There’s hardly anyone who’s into the old-style socialist utopianism anymore. And who believes the world will be saved by more science and technology run by technocrats? The concept of enlightened transnational government, a vision underlying the United Nations or the European Union, still has some vigor and is still important, but I don’t meet many people who are wildly enthusiastic about either as the solution to all our ills. These utopian visions that guided so much of humanistic and socialistic thinking in the twentieth century have put their trust in rational reform, education, science, technology and world government. The Rio conference on the Environment was an attempt to bring this approach to bear on problems such as global warming and environmental degradation. The results have not been impressive.
I’d like to ask you, Terence, how you see these two strands in your own thinking. On the one hand the archaic revival is psychedelic utopianism. On the other hand the time wave, ending in 2012, is millenarian. Since you represent both strands so eloquently, I’d like to know how you see them connecting or linking together.
Terence Mckenna: If we restrict ourselves to the realm of the rational, we only have two choices—utopia or more history. More history is beginning to look less and less likely. At the beginning of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus says, “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” I feel this way. I can’t imagine a thousand more years of human history—more wars, more discoveries, more topless photos of Fergie, more and more and more endlessly to no meaning. On the other hand, efforts to build utopia have become fiercer and more horrifying. In the twentieth century there were three serious efforts to build utopias: the American, the Nazi, and the Soviet. All have ended very badly, I think. The National Socialist utopia ended in the Second World War in an utter discrediting of fantasy fascism. The Soviet Union dissolved in disarray. The American story is in the act of unraveling at this moment. This leaves us to face the most unlikely of all scenarios, the millenarian, which is an irrational choice. The rational path is to fashion out of human plans, dreams and institutions some more humane order. That’s the hope of utopianism.
I believe in the millennium, but I also think it’s politically a disempowering idea. I see Christian fundamentalists running around who also believe in the millennium, and they’re the major anti-progressive force in the most advanced societies.
How should we react to this dilemma? I think it’s worth looking slightly afield for a moment. What we’re really talking about here are origins and endpoints, and so far we’ve been looking at endpoints. What about origins? The dominant and virtually unchallenged myth of our origin is either God created us in seven days along with all the rest of creation, or the universe was born out of nothingness in a single moment for no reason. These are the two choices on the menu. Neither is terribly compelling to rationalists, I dare say. The scientific explanation however we may think of it in terms of its veracity—that the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant—is the limit case for credulity. If you can believe that, you can believe anything! Sit down and try and think of something more improbable than that contention. Science opens up with the one-two punch, saying, “Put that in front of them, and if they can swallow it, then hydrogen bonding, gene segregation, whatever, will follow hard apace.” The hard swallow comes first.
Many creation theories require a singularity. That means that in order to kick-start the intellectual engine, you have to go outside the system. You get one free hypothesis, and once you’ve used that up, your system has to run very smoothly clear down to the end. Science uses up its one free hypothesis with the Big Bang, saying in effect, “Give me the first ten to twelve nanoseconds, and if I can do smoke and mirrors in that time frame, the rest will proceed in quite an orderly fashion.” I think that if you get one free singularity in your model building, a more likely place to put it would be not in a featureless, dimensionless, processless super-vacuum at the beginning, but in a domain of many temperature regimes, many forms of energy, many languages, many chemical systems, many different levels of energy exchange, late in the life of the universe. What you have then is a picture not of a process being pushed by causality toward some heat death billions of years in the future, but one of a universe that is flowing naturally toward ever greater complexity, at the end. Organization transcends itself, produces more complex organization which transcends itself, which produces more complex organization, and conceivably, out of a process of avalanching complexity you might actually get a singularity of some sort. This singularity would have the character of an attractor. I grant you that this model is irrational, but our little discussion of the birth of the universe should convince you that it’s ALL irrational. Irrationality doesn’t get you tossed out of the game. It’s the name of the game.
Being hopefully a sane person, my own inner dialogue goes back and forth between the reasonable desire to preserve rationality and hence channel energy toward utopian hope, and thoughts about the end of time. After all, we have the money, scientific knowledge, communication systems and so forth, to solve any of our problems—feeding the hungry, curing disease, halting the destruction of the environment. The problem is that we cannot change our minds as quickly as we can redesign harbors, flatten mountains, cut rainforests, dam rivers. Because I see this, and because I see it from a psychedelic point of view, and because I don’t want to abandon myself to despair, I see then this transcendental object at the end of time. This is not part of the utopian schema. It is part of the millenarian revelation. It’s a very persistent idea, and in all times and all places, this highly unlikely concept has been kept alive.
I think that we are blinding ourselves to the intentionality present in our world. I think you have to be carrying a lot of unusual intellectual baggage to not see the last thousand years as moving toward a maximizing of some set of goals. It’s not the triumphal march into God’s kingdom envisioned by Christianity, but neither is it the trendless fluctuation that is taught in the academy. If you go to a university and ask them, “What is history?” they will tell you it’s a trendlessly fluctuating process. What they mean is it isn’t going anywhere. Now that’s interesting. If history is a trendlessly fluctuating process, then it is the only such process ever observed anywhere. Processes are not trendless; this is what dynamics has secured. Processes always occur under the aegis of some set of parameters that are being maximized. If a desert is drying out, then water vapor levels are dropping. What’s being maximized is dryness. To think of history—the very process in which mind is embedded and through which it expresses itself—as trendless is an existential absurdity.
Plato said that if gods did not exist, human beings would create them. We are creating God. Our cultural machinery, our dreams of integration and balance, our care for each other and for the world—these are god-like aspirations. We aspire to be God when we talk about becoming the caretakers of the world. We don’t want to be Adam and Eve chewing on the fruit in the garden. We want to be the gardener. The power that we have in our possession means we will realize these dreams. If there is not a real millennium with a real Eschaton, then there will be a virtual Eschaton, created with such care and fine attention to detail that it becomes an alternative reality of some sort.
If one were saying this will happen in a thousand years, or in 500 years, it would just be interesting table talk. But the rates of closure, the speed of acceleration toward the Omega Point, are exponential. We cannot imagine 2012 by looking backward 20 years and then saying we have that much more time to go through before we reach this moment. Cocktail party habitués bore each other by observing, “Have you noticed that time is speeding up?” Time itself is moving faster, and we are compressing more events into it. I would like to take that seriously. Time is speeding up. Not human time, but the time of physics. We can imagine ourselves colliding with an asteroid or being battered by earthquakes or something like that, but what we cannot conceive of is that we are on a collision course with a hyperdimensional objec
t of some sort.
People always object to the millenarian intuition with, “Well, you say a transcendental object is coming parallel or tangential to history—don’t you find it a little odd that out of billions of years, it’s going to occur in your lifetime? How convenient.” This is not an objection at all; it’s an argument in favor of my position. You see history is the trumpet of judgment. A million years ago there were only animals and plants and rivers and glaciers on this planet. Human history is the annunciation of the Eschaton. When you open a door, first there’s a crack of light that streams into the darkness. That’s human history. We have cracked the door. That moment only lasts about 25,000 years, creating an order in nature never before seen, represented by a technological, language. When you push the door open, you see that history is the shock wave that precedes the Eschaton. This is pretty straight Christian dogma, that there is a covenant between human beings and God Almighty and that the contract and the promise will be kept. I think it will be kept, and the challenge of science is to overcome its struggles with religion, and guide us into the presence of the Eschaton using the tools and the descriptive approaches that it has perfected. The proper attitude toward the Eschaton is not prayer and sacrifice alone. The proper attitude is inquisitive understanding, curiosity, and delighted anticipation. The end of history is an object in nature like the electron, the spiral galaxy, and the human body, “a complex nexus,” to use Whitehead’s words, of temporal complexity that accounts for our existence. Without the Eschaton, there would have been no human beings—no you, no me, no pyramids, no Stonehenge, no Catholic Church, no Hassidism—none of these things would exist. They are the precursive anticipation of the perfection that lies at the end of the morphogenetic process of self-expression that is history. We are a part of it in the sense that we represent the individual atoms that are flowing together to make the transcendental object at the end of time.
I’ll put myself out of business long before 2012 if other people don’t start seeing things my way, because part of the prophecy, if you will, is that awareness of this impending event will spread, not simply through those who take their inspiration from Gideon or Stropharia, but among those who study particle physics, temporal matrices, and general modeling of nature. Nature cannot be made sense of without this kind of a singularity. Science has recognized this, only putting the singularity out of reach and safely in the past. This doesn’t explain organism, intelligence, or history. To do that, you have to take this mysterious moment of concrescent involutional totality and put it in the end state. It’s a matter of simple logical necessity. The fact that it was achieved by psychedelically driven visionary shamanizing only shows how similar these two methods are in their conclusion.
RA: Terence, I’d like to consider this millennial obsession of yours in the context of a deep habit, a runnel in the morphic field of our civilization. We have habits of thinking about time. We have philosophies of time, and consideration of time according to certain models. The idea of time having a singularity at the beginning and a singularity at the end is one model of time, and, as Rupert has observed in the past, when you believe in the Big Bang, it’s easier to believe that there’s a singularity at the end.
TM: There’s more evidence there’s a singularity at the end.
RA: It seems to me that the situation is quite symmetrical, and neither the singularity at the end, nor the singularity at the beginning makes any difference. There’s another model of time, the cyclical one, where we have the cycle of the four ages repeated indefinitely, with not only a Golden Age in the past, but a Golden Age in the future as well. The utopian Trinitarian model is a version of this laid down by Joachim di Fiore when he changed the classical four epoch model into a three epoch model to agree with the Christian trinity. These two habits, which account basically for the utopian and the millennial obsessions of the human species over this historical period of 6000 years, were enabled by certain mathematical models of time coming into consciousness. First, we must understand a line, then we think of a linear model of time, and then we understand circles as our mathematical consciousness grows. Recently we have had a proliferation of new models for time. You, for example, have contributed enormously to the history of the philosophy of time by creating a fractal model of time. Chaos theory, likewise, has given many new models for transformation, which transcend the singularity concepts. Our mathematical capability has evolved to a certain point where we can recognize many other forms of transformation in nature occurring through time. The New Age expectation is for a social transformation, a future history that is not boring. The dream of a social transformation has historical support. You said that history is the trumpet of the human experience. Compare our fantasy of what’s going on with the historical record, we find that the historical record does not support the Eschaton. This is a particular interpretation based on a very archaic model, the oldest model of time in the history of consciousness.
TM: At the beginning you said that the two possibilities—a singularity at the beginning, or at the end of the process of universal becoming—these seem...
RA: Equally improbable, as you pointed out.
TM: I didn’t say that. I said I think it’s much more probable to find it at the end of a process, when you have great complexity, than to believe it would spring from a state of utter nothingness.
RA: The historical record is compatible with the idea of an upcoming, amazing, difficult, and creative social transformation in our immediate future. The future will not be boring. Transformation will be a chaotic transient from one attractor to another, a period of destabilization when all constraint of history is lifted, novelty is empowered to actually do something instead of being constantly frustrated, and then we wake up one morning and read in the paper that the sun is rising in a different way. This has happened in the past. It’s in the historical record of people who wrote of history by whatever model, whether it’s the cyclic model or the linear progressive model or whatever. History goes along boringly the same for a while, eventually there’s a destabilization, then you have rapid change to a new equilibrium.
Among these different equilibria there is perhaps a kind of progression in the long run. In this model, catastrophic transformations are announced by plagues and disasters, and the dissolution of established structures, out of which, like a Phoenix from the ashes, comes a new organization which might be glorious. The longest view in this transformational model of history, is given in a history of our living Earth by Jim Lovelock, called The Ages of Gaia. In that book he describes the whole history of life on the planet as a series of equilibria punctuated by catastrophic transformations, eight really major transformations, the last one 65 million years ago.
TM: This shows the kind of attention he gives to human history.
RA: In this view, even the human species could disappear and life may be boring for microbes, but they will go on, the biosphere will not end, life is not over. Maybe the Eschaton is only for the human species.
TM: The reason I don’t buy the idea that this is simply one more renaissance, or one more gothic revival, is because these breakthroughs to novelty are occurring faster and faster. It’s not just that they happen, it’s that they happen faster and with more frequency. Whatever James Lovelock’s affinity for something happening 65 million years ago, a few things of high interest have happened since, like everything in the human world. When you look at human history and technology and the spread of peoples and genes and so forth, it’s clear that we’ve reached some kind of limit. Maybe you get one more renaissance before you slam into the wall, but not a dozen, not a hundred. This is not the Renaissance, this is not the rise of Rome, this is the final global crisis. The objective data support me on this.
RS: But it’s so provincial, Terence. There’s a sense in which the millenarian vision is a product of the historical model that grew up within one branch of human consciousness: the Judaic-Christian-Islamic branch. There’s a sense in which you could argue that all
this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Having unleashed these millenarian visions, our history’s been driven by millenarian visions, which actually empowered and directed the discovery of America, the opening up of the New World, the rise of science and technology, the development of the atom bomb. Most of the things that are actually creating the crisis are man-made.
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