Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era

Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era by Sean M. Kelly Lindisfarne Books, 2010. 199 pages

Review by Frederick J. Dennehy

Sean Kelly, in 'Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era', approaches the evolution of consciousness schematically, as an arc of time that includes a series of “fractal” arcs recurring in everdiminishing cycles. Kelly, a member of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), is a Hegel scholar intimately familiar with the triadic system of thought best known to readers in the dialectical movement of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. In Kelly’s view, the Hegelian dialectic is more helpfully expressed as identity—difference—new identity.

Kelly swims against the academic tide by seeing history as unfolding in a metanarrative. William Blake once referred to this as the Great Code of the Bible, moving from the Creation to the Fall to the Redemption, or from Innocence to Experience to Higher Innocence. Kelly, of course, is only one of many to view the history of ideas or the evolution of consciousness as triphasic. In addition to Hegel, Kelly cites Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson, and Richard Tarnas, among others, as perceiving the unfolding of history in a largely similar pattern. This history has more idea-orientation than Barfield’s consciousness-orientation, but the themes sharply intersect.

While Kelly’s perspective includes all of history, the focus of 'Coming Home' is the evolution of consciousness from the first axial age (c.550 B.C.E.) to what Kelly envisions as the imminent second axial age. The first of these fractal triads begins with the early Christian community, guided by the spirit of the risen Christ and possessed with the ideal of unconditional love and a power to heal. From this state of original unity Kelly traces a “differentiation” into the secular power of medieval Christendom and the “vaticanization” of the community. This is represented philosophically by scholasticism, and scientifically by Roger Bacon and William of Occam, both standing in “counterpoise” to the otherworldly orientation of the original view. The Renaissance is the synthesis or “new identity,” with its esoteric and organic inflections represented by Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Jacob Boehme, Robert Fludd, and others, and its enthusiastic embrace both of an expanded cosmos and a new view of human potential, including a variety of utopian visions. Aligned with the Renaissance stands the radical will of the Reformation, sparked by Luther and marked by the emergence of a new subjectivity and a yearning for freedom.

Kelly’s second cycle begins with the Renaissance/Reformation and “differentiates” into the “mechanistic paradigm,” represented principally by Newton and the Enlightenment. The third “moment” of the pattern is realized in Romanticism, particularly in Germany and in England, and in the Transcendentalist movement in America.

The third cycle begins with Romanticism, and gives way around the mid-19th century to what Kelly terms the “New Enlightenment,” represented by John Stewart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte, the father of positivism. This trend is carried forward by Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. The counter-cultural reaction, the third of the “triphasic moments” of this cycle, is termed the Twentieth Century Threshold, which includes the new breakthroughs in the first decades of the century in physics, psychology, and spirituality (including the spread of Hinduism to the West, theosophy, and anthroposophy), and “modernism” in the arts, represented by Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism in the pictorial arts; in classical music by both Late Romanticism and the mutation of the Western sense of rhythm and tonality by Scriabin, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg; and in literature by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, among others.

The fourth cycle begins with the Twentieth Century Threshold and differentiates into what has been termed the “age of anxiety,” a resurgence of “technocracy,” defined as “that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technological experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge” and to the societal dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity. The “age of anxiety” gives way to the third “moment” of the cycle, represented particularly by the countercultural movements of the 1960s as they manifested in French and American universities, and characterized by both inner and outer exuberance and daring.

The fifth fractal cycle begins with the 1960s counterculture and metamorphoses into a smorgasbord of conservative political and fundamentalist religious agendas. It then realizes its third “moment” in what Kelly, perhaps idiosyncratically, sees as the “countercultural resurgence” of the 90s, exemplified variously by the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall shortly thereafter, and various breakthroughs in science, including the revelations of the deep cosmos by the Hubbell telescope, and the beginning of the Human Genome Project. This is a resurgence of the spiritual values and themes that were prominent in the 60s, as many of those who were on the cusp of maturity at that time had now “come into their own.”

Most important in this synthesis of the fifth cycle is what Kelly terms the “New Paradigm,” comprising a number of views including the “holographic paradigm” associated with David Bohm and Karl Pribram; the paradigm of self-organization associated with the school of Ilya Prigogine; Rupert Sheldrake’s “formative causation” hypothesis; and James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis.” Prominent among the thinkers in the New Paradigm are William Irwin Thompson, Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, and Richard Tarnas.

Kelly sees a sixth cycle that begins with the resurgence of the counterculture and the New Paradigm, turns in its “second moment” to the flourishing of neoconservatism, and now shows signs, Kelly believes, of a coming “third moment”: the beginnings of a seventh turning of the spiral. Kelly envisions this still-gathering “moment” as finding expression in four “planetary” ideals: cosmic solidarity, human unity, radical interdependence, and spiritual liberation.

The latest turning of the gyre, the beginning of what Ewart Cousins has termed the second axial period, Kelly calls “coming home.” Now, with the increasing threats to the biosphere, the continuing danger of nuclear war, and the intensification of ideological and socioeconomic divisions, there is a movement toward international cooperation in a genuinely planetary Earth community, accompanied by a growing populist influence of Internet-facilitated democracy. Paul Hawken has identified this newly born movement as the “largest social movement in history.” Kelly adds to it the New Paradigm and New Age (broadly defined) groups now active, and finds the movement has doubled in comparison with the size stated by Hawken.

If a genuine planetary wisdom-culture fully emerges and becomes stable, then “business as usual, industrial growth society, unchecked corporate rule, unsustainable modes of production and consumption”—everything David Korten defines as “empire” in his book, The Great Turning—must fall. If all this occurs, what is now countercultural will become mainstream, and this turn of the spiral will be a final turn—a singularity. Whether this “subterranean and occult reality” in the words of the influential Edgar Morin, will actually come to pass is uncertain, but whether it leads to a long menu of disasters and apocalyptic grief or to a genuine new planetary wisdom-culture, there is “neither stopping nor turning back.”

There are those who may find Kelly’s account to be an exercise in ultra-determinism or reductionism by way of metapatterns. Big pictures are not fashionable. Many people are more comfortable with a history that is “one damn thing after another,” or tend to align themselves with Henry Ford: “History is more or less bunk.” A similar skepticism has sometimes greeted the work of Kelly’s colleague, Richard Tarnas, in response to his 'Cosmos and Psyche'. Isn’t it tempting for Kelly and Tarnas to find within the vast wealth of cultural and historical events sufficient examples to conform to their patterns of choice? Are Kelly’s fractal arcs influenced, at least in part, by his own political leanings? Does he accord sufficient recognition to the second phase of the triphasic pattern, the differential moment that always seems to constrict human energy?

Works of this scope and daring invite such questions. Kelly’s thesis will not be found provable by the exacting standards of a Karl Popper, to be sure, but how could they be? The value in what Sean Kelly presents in 'Coming Home' is his faith in an organizing idea, in the reality of meaning and purpose rather than an easy capitulation to the flavor of the times—contingency, and it is in the imaginative insight of his vision, the passion that flames in its pages. The sense of “evidence,” as Georg Kühlewind has pointed out, cannot be demonstrated by pointing to yet another thought, but is rather to be grasped as a cognitive feeling of wholeness and completion.