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Book review from the Whole Earth Review magazine. E-mail to
(
[email protected]) for more info about the magazine.
The Voice of the Earth
Theodore Roszak, 1992
(Summit Books); 367 pp.
$23 ($26 postpaid) from Simon & Schuster/Order Dept., 200 Old Tappan Road, Old Tappan, NJ 07675; 800/223-2336
(or Whole Earth Access)
Here is a wise and tasteful grand synthesis of the new cosmology and the new physics. Its an argument that there appears to be some purpose for us Homo sapiens here. This noble philosophical work shares some concerns
and intentions with Thomas Berrys The Dream of the Earth: to establish our evolution as part of an historical continuum that started with the Big Bang. Roszak pursues, through available psychological theory and beyond, a concept of psyche that bears some integral relationship to the living whole. The genius of the book is Roszaks belief in human goodness, a faith hes proclaimed since The Making of a Counterculture.
Why is this work important to the ecological activist? Because how we think about ourselves determines our thinking about the world, and thought errors about the nature of the universe or righteous misanthropy might do not just us, but our little home here in the Milky Way, in. The Voice of the Earth is about learning a suitable, authentic basis for our endeavor -- its a learned, rational case for honoring the Creative Mystery that enfolds us. --Stephanie Mills
Excerpts from the book follw:
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There is a bright spirit waiting to be found in each of us, a true self
that needs the optimistic trust and freedom that neither social
respectability nor conscience-driven politics will give it.
----
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However closely one may feel that a computer and a living thing resemble
one another, there are plaguing differences, among them one of the classic
holistic observations. A machine, including the computer, can be taken
apart and put back together losing nothing in the process. Not so an
organism. Take it apart and something special happens. It dies. Interrupt
its vital processes for any length of time by pulling it to pieces and it
loses something that must have been there hidden away in the relationship
between the parts and which cannot be restored. Lived time is radically
different from clock time. Living things are systems to which history is
indispensable. This distinction shows up nowhere so markedly as in the
faculty that is frequently and casually associated with the computer:
memory. Insofar as machines have memories, they function very differently
from memory in the organic realm. Organic memory is a record of experience,
an intricate, highly selective blending of emotion, sensuous stimulation,
existential crisis. In plants and animals, the experience may be that
collective embodiment of evolutionary history we refer to as instinct. At
the human level, it is connected with the psyche, a true mind that grows
from a personal as well as an evolutionary history. This in turn connects
with another great difference between organic and mechanical systems, one
that also has to do with time. In the history of the universe, organic
systems precede mechanical systems. No machine existed until a human being
made one upon this planet. And as yet, no human being has succeeded in
making a machine that matches the complexity of our own mind or body. This
is why the mechanistic hypothesis has always been deeply flawed; it has
chosen the lesser system as a model of the more complex.
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