E-mail: wer@well.sf.ca.us for info about this document ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From the WELL's gopher server - for info e-mail gopher@well.sf.ca.us ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Book review from the Whole Earth Review magazine. E-mail to (wer@well.sf.ca.us) 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: ---- 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. ---- ---- 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. ---- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ E-mail wer@well.sf.ca.us for more info about this document. This document was provided by the Whole Earth Review magazine. Whole Earth Review (WER) is published 4 times each year by the Point Foundation, a non-profit US corporation. Trial subscriptions to WER are available for US $20 per year for individuals. $35 per year for institutions; single copies $7. Add $8 per year for Canadian and $6 for foreign surface mail; add $12 per year for airmail anywhere. Most articles in Whole Earth Review are available on-line via Dialog, Mead & BRS. Whole Earth Review is indexed by "Access: The supplementary Index to Periodicals", Alternative Press Index, Magazine Index, Consumers Index, HumantitiesIndex, Book Review Index, Academic Index, and General Periodical Index. For copyright or other information please contact: Whole Earth Review 27 Gate Five Road Sausalito, CA,94965 USA Voice Phone: (415) 332-1716 Fax: (415) 332-3110 -------------------------------------------------------------------------