andrew.pilsch.com

Robert Anton Wilson begins his Cosmic Trigger, vol. 1: The Final Secrets of the Illuminati by expressing to his readers his own deep-seated aversion to belief as a cognitive mode of engaging with reality. As he is right to point out, belief closes off possible avenues of investigation by pre-packaging a model of reality that explains reality. A number of postmodern thinkers have correctly suggested that Western scientific rationalism is one of these pre-packaged lifestyle systems just as much as Christianity or Islam. For Wilson, the key is to approach the world from a position of no belief, in which no round observation is leveraged into the square holes of belief.

As evidenced by Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: the Return of Quetzalcoatl, this subject position is much easier said than actually done.

Opening the book by articulating a thesis that the world is on the cusp of a spiritual/psychic/cognitive reconfiguration, Pinchbeck suggests that the framework of Western rational thought has closed off much of the spiritual and psychic knowledge gained by the societies it labels primitive (especially, for Pinchbeck, the Maya). In giving reading instructions, Pinchbeck suggests that a suspension of the ingrained model of Western rational thought will produce a deeper and more satisfying reading of the book.

For what it’s worth, I did my best to approach the book on Pinchbeck’s terms.

The problem that this book has with belief, though, lies more with the author than the reader. While it proposes to be an account of non-Western knowledge systems and what they can teach us about a possible coming change in human life on Earth, the book becomes increasingly unhinged from Wilson’s anti-belief position and falls into a new system of belief. Largely, the book is a personal narrative of moving from one belief system (Western rationalism) to another (New Age spiritualism). Consequently, I found the book increasingly hard to read, as I approached the ending.

While initially a survey of some of the bizarre and unexplained phenomenon that contribute the growing since, on the fringes of society both Left and Right, that the world is going to either change or end on December 21, 2012 (the Winter Solstice and, also, the moment at which our sun crosses the Galactic Equator), the book becomes an increasingly difficult to swallow account of dreams, visions, and numerology. While it may be my own Western, rationalist biases, I find numerology incredibly hard to believe. Basically, the idea behind much of what Pinchbeck talks about in the book’s latter (and lesser) half revolves around numerological coincidences (or synchronicities) resulting from the Mayan long-count calendar. This idea is very similar to some of that Bible code stuff (which is parodied quite well on The Simpsons) that could really prove anything. Anyway, my larger point is that Pinchbeck’s book ultimately reveals that he is believing in the sort of New Age spirtualist framework of reality at the expense of other frameworks.

I find this problematic, as the rhetorical situation of the book demands that I change my perspective from a belief in science to a belief in spiritualism. That’s not something I feel prepared to do. Of course, the genius of the book is that Pinchbeck’s frequent articulation of the bad Nietzschean subject position (the kind of intellectual who feels that people don’t “get” him and, therefore, are like the sheep described in books like Beyond Good and Evil) and his equation of lacking of belief in the New Age with being locked into a capitalist, materialist, phallocentric (my word, not his) civilization allows him to dismiss any criticism like mine as resulting from my own lack of enlightenment.

This is what I love about this stuff, beyond my other interest in real, existing transhumanism: the way that New Age, conspiracy, or other outsider discourses turns the act of prolepsis from a moment of anticipation to a moment of direct attack (instead of merely anticipating your objections, it figures you as wrong because of your subject position). Hello, book #2.

Anyway, that said, I think 2012 is probably worth at least grazing. The first half is pretty solid, but once he gets into the stuff about changing the calendar and his trip to Hawai’i, it kind of loses steam. I’m treating the book, for my own work, like I treat Daniel Kevles book on eugenics: a work that traces out a lot of interesting territory but, as its own argument, makes a lot of unusual and suspect claims along the way. In other words, I’m going to be drawing heavily on Pinchbeck’s bibliography and not so much on his theories.

Image Credit: belief by phanphanphan