COMING HOME

Many readers will be familiar with the work of Richard Tarnas, who endorses this book by saying that it is necessary reading for our time, an assessment with which I wholeheartedly agree. The book is subtitled 'the birth and transformation of the planetary era' and builds on Hegel's dialectic of history to present a pattern that makes sense of periodic cycles of renewal and switches of emphasis between left and right hemisphere thinking, the former being associated with the masculine qualities of competitive striving, separativeness and domination. In the epilogue to The Passion of the Western Mind, Tarnas suggests that we are moving towards a participatory culture with a greater emphasis on holism, relatedness and cooperation - in other words a rise of the feminine. Kelly characterises this approach as countercultural, situating it within the broad sweep of Western history. Associated with this is the idea of the sacred marriage, and also the journey back home, which gives the book its title and which also draws on the work of Joseph Campbell with his three stages of the hero's journey: separation, initiation and return. Kelly translates this into his own tri-phasic system of identity, difference and new identity, which he sees as underlying developmental processes of all kinds. An important point of departure is the Christian idea of the Trinity, which Kelly sees as providing the Great Code and which is exemplified in the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The broadest version of his thesis begins with the identity of the Christian worldview, the difference of the modern secular view and the eventual new identity comprising a planetary worldview. However, Kelly traces many cycles of development both in the text and in diagrammatic form, explaining them as a fractal repetition of the same fundamental pattern. Incidentally, it is amusing to read Hegel's opinion that 'it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation.' Every era can now say this about itself. The first cycle from biblical to modern scientific passes through scholasticism to the esotericism of the Renaissance and the radicalism of the Reformation. In the process, the analogical and symbolic form of understanding gives way to the analytical, as pioneered not only by Aquinas but more specifically by Descartes. Schelling helps to revive the symbolic understanding and is part of a second cycle of via the mechanistic paradigm and the European Enlightenment to Romanticism, Idealism and Naturphilosophie, also exemplified by Goethe. Incidentally, there is no mention of the role of the Scottish Enlightenment in this phase. Comte is among the important figures to react against romanticism, along with Mill, Marx, Darwin, Freud and Skinner. Spirit, mind and life are banished from 'the discourse that defines the scientific worldview.' A third cycle moving from the modern to the planetary passes through these figures to people like Vivekananda and William James at the turn of the 20th century. A fourth cycle moves through technocracy to the 1960s counterculture, and a further two cycles reacting to this counterculture on the part of the new right and neoconservatism leads to a countercultural resurgence in the 90s, and what Kelly calls the Great Turning. Another dialectic is provided by the rise of religious fundamentalism and associated authoritarianism while the mechanistic paradigm pits the human against the natural world. Large numbers of people are now espousing a more holistic and interdependent view embodying a spiritual connection with nature with new formulations in science (e.g. holograms, self-organisation and Gaia theory) and transpersonal psychology. Our current destination is a planetary wisdom culture based on wholeness as a marriage of opposites and the four ideals of cosmic solidarity, human unity, radical interdependence and spiritual liberation. The first three might seem more immediately obvious, but it is the fourth one that makes a real difference and provides a means of going beyond fundamentalism. This leads Ewert Cousins to write about the possibility of a second axial period where consciousness is collective and cosmic, and is rooted in the life cycles that apply to the rhythm of passing generations. The most interesting question is whether this new culture, based as it is on many of the premises of the counterculture, will mean that these ideas cease to be countercultural. It is obvious to many people that the dominant worldview is unsustainable and that long-term stability implies a transformation so as to integrate the strengths of the current system with those of the counterculture. The book is extraordinarily erudite and wide ranging, but I did miss any reference to Arnold Toynbee, whose work would surely have been relevant to the analysis. He too wrote about cycles of renewal based on the countercultural creative minority, and was acutely aware of the importance of the spiritual revolution transforming the love of power into the power of love.