William Irwin Thompson - The Shift from Capitalism to the Global Noetic Economy

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Another highly entertaining and thought-provoking article from William Irwin Thompson at Wild River Review. He gives a brief overview of the evolution of Western Civilization, then offers the next stage, the Noetic Economy.

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

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