Photo by
Joy E. Stocke

Thinking Otherwise

By William Irwin Thompson

“We Irish think
otherwise.”Bishop Berkeley

The Shift from Capitalism to the Global Noetic
Economy

Let’s
review. The hunting and gathering economy was based upon following the
movements of animals and the flowering of plants according to the seasons. It
was a process and not a place, and no one had a fixed address. Gathering led to
spilled seeds and spontaneous gardens propping up near the temporary shelters,
and as animals hung around to live off the scraps of messy humans–as foxes and
bears are doing once again in our suburbs–they slowly became domesticated.
Humans found themselves living in fixed places even before irrigation
agriculture developed.

Agriculture
introduced us to living in place with fixed assets like heavy grinding stones
and huts for food storage. What the locals didn’t have in place they found they
could get through trade, so Chatalhoyuk‘s obsidian made its way down to Jericho, and Jericho’s cowrie shells showed up in Anatolia. Hunters, like all NRA
conservatives resistant to change, were fuming at the salads of settled life,
but soon found that their bows and arrows could be aimed at humans to take what
they had produced, so hunting grew into raids, and raids grew into warfare.
With medieval feudalism, this system of warfare and land tenure grew into its
ultimate expression.

But
trading had also grown with warfare, so with the Crusades introducing the
European savages to the advanced civilizations of the East, financial
instruments in bills of trade and double-entry book-keeping created a new
international merchant class. Even traditional military knights, like the Knights Templar, found themselves becoming international bankers,
and these new bankers began to introduce internationally accepted currencies to
support trade. And so the Crusades led to the Italian Renaissance and the Medici bankers.

But
with this change from feudalism to incipient capitalism came a shift in the
locus of identity. Knighthood and religion derived their source of identity
from a fixed place and a fixed place in time, the past. But capitalism derived
its identity from the future, on indebtedness.

But
now at the end of the era of modernism, our future is looking grim, as debt
clogs our arteries, and currencies are becoming too weak to transport value.
The old economy is dying, but lacking knowledge of any other way to go, we seek
to insert artificial life support into corporations like GM and put off the
inevitable death of industrial capitalism.

Let
us, merely for the sake of using our imaginations, accept the fact that the old
capitalist economy is dead, and that returning to older primitive economies in
barter or communism is clearly regressive. Living as we now are in an
electronic, technological, and scientifically generated economy, we need to
find the circulation systems that allow us to continue to grow, just as
irrigation systems allowed agriculture and city-states to grow in the fourth millennium
B.C.E.

Let
us call this new society a noetic economy, and say that Russia, China, and the
U.S.A. are all seeking to apply inadequate communist and capitalist
interpretative ideas to its governance. They all are doomed to failure, and,
indeed, are already failing.

Now
just as feudalism held knightly and monarchical estates as its assets, and
nation-states held companies and corporations as its assets, the global ecumene now holds universities as its assets. Harvard,
MIT, Cambridge, the Ecole
Polytechnique, ETH,
and the University of Tokyo are what U.S. Steel, Ford, BP, and Siemens were to
industrial times. Nation-states now are merely banks, and that is one reason
banks are melting down into the Fed and the U.S. Treasury. Yes, of course, if
the U.S. just keeps on printing money, the dollar will become worthless, and
that is why the nations cannot continue on their Breton-Woods policy of basing
world trade on one national currency.

The
Banks used to print their own money, and then the nation-state took that task
over. Now the nation-states need to stop printing their own money and create a
global currency to finance trade and credit, but a currency that is not based
upon a single national currency. The Euro was a first step, but now the Pound,
the Dollar, the Ruble, the Yen, and the Yuan need to become integrated–not
based on exchange rates–but on a mutual agreement to support world trade and
credit through the creation of a new instrument. Since the price of energy is
global, and resources as well as carbon footprints are global, it might just
work to the good, if products were priced according to their global value and
not artificially supported by national pollution and serf and child labor. To
issue this instrument from a single world capital would be a mistake, for
obvious reasons of national vanities and competition, so some off-shore central
spot, like Santa Claus’s North Pole would be best. Given global warming and the
opening of the Northwest Passage that might not be such a joke in the near
future. In the meantime, Basel and the Bank of
International Settlements
might be the place to take the first step.

Cultural Historian William Irwin
Thompson writes regularly for
Wild River Review

Photo by
Joy E. Stocke

Thinking Otherwise

By William Irwin Thompson

“We Irish think
otherwise.”Bishop Berkeley

The Shift from Capitalism to the Global Noetic
Economy

Let’s
review. The hunting and gathering economy was based upon following the
movements of animals and the flowering of plants according to the seasons. It
was a process and not a place, and no one had a fixed address. Gathering led to
spilled seeds and spontaneous gardens propping up near the temporary shelters,
and as animals hung around to live off the scraps of messy humans–as foxes and
bears are doing once again in our suburbs–they slowly became domesticated.
Humans found themselves living in fixed places even before irrigation
agriculture developed.

Agriculture
introduced us to living in place with fixed assets like heavy grinding stones
and huts for food storage. What the locals didn’t have in place they found they
could get through trade, so Chatalhoyuk‘s obsidian made its way down to Jericho, and Jericho’s cowrie shells showed up in Anatolia. Hunters, like all NRA
conservatives resistant to change, were fuming at the salads of settled life,
but soon found that their bows and arrows could be aimed at humans to take what
they had produced, so hunting grew into raids, and raids grew into warfare.
With medieval feudalism, this system of warfare and land tenure grew into its
ultimate expression.

But
trading had also grown with warfare, so with the Crusades introducing the
European savages to the advanced civilizations of the East, financial
instruments in bills of trade and double-entry book-keeping created a new
international merchant class. Even traditional military knights, like the Knights Templar, found themselves becoming international bankers,
and these new bankers began to introduce internationally accepted currencies to
support trade. And so the Crusades led to the Italian Renaissance and the Medici bankers.

But
with this change from feudalism to incipient capitalism came a shift in the
locus of identity. Knighthood and religion derived their source of identity
from a fixed place and a fixed place in time, the past. But capitalism derived
its identity from the future, on indebtedness.

But
now at the end of the era of modernism, our future is looking grim, as debt
clogs our arteries, and currencies are becoming too weak to transport value.
The old economy is dying, but lacking knowledge of any other way to go, we seek
to insert artificial life support into corporations like GM and put off the
inevitable death of industrial capitalism.

Let
us, merely for the sake of using our imaginations, accept the fact that the old
capitalist economy is dead, and that returning to older primitive economies in
barter or communism is clearly regressive. Living as we now are in an
electronic, technological, and scientifically generated economy, we need to
find the circulation systems that allow us to continue to grow, just as
irrigation systems allowed agriculture and city-states to grow in the fourth millennium
B.C.E.

Let
us call this new society a noetic economy, and say that Russia, China, and the
U.S.A. are all seeking to apply inadequate communist and capitalist
interpretative ideas to its governance. They all are doomed to failure, and,
indeed, are already failing.

Now
just as feudalism held knightly and monarchical estates as its assets, and
nation-states held companies and corporations as its assets, the global ecumene now holds universities as its assets. Harvard,
MIT, Cambridge, the Ecole
Polytechnique, ETH,
and the University of Tokyo are what U.S. Steel, Ford, BP, and Siemens were to
industrial times. Nation-states now are merely banks, and that is one reason
banks are melting down into the Fed and the U.S. Treasury. Yes, of course, if
the U.S. just keeps on printing money, the dollar will become worthless, and
that is why the nations cannot continue on their Breton-Woods policy of basing
world trade on one national currency.

The
Banks used to print their own money, and then the nation-state took that task
over. Now the nation-states need to stop printing their own money and create a
global currency to finance trade and credit, but a currency that is not based
upon a single national currency. The Euro was a first step, but now the Pound,
the Dollar, the Ruble, the Yen, and the Yuan need to become integrated–not
based on exchange rates–but on a mutual agreement to support world trade and
credit through the creation of a new instrument. Since the price of energy is
global, and resources as well as carbon footprints are global, it might just
work to the good, if products were priced according to their global value and
not artificially supported by national pollution and serf and child labor. To
issue this instrument from a single world capital would be a mistake, for
obvious reasons of national vanities and competition, so some off-shore central
spot, like Santa Claus’s North Pole would be best. Given global warming and the
opening of the Northwest Passage that might not be such a joke in the near
future. In the meantime, Basel and the Bank of
International Settlements
might be the place to take the first step.

Cultural Historian William Irwin
Thompson writes regularly for
Wild River Review