Review of 2012 in Enlightenment Magazine

[K.J]

I appologize if this has been posted elsewhere, but I couldn't find it using the search function if it has (may be a user-error issue).

I completely disagree with the reviewers ultimate outake on Daniel's new book. At one point she states that "the book has an underlying quality of 2012 is dark, expressing an emblematic sense of Gen-X nihilism, moral confusion, and profound impotence and fatalism in response to today’s global crises." That's exactly the opposite of what I think the book embody's.

Based on her assesment of the book, it seems to me that maybe Daniel's crafty style of writing confused her and boggled her noggin'. I think the book is at its best when read through carefully, and more than once. She might want to try that and update her review.

K.J

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (http://www.wie.org/j34/reviews.asp?ifr=hp-art)
by Daniel Pinchbeck

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl may be one of the most outrageous, troubling, and thoroughly disorienting books to come out of a major publishing house in the last decade. Melding personal memoir and philosophical inquiry, the scope and length of Daniel Pinchbeck’s new book is enormously ambitious. It traverses the author’s secular upbringing in New York City during the seventies, his exploration of psychedelics in his twenties, and his growing fascination with UFOs, crop circles, indigenous peoples, as well as the occult, shamanism, and the apocalypse. All the while Pinchbeck integrates the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, and Martin Heidegger, bolstering his thesis with intellectual weight.

The essence of his thesis is this: Contrary to our modern super-rational and materialistic prejudices, consciousness is the “ground of being rather than an epiphenomenon of physical processes” and at this moment in history, consciousness is undergoing a series of dramatic changes that will culminate in a final shift on December 21, 2012. The Mayans ended their calendar on this date when they created it in the sixth century, and Pinchbeck is one of a growing number of people around the world who believe that the Mayans were prophesying a major paradigm shift in consciousness, one that will liberate the West from its “constricted rationality,” usher in a “worldwide resurgence of shamanism,” and give rise to a “new planetary civilization.”

Pinchbeck is an accomplished journalist and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Artforum, Esquire, the Village Voice, and many other publications. His previous book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), detailed his experiences while traveling to Africa and South America to take psychedelics with indigenous peoples. In his second book, Pinchbeck is still talking about psychedelics, but he also explains how he discovered the “2012” theory: by way of the infamous psychedelic prophet and writer Terence McKenna. McKenna, who died in 2000, believed that the 2012 shift would kick-start an “archaic revival” that would bring “shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people,” which he believed were “hegemony, monogamy, and monotony.” Inspired by McKenna’s work and a handful of others, the idea that the Mayan end time is a schedule for humanity’s collective return to the mystical worldview of the original tribal cultures (a worldview that is often misunderstood as being more holistic, peaceful, and spiritually enlightened than that of the modern and postmodern eras) is more popular today than ever before.

Unlike McKenna, Pinchbeck is reticent to completely endorse the idea that we should revert to a prerational, premodern, pretechnologicalway of life come 2012. Perhaps this is because he has absorbed the work not only of thinkers like McKenna—who see our tribal past as a Golden Age we have fallen from and must return to—but also of philosophers and theologians with an evolutionary, developmental view of human history and consciousness. Indeed, the works of Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and Rudolf Steiner, each of whom posit that evolution is a process moving us toward greater levels of complexity, integration, and ultimately wholeness, are cited throughout the book. So where does Pinchbeck ultimately stand on this question? Is the next stage of human development going to move us forward or backward? With Pinchbeck, it’s when you start trying to define what “backward” and “forward” would look like that things begin to get reallyconvoluted.

Indeed, the closest he comes to offering a vision for the future is describing the drug-induced, neoshamanic bacchanalia, or festival, called Burning Man, held in the desert of Nevada every year. Pinchbeck describes it as the “occult nexus of avant-garde chaos” and in one peculiar passage writes how a couple of years in a row he carried on a “telepathic chat with an alien intelligence—introducing itself as a representative of the enlightened hive-mind of the praying mantis.” In 2003, Pinchbeck gave a talk at the festival in which he told the audience that come 2012, “we will be able to consciously transform the planet in whatever way we like. . . . The planet will become Burning Man . . . with running water!”

Claims such as these will strike any thinking person as bizarre. Indeed, despite Pinchbeck’s noteworthy brilliance in being able to synthesize the ideas of an incredibly diverse group of philosophers and theories, 2012 only gets stranger the more you read. Sometimes, it calls to mind the spiritually eclectic literature and far-out explorations into consciousness published during the sixties and seventies: think of Carlos Castaneda’s psychedelic mysticism mixed in with Aldous Huxley’s perennial philosophy and visions of a sexually liberated utopia presented in his 1962 novel Island. But the underlying quality of 2012 is dark, expressing an emblematic sense of Gen-X nihilism, moral confusion, and profound impotence and fatalism in response to today’s global crises. One could say that under the surface, 2012 evokes more of the mood of Apocalypse Now than Be Here Now. As if to confirm this, the last fifty pages of 2012—in which Pinchbeck travels deep into the Amazon rainforest on a boat surrounded by Wiccan priestesses drinking copious amounts of the hallucinogen ayahuasca—appear to be a parody of Captain Benjamin Willard’s journey up the Mekong River and his descent into insanity.

The book’s finale is even more bizarre and includes the author’s confession that he is in fact the vehicle for the ancient Mayan god Quetzalcoatl’s return to earth, in part because he was born in June of 1966 (666). Pinchbeck seems vaguely aware that after many years of exploring the occult, the paranormal, and his own subconscious through psychedelics such as iboga, ayahuasca, LSD, and DMT, he’s landed himself directly in what the writer Robert Anton Wilson dubbed, “Chapel Perilous, that vortex where cosmological speculations, coincidences, and paranoia seem to multiply and then collapse, compelling belief or lunacy, wisdom or agnosticism.” Though he cites this quote three times in the book, Pinchbeck remains ambiguous to the end, leaving it up to the reader to decide which category he is in.

According to its author, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is “a gift handed backward through space-time, from beyond the barrier of a new realm.” But by the end of the book, this claim feels utterly unconvincing. Rather than being on the leading edge of a shift in consciousness that we will all experience on December 21, 2012, it seems more likely that Pinchbeck is entrapped in the same generational dilemma so many of us find ourselves struggling with—craving a higher spiritual context with which to face the future but as of yet unwilling to transcend our narcissism and emotional immaturity in order to truly forge one. More so than Mayan prophecy or the gods of old, it’s this issue that seems most worthy of our attention.

Maura R. O’Connor

[ September 15, 2006, 11:37 AM: Message edited by: K.J ]

[Caprinardo Delirio]

i thought that was a good review. i haven't read it, (the book) but it more or less reflects how i imagine i'd feel and think about it.

i thought though that she didn't really understand mckenna's position on the whole 'forward'/'backward' notion, since he stated over and over that we shouldn't reverse and "go back", that it can't be done, and that it's fatalistic to think in such a way. unlike someone like john zerzan who DOES believe we should go back, destroy all machines, and so forth to be where we desire, mckenna said "it is here, it is now." meaning never really lost, but forgotten. he does say, like zerzan, that for a time being it was pretty perfect, but that is merely to introduce a vision of where he'd like us to go. i don't particually find the whole group orgiastic gang-bang scenario all that appealling, but i like his thoughts about injecting feminine values back into society, reclaiming experience, and in a sense dropping out of the vast amount of bullcrap that capitalism generated, from stupid consumer culture and self ego-incapsulation into fear and death-angst, to stupifying rhetoric and discources that speak to everyone and no-one. in that respect i think he's as sane as they come.

mckenna never really stated that he believed that 2012 would be any kind of eden to hope for. in fact the opposite and, he thoroughly re-repeated how cokoo it surely would sound to anyone that dosen't space-out frequently.

i think both mckenna and pinchbeck overlook how opposite these claims sound to people not constantly thinking about the sum total of things, and in that way appear to defeat their own good intentions and optimisms by these theories.

what does everybody else think about the review?

[ September 17, 2006, 07:33 AM: Message edited by: Caprinardo Delirio ]

[sidecross]

I thought it was fair review; she pointed out some things that I had agreement.

I think it is interesting to note that both daniel and McKenna’s relationships with their partners ended; one in divorce, McKenna’s.

The biggest difference between McKenna and daniel is daniel’s seemingly lack of humor in dealing with those who disagree with his conclusions.

Life is an ongoing learning process; it is immature to think at age 40 daniel has learned enough to make conclusions that are complete and not worth reappraisal.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

mckenna also returned to monogamy as his preferred personal lifestyle and, it sounded, belief in it's "rational superiority".

[ September 17, 2006, 08:23 AM: Message edited by: Caprinardo Delirio ]

[Caprinardo Delirio]

i think it's intersting how 'alienated' (bored/unsatisfied/disengaged) people really vibe with 2012 and conspiracies in general.

[willoweyes]

If it was my work, and I was Daniel, I would feel honored by such a review. Maura bestowed close attention on 2012--what more could an artist require? Lockstep? I think not.

[willoweyes]

Capo, we all need something bigger than ourselves

(I hope my nickname "Capo" does not mean Condom, but my husband just said it does in French. I thought it meant "Leader; head--as in the cosa nostril movies i saw in my youth.)

[Agent Smith]

artists don't require lockstep?

willoweyes, the sort of unreasoning hatered reflected in your above post is what's killing the planet.

get in line or the universe will spank you.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

capo sounds pretty good to me, whatever it really "means"..

i don't know about the whole: "need.. bigger.. stuff!" in a certain sense, fersjerr, but we certainly don't need fatalism and lockstep futurism.

i can only begin to imagine the freakshow that will take place in 2012... like those people on the top of the buildings in independence day, yeah.. "the first ones to be spritually 'transformed'"

anyway

[ September 18, 2006, 01:18 AM: Message edited by: Caprinardo Delirio ]

[nyk]

SideCross wrote:

I think it is interesting to note that both daniel and McKenna’s relationships with their partners ended; one in divorce, McKenna’s.
I do not believe any relationship can survive
the crossing of this sort of threshold unless
the two cross together. Daniel wants to and will
find someone who is headed the same 'direction'
he is. In the meantime, he is fortifying his
sense of direction and clearing away the detritus;
both of which will make such a relationship
possible. That relationship will be monogomous
because it will resonate at such a frequency -
a fullness - that it will effectually if not
literally be multiplicit...the many resolved
into two. Like the 'other world', one cannot
imagine what such a thing would be like - beyond
anemic abstractions - until one is in it.

[sidecross]

“I do not believe any relationship can survive
the crossing of this sort of threshold unless
the two cross together. Daniel wants to and will
find someone who is headed the same 'direction'
he is. In the meantime, he is fortifying his
sense of direction and clearing away the detritus;
both of which will make such a relationship
possible. That relationship will be monogomous
because it will resonate at such a frequency -
a fullness - that it will effectually if not
literally be multiplicit...the many resolved
into two. Like the 'other world', one cannot
imagine what such a thing would be like - beyond
anemic abstractions - until one is in it.”

Just so we can begin on common ground, my name is sidecross, not SideCross.

I know nothing of daniel’s relationship with the mother of his daughter, but to describe his relationship with her as ‘detritus’ is certainly not complementary to either daniel or her.

The description of your ‘other world’ sounds so exclusive that no one can appreciate it ‘until one is part of it’; that argument might be used by someone such as Hitler in describing why his worldview can not be understood unless you were part of a ‘Super Race’.

[nyk]

Just so we can begin on common ground, my name is sidecross, not SideCross.
Then 'sidecross' it is, if that is important to
you. You can however call me anything you like.

I know nothing of daniel’s relationship with the mother of his daughter, but to describe his relationship with her as ‘detritus’ is certainly not complementary to either daniel or her.
The 'detritus' expressed here is in general terms,
not explicitly directed towards his former
partner. It is whatever encumberances he has
which prevent such an alignment. That is his
business.

The description of your ‘other world’ sounds so exclusive that no one can appreciate it ‘until one is part of it’; that argument might be used by someone such as Hitler in describing why his worldview can not be understood unless you were part of a ‘Super Race’. I hope you are kidding with that flaccid remark.

Anyone of any race or persuasion can step thru
that crack. No one or thing is stopping them,
but themselves.

[sidecross]

Yes, my name is important; as far as making a ‘flaccid remark’ that is a peculiar way to express it. Do you happen to be in the business of selling Viagra? ;)

[nyk]

Why...were you talking thru your penis before?

:D

I am so sorry. I couldn't help that. Yes, I am
peculiar. I sometimes wish I was more flaccid.

[sidecross]

As long as a sense of humor is paramount, nyk, we will definitely enjoy and learn from one another. :cool:

[nyk]

I'm going to have to agree with that, one
thousand percent. Without humor - a sort of
deep and warm one - then this entire enterprise -
our lives - amounts to little more than a squirrely reflex...or perhaps I should say;
a reptilian one.

So, how does one tickle a feathered serpent?

[willoweyes]

I just checked back on this thread after a time away--I'm dismayed by Agent Smith's comment "that such unreasoning hatred is what is killing the planet." when referring to my mark about "capo" meaning "condom."

What I was trying to say was this: As I was posting, my husband looked over my shoulder and said, "dear, did you know "Capo" means condom in French slang?"

I didn't realize this, and was horrified. I admire Mr. C's posts tremendously--I'll click on his latest, first thing, every time. So my remark was in the way of a query, ie was my husband who has been known to kid, pulling my leg re "CAPO"--and also I wanted Mr. C to know I considered him a head man (and someone COULD take that wrong if they worked at it, but what I mean is a leader).

Maybe I shouldn't have said we need something bigger than ourselves--maybe we crave something bigger than ourselves.

Love to all, I'm sorry I offended--

_________________________________
"So What?" (Andy Warhol)

[willoweyes]

Or maybe Agent Smith is Italian, and felt "Capo Nostril" is an ethnic slur?

[willoweyes]

Or perhaps (oh happy thought) my friend Agent Smith was trying to test MY sense of humor?

It is when I am misunderstood that my sense of humor deserts me, I'm afraid. Or when I don't understand.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

well, willow.. don't know what to say, thanks! :o

that's very kind.. or maybe you've build some engine of humoristic reflection testing, and i'm the only one not getting it:confused: ?

i was afraid that me coming on here and starting raving, might have been what drove them all away...

either way, i'm glad to feel that speding late nights alone isn't really what i'm doing here..

[willoweyes]

Actually, I have been working on exercising my humor muscles, but my remark about respecting you Mr. C is straightforward.

And I do wonder about internet engines to test various stimuli! What a tool for the social engineer.

[daniel]

Newsweek has a piece on the concept of 2012 in this week's issue (originally an article on beliefnet). I am quoted at the end. Here it is:

MSNBC.com
Beliefwatch: 12/21/12
Newsweek

Sept. 25, 2006 issue - Followers of New Age spirituality have long turned to indigenous religions for wisdom and inspiration, so it has not escaped their notice that something big happens in 2012: the ancient and complex Mayan calendar—studied by astrology, spirituality and history buffs alike—has chugged along for 1,872,000 days, and its cycle stops (and restarts) on Dec. 21, 2012.

Speculation over the 2012 cycle change has spurred a growing cottage industry. Amazon.com shows more than 100 books on the subject, with titles like "Doomsday 2012" and "2012: You Have a Choice!" A number of spirituality conferences are already convening. This month in New Mexico, spiritual seekers will gather for a "2012 Ascension Symposium," which promises to "offer humanity global reassurance and change the Consciousness of the world"; metaphysics author Geoff Stray is giving a series of lectures on 2012 throughout 2006 and 2007, including at the UFO Conference in Nevada in February and a "Healing Conference" in Jericho, Israel, in May.

To add to the frenzy, it just so happens that the years building up to 2012 mark an unusual astronomical alignment, one so rare it occurs only in 30 out of every 26,000 years. During this period, the Sun will make its annual crossing of the galactic equator—the plane that bisects the Milky Way as it appears in the sky—on the same day as the winter solstice. So what does all this mean? A small group of doomsayers believe a life-ending cataclysm is on the horizon. Patrick Geryl, a Belgian researcher, says he believes the alignment will trigger a reversal in the magnetic fields of the Sun, causing it to get 10 or 20 times hotter, which will reverse the Earth's rotation on its axis and flood its inhabitants (mainstream astronomers don't agree).

Meso-American scholars are far less concerned. In Mayan cosmology, time proceeds in cycles—not in a straight line. "The world collapses, but then it gets reborn," says Davíd Carrasco, professor of Latin American religions at Harvard University. (The Maya believe the same thing happens when the Sun rises and sets each day.) Literary-magazine editor Daniel Pinchbeck, author of "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl," sees the new cycle as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth. Instead of looking at the completion of the 5,125-year cycle as "the end," Pinchbeck suggests that 2012 "could be more like the birth of the world."

—Holly Lebowitz Rossi

URL: http://www.newsweek.co.uk/id/14868185/site/newsweek/
© 2006 MSNBC.com

[sidecross]

“…Literary-magazine editor Daniel Pinchbeck, author of "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl," sees the new cycle as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth. Instead of looking at the completion of the 5,125-year cycle as "the end," Pinchbeck suggests that 2012 "could be more like the birth of the world."

Someone seemed to get it right daniel!

You are fortunate that it did not take a critic as long to understand as it did for authors like James Joyce and Herman Melville.
:)

[nyk]

Death is easy; Birth is hard.

[Seth]



Never-the-less, I also choose birth.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

I CHOOSE DEATH!!

actually, since i concider myself perhaps slightly more alive than dead, what else is there to choose? really?!

but hey: TODAY I FINALLY ORDERED MY COPY OF 2012!! yaaaaay!! :D

and all along a load of other long wanted books by mckenna, watts, grof, campbell, 'the yage letters' by burroughs & ginsberg, a chomsky/foucault thingy.. plus a heap of great fiction by céline, vian, gombrowicz and other wonderful writers.... i'm happier than a sufi that got served by a shaman but won the dance-off!:cool:

also just got an awesome new drum-kit, so i'm gonna spend this whole winter just reading and shredding..

oh, the joys of consumer culture.......

[paul]

is this the same issue of newsweek:http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/25/newsweeks-latest-cover-by-geographical-region/
?:)
-------------------------------------------------------------
such is.

[graffitirun]

perhaps the first line in the review is actually a great compliment-

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl may be one of the most outrageous, troubling, and thoroughly disorienting books..

[Dna]

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/newsweekcovers.jpg

That's nuts! :p

You guys really do live in a police state!

Thanks for that Paul.

[Dna]

To be fair, you can probably still get the same articles inside. Still...

[the music]

Apocalypse's Eternal Return
Hipster guru predicts: Capitalism will destroy the world!

Brian Doherty | December 2006 Print Edition

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck, New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, 416 pages, $26.95


Did you know that the ancient Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl—the all-encompassing plumed serpent whose return has been prophesied for centuries—has decided to weigh in on politics? Here’s an excerpt from his message for the world of mortal men: “The global capitalist system that is currently devouring your planetary resources will soon self-destruct, leaving many of you bereft.”

Quetzalcoatl has chosen to speak through the curious medium of Daniel Pinchbeck, 40, a former editor of the Manhattan lit-journal Open City. Pinchbeck has had a glowing reputation in hipster circles since his 2002 book Breaking Open the Head, a travelogue and treatise on exotic psychedelics, which transformed him into the 21st century’s chief pop guru on the meaning and significance of altered states—a thought leader whose musings, no matter how offbeat, are considered worthy of review in publications as mainstream as The New York Times.

Pinchbeck’s latest intellectual-spiritual journey, recounted in his new book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, has taken him on a globe-girdling tour of New Age fantasies, from crop circles to alien abductions to Mayan communication with ancient space brothers. It ends with him serving, he insists, as a medium for Quetzalcoatl, who dictates a message that sounds more like a zonked-out Inconvenient Truth than a traditional religious revelation.

Quetzalcoatl apparently has no idea or knowledge that was not already present in Pinchbeck, whose general sense of dread and dissatisfaction regarding capitalist modernity existed before his spiritual journey. Those sentiments are in fact nearly universal in the post-’60s counterculture for which he is a spokesman. Indeed, they’re pretty common in mainstream intellectual culture as well; few literary intellectuals under 40 do not share them to some degree, though most refrain from claiming they learned them from a supernatural serpent with feathers.

Pinchbeck knows you’ll think he’s a bit of a freak for saying that he did just that. He openly acknowledges that seeing oneself at the center of a great cosmic drama is normally written off as a sign of mental illness. With that on the table, the reader can either give up or go along for the ride. Despite the zaniness, it’s a ride worth taking, partly for the wild entertainment value but also because the book is a document with genuine sociopolitical relevance. Beneath the nutty metaphysical musings, 2012 is an engaging take on contemporary eco-politics, pretty much the hottest topic around in this year of awful summer heat and the Second Coming of Al Gore.

Pinchbeck’s title refers to the idea that 2012, the final year of the Mayan calendar, will be, as New Age cranks have argued for years, the end of the world, or at least the world as we have known it. In Pinchbeck’s reading, that end is approaching via planetary death caused by capitalist excess. Modernity, Pinchbeck argues, is inherently doomed and deserves to be doomed for playing into the detestable human urges of atomistic individualism and ugly greed; it has led to global warming, irreversible and tragic forest depletion, and a rapidly hastening loss of all the resources on which life depends.

2012 is more interesting than the typical doom-laden environmental policy document because Pinchbeck delivers his eco-political message in the form of a syncretic mad masterpiece, a colorful mash-up of the alien-archaeology fabulist Erich Von Däniken, the purveyor of fabricated Amerindian wisdom Carlos Castaneda, the psychedelic theorist Terrence McKenna, and the robed mystics behind the 1987 “Harmonic Convergence,” who prophesied a shift in planetary consciousness to a higher level. Pinchbeck thinks almost all the phenomena he discusses—including the calendar (our Gregorian one, for reasons this reader found very hard to understand, is held responsible for a lot of our spiritual/cultural crises), his trips on the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, and various ancient cultures’ prophecies— suggest a rapidly approaching apocalypse.

But he holds out hope that this end of times might just be the beginning of even better times if we can all somehow shift our consciousness on a planetary scale. “As much as everything seemed to be collapsing,” he writes, “everything was also going seamlessly according to plan…the Plumed Serpent was meant to slither-flutter his way back to Earth, reestablishing ‘Sacred Order,’ reasserting harmonic concord amidst rampant discord, before the Great Cycle reached its end.”

Or not. Pinchbeck has no trouble embracing paradox and ambiguity, because his evidence is always equivocal. You try to get precise, unarguable conclusions from crop circles or reports of close encounters with extraterrestrials. But such phenomena sure can suggest a lot, to the suggestible. About crop circles, for example—one of his biggest fascinations—he notes that “For every article or book I read that supported their validity, I found an equally convincing text or hoaxer’s Web site that undermined such a perspective” and ultimately decided, hey, that’s just the nature of the beast: “the [crop circles] offered instruction in how to work with paradox…you advance your understanding when you can hold both sides of a dichotomy in your mind at the same time.”

Pinchbeck may equivocate about his more mystical excursions, but he’s sure he’s on solid ground when he sees evidence of our spiritual malaise in the damage caused by our abuse of natural resources, particularly burning petroleum. Neither species depletion nor forest depletion are moving along quite as quickly as Pinchbeck fears. If virtually everyone nowadays seems to agree that anthropogenic global warming is a cold hard fact, it remains unclear precisely what such warming will mean to human beings—and the “planet” per se shouldn’t be concerned with how much usable coastline we have. And as for exceeding Earth’s capacity to sustain us, food continues to get cheaper and more abundant as centuries of Malthusian fears continue to fall flat and population growth slows to well within our food-producing means.

Man unquestionably has an enormous impact on the world. If unaltered nature is your value, that impact is no doubt destructive. And if you think man’s impact has been intolerably destructive, you are bound to recoil from markets and property—institutions that treat the natural world as something we can own, use, buy, and sell. Pinchbeck seems conflicted here. While he hates capitalism for its endlessly innovative “exploitation of resources” (put differently: he hates people for using the materials of the earth), he also hates “our patriarchal religions” for their “lockdown of possibility.” In one sentence, he (well, Quetzalcoatl) insists we must fight for both “human freedom” and “preservation of the planetary environment.” Neither he nor the Aztec deity grapples with the ways those impulses can both mesh and conflict.

Human beings have and will continue to cut down forests and burn oil to make room for themselves and to improve their lives (although the planet’s overall forest land area has hardly changed in the last 60 years). Human freedom inevitably means using, even at times using up, parts of the world. But the key to taking environmental concerns seriously—to doing more with less—has been market institutions.

A planetary commons, like a dorm refrigerator commons, will quickly be depleted. Crises such as overfishing the oceans, which Pinchbeck laments, are a direct result of lack of property rights. Intelligent awareness of long-term values, and the incentive to preserve them rather than just slash and burn to get whatever you can today (because if you don’t someone else will), is best actuated through private property. Such awareness and incentives ultimately can make the world greener as well as richer. The wealthy are best equipped to see forests as valuable for long-term, intelligent use, rather than something to be chopped and sold for today’s immediate survival needs. Pinchbeck sees none of this promise.

The emotions behind apocalyptic thinking recur as eternally as doomsday is postponed. These days the most prominent doomsday theory sees the fruits of markets and liberty as harbingers of the angel of death. But anyone reading 2012 should also contemplate the computer-world guru Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the “singularity,” an idea moving along in a countercultural universe parallel and very close to Pinchbeck’s. It’s a vision that, while not designed as such, is in direct competition with Pinchbeck’s. Kurzweil believes our increasing control of machinery, computer intelligence, biology, and the material world at the smallest levels puts us on the cusp of an earthly near-paradise in which we will have highly advanced control over both matter and mind without destroying the earth or even using very much of it.

Human beings have a fairly decent history of meeting the needs of a growing population while using less (per capita, at least) of the earth’s resources. The technologies of the 20th century’s “green revolution” have allowed us to grow more food on less land. Burning coal—not to mention splitting the atom—puts more energy at our disposal than burning wood, and with less impact on the earth. So whether or not its wildest extrapolations come true, Kurzweil’s vision of a technological rescue from environmental and human limits seems more plausible than either Pinchbeck’s apocalypse or his alternative Quetzalcoatl ex machina of a sudden shift in planetary consciousness.

What is more likely than either the Pinchbeck or Kurzweil visions of a planet utterly changed is that 2012 will pass into 2013 with the world a little bit different and a lot the same. But the kind of slow, gradual betterment in overall human well-being—the sort that has swept the Western world in the last century—lacks that shot of emotional drama that human beings crave. Some of us don’t fear a vivid, certain end to the world we know; for various psychological reasons, some of them quite creepy, we want it. In an essay written after 2012 came out in June, Pinchbeck acknowledged this about a certain element in his own fan base: “A lot of people in the radical and progressive cultural realm, on some level, are actively looking forward to the destruction of the present system and then a truly horrendous and volatile passage before we potentially come out the other side.” Pinchbeck means that as a criticism, but it’s no surprise that such people would find his book attractive: He frequently sounds just like them.

Put another way, he frequently sounds like that other apocalyptic tribe, the Christian fundamentalists. His book lays into fundamentalism early on, but both he and the religious right are offering variations on the same ancient mentality—the one that’s always finding new reasons everyone else deserves to get it good and hard.

Such people see our Western world of unprecedented wealth and opportunity as based on something akin to sin and thus deserving punishment. The richest culture on Earth includes a substantial minority who despise its economic basis even as they benefit from it. That is a dark emotional truth worth understanding.

[sidecross]

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/newsweekcovers.jpg

That's nuts! :p

You guys really do live in a police state!

Thanks for that Paul.


A better picture of the U.S. would have been the mob of shoppers that Bob Herbert wrote about today that was posted today under 'The Ugly American'.

[nyk]

http://www.roadkillbill.com/!Walmart(Always).jpg