William Irwin Thompson was an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He was professor of humanities at MIT and later at York University. He was the author of books including At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971), The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture (1981) and Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness (2004), which was a collaboration with mathematician Ralph Abraham. Thompson was also the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture. He began Lindisfarne after leaving academia, believing that the world was undergoing profound changes that needed non-academic viewpoints. His work highlighted the integrity of the individual and the individual as an institution. He retired from academia in 1973 to pursue he work with the association, which he led until 2012.
In his lecture, Thompson outlined a new vision of the future based on the shift towards a meta-industrial village for the post-post-industrial age. In the face of the economic, social, and cultural challenges of the 1970s, Thompson argued, human ways of thinking needed to change, replacing the mythology of the machine and consumerism with a new mythology. Thompson believed that historical thinking showed that the energy crises of the 1970s and the real reckoning with the effects of industrialization were inaugurating a period not of destruction but destructuring. He found it analogous to the changes in society after the Renaissance and Copernican revolution. In 2000, he believed that the human identity would be based on an individual’s being rather than consumption, and culture would become planetarized. In the meta-industrial village, humanity would retain modern technologies but reorient its value systems, looking for the source of the good life within individuals rather than without and understanding the entire planet as a single organism.
Listen to his lecture below.