one in in_nity. Nothings was one possibility, sharing with the others the same in_nitesimal likelihood of being true. The fact that one cannot pin down an electron simultaneously in any one time and place is a remnant of that indeterminacy. The sharpness of reality is a result of the harmonious synchronization of many fuzzy events.

Technology is the continuation of the process of evolution by which the inde_niteness of the world gave rise to greater and greater certainty. It is that goes back through our bodies, the persisting organisation of crystals and stable molecules, and the durable coherence of elementary particles to that first moment when possibility resolved itself into a burst of identical photons.

In the heyday of high modernism the world of the future seemed impersonal, cool, centralized, inorganic, tidy, sharp-edged: a world-state with equal prosperity or all, tall rectilinear buildings, cool atonal music, abstract art, imagist free verse, novels puri_ed of the fetishism and hierarchy of plot and character; a world-state without repression, alienation and ego, free from the shibboleths of honor beauty sexual morality, patriotism, idealism, religion and duty.

This future now appears dated, even dreary. It has been shown that yes, indeed, humankind does have a nature; there are cultural universals. There are rules include not only the grammar of language, but also the classical laws of harmony, melody, color, proportion, rhythm, and balance. The modernists believed those classical qualities to be arbitrary and tried to seep them away, thereby damaging the art forms they were trying to liberate and depriving them of their audience. But we are beginning to discover the nature of our humanity as well as the humanity of nature. To put it aphoristically: We have a nature; that nature is cultural; that culture is classical.



I suspect that some readers winced when I gave a list of values: honor, beauty, sexual morality, patriotism, idealism, religion, and duty. That re-flex indicates a reaction to values and reward systems that has rarely been examined.

In the nineteenth century, materialist ethics came together with materialist biology and agreed that there were only two types of rewards: this obviously associated with survival and those obviously associated with reproduction. Two brilliant value systems﹘Marx’s, which reduced all value to the economics of survival, and Freud’s, which reduced all value to libido﹘were the results. Existentialism struggles between accepting these rewards as preferable to the more complex value systems of a society and rejecting them, and all rewards, as bribes to make us give our freedom.

Under the pressure of these theories, which postulated very coarse rewards even for very refined behavior, our value systems changed and coarsened. When people wince at the words “duty,” “honor,” and “beauty,” they are doing exactly what Victorians would have done upon hearing the words “passion,” “desire,” and “sexuality,” or even “money,” “fees,” and “honoraria.” The Victorians, in a last-ditch defense of the older, more complex value system, would naturally have been pained by references to the enemy’s rewards﹘the joy of duty, the satisfaction of honorable conduct﹘that we have given up. Not that we are not, often, honourable and dutiful. But we are so in a spirit of taking nasty medicine with good grace, and we are deeply suspicious of those who enjoy doing their duty.

But new discoveries are forcing on us a new value system. The pleasures of eating and sex are not the only rewards. Scientists studying the chemistry of the brain have begun to uncover a remarkable variety of rewards, suppressors of rewards, suppressors of the suppressors, and so on. The pleasures of achievement, of insight into the truth, of heroic exertion or sacrifice, of good conscience, of beauty, are real pleasures in themselves, not repressed or sublimated derivatives of libido. Certainly the higher pleasures enlist the coarser and more obvious ones as reinforcement; and indeed society uses the coarser and more obvious ones﹘for example food, for children﹘to train the higher reward systems, to “prime the pump,” so to speak. But the “endorphin high” is as real a reward as orgasm, or as food to a starving man.

Nor are hunger and sex the simple survival drives they seemed to the materialists. The study of evolution shows that the division of food played a central role in the religious rituals that defined the human community. What food represents has long been more important than the 2,000 calories a day required for survival. And the comparative study of sexual behaviour shows that, far from possessing a feeble and watered-down version of brute sexuality, we are the most sexual of all animals,we are in the heat all the time, we copulate face to face, our females have as powerful a libido as our males. Our sexuality is much more powerful than that of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and gorillas; it is far more powerful than is needed for reproduction. Many anthropologists suspect that our sexuality evolved in tandem with our brains, and that it took on the important function of encouraging the creation of family and social groupings that could nurture the young and promote cooperation through affection. Nevertheless, without the discovery of the higher reward systems, the theories of sublimation and repression would still wash. It was the brain chemicals that broke the old ideology. Who can forget those rats that would ignore females in heat and food, pressing the pedal that would deliver their shot of happiness? But there is a terrible tragedy here. Endorphins were discovered because certain scientists studying drug addiction asked the obvious, and brilliant question: Why does the brain have receptors designed precisely to respond with extreme sensitivity to the sap of an Oriental poppy? What was the evolutionary necessity? The answer, of course, is that those receptors were designed to respond to something else entirely. The poppy resins simply happened to possess a molecular resemblance to that something else an opiate produced by the brain to reward itself for doing very hard work. The tragedy is this: the materialist theory of value has resulted in the cutting off of many of the pleasures produced by the brain chemicals. We are starved for the pleasures of the mind and spirit and soul. The twentieth century is full of angst, which has its source in a thirst for things like glory, sanctity, conscience, and heroism, things with counterfeits; and as the doctrines of materialism triumphed, first among intellectuals, then among the population at large, so did the use of opium; cocaine, mescaline, cannabis.(Of course those individuals at the bottom of society, who have always felt cast out, have always used such drugs when they could get them.) We are only beginning to realise the horrible effects of tampering with the brain’s own reward system by means of drugs. That realisation touches us, with the hard thrill of permanent damage, in the very center of our will, our freedom, our selfhood. Who can forget those rats that would ignore females in heat and food, pressing the pedal that would deliver their shot of happiness? Or the teenage mugger, sniffing and shaking with his addiction, interested in nothing but the high?
But - turning again to the future - as the theory of reward expands to include endorphins, we will once again educate the young to create their own high, and the demand for the substitute will decline. After all, the real thing is, chemists say, fifty times more powerful than the false, though harder to obtain. Any good teacher will recognize a gifted student whose capacity for self-reward has been stunted from birth by parents and teachers who would not challenge him and who feared to nurture in him an undemocratic pride and pleasure in achievement. As you force the unaccustomed juices of pleasure - in learning, in truth, in beauty, in work - to flow, the student is almost incredulous. Surely you can’t mean him to enjoy it? It’s obscene. You’re teaching him vile and monstrous joys. In fact you’re letting him into his inheritance, an inheritance paid for by millions of our ancestors, who humanized themselves by ritual, by claiming kin, by the agonizing and delicious effort to articulate the wordless.

Paradoxically, then, materialism as the supreme religion began to sicken when we began to make thinking machines, and died when we began to see ourselves as machines for the production of spirit, soul, value. Materialist politics is dying too, and we have come to see our traditional cultures as machines that support the process of soul-making. All over the world, revolutionary forces are championing complex and traditional value systems - ethic, religious, and political - against materialism, whether it be liberal, fascist, capitalist, socialist, or communist. What makes the Vietnamese, the Poles, the Afghans, the Palestinians, and the Irish such dangerous adversaries is not a materialist ideology but religion, traditional education, blood ties, patriotism, a sense of beauty, honor, heroism, duty, and all the rest: the endorphins blazing in the head like a lantern, more fiercely than any sexual passion, or thirst, or hunger for bread.

To a materialist all those beliefs are only distracting games by which we hide the knowledge of death and the reality of our worldly condition from ourselves. But the human race is more deeply motivated by a game than by a reality and fears losing more than it fears death. From the point of view with wich I began - the collapse of the distinction between knowledge and being, information and reality, representing and doing - the paradox is no paradox. Reality has always been a game, and our games continue the evolution of reality. We evolved as idealists, teleologists, essentialists, because, by golly, we survive better that way. Teleology is the best policy. Less idealistic animals have less control over the future.