Daily Archives: July 13, 2024

Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (8) Terence McKenna – Food of the Gods

Posted on by

Instead of my usual feature image of the book’s cover, I couldn’t resist this clip from the opening sequence of the Inside Job animated TV series, which seems to me a nod to the Stoned Ape theory

 

 

(8) TERENCE MCKENNA –

FOOD OF THE GODS: THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINAL TREE OF KNOWLEDGE – A RADICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS, DRUGS & HUMAN EVOLUTION (1992)

 

“I think it’s time to discuss your, uh, philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour.” – William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch.

Stoned Ape theory, anyone?

Terence McKenna may be a trip and a hoot, perhaps the trippiest and, ah, hootiest, entry in this top ten, although there are a few rival claimants.

But seriously, my philosophical taste leans towards aphorism, the memorable or striking phrase (and idea) – quip and koan, each (and both) of which might be regarded as synonymous with trip and hoot. After, a good koan resembles both a hoot and a trip, the latter ideally the purpose of the koan leading to enlightenment.

Terence McKenna certainly had the gift for memorable or striking phrase and idea, lodging deep in your psyche even if you don’t accept or agree with them, but even more so was one of the leading ‘philosophers’ of the literal drug trip.

And perhaps never more so than in this book, arguably his magnum opus – nothing less than the radical history of humanity and drugs, and even more so the prehistory of humanity and drugs. Enter the Stoned Ape theory, which in a nutshell puts a spin on Genesis where God made man – but in which God was a mushroom.

No, seriously, McKenna proposed that the cognitive transformation from our hominid ancestors to our present human species mainly involved the addition of psychoactive mushrooms (growing in dung!) to our diet, based on the alleged effects of such mushrooms on cognitive capacity.

The intellectual or observational gems don’t stop there – one thing that has always stuck in my head ever since reading it in the book is how much the European empires originated as or were drug plantation empires, particularly if you count sugar as a drug – as McKenna persuasively argues we should.

It gets trippier from there, as indeed did McKenna in general – “an American ethnobotanist and mystic who…spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism and the theoretical origins of human consciousness…one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism and the intellectual voice of rave culture”.

Not to mention machine elves.

This of course saw him come under criticism from those who didn’t see him as the fun he was.

Judy Corman wrote “surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties.”

While Peter Conrad wrote “I suffered hallucinatory agonies of my own while reading his shrilly ecstatic prose”. You fool, Conrad – that shrilly ecstatic prose is the best part!

I prefer the views of Tom Hodgkinson and Mark Jacobson. The former stated that to write McKenna off “as a crazy hippie is a rather lazy approach to a man not only full of fascinating ideas but also blessed with a sense of humor and self-parody”, while the latter wrote “it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-great-mother-river-saga of brotherly bonding,” adding “put simply, Terence is a hoot!”

‘Nuff said. McKenna is a hoot – and a trip!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Empires (Special Mention) (7) Egyptian Empire

Posted on by

The maximum borders of the Egyptian empire 1450 BC by J.G. Bartholomew in 1913 (public domain image – Wikipedia “New Kingdom of Egypt”

 

(7) EGYPTIAN EMPIRE

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Even more so than Mesopotamia, Egypt set the standard for imperial state chic, not least in its monumental architecture and statuary, as well as its priesthoods and divine ruler personality cult.

Indeed, it is not too difficult to see the stamp of Egyptian imperial chic even to the twentieth century and beyond, as in the Soviet Union but with a secular party priesthood devoted to the cycles of history as opposed to the Nile and cult of socialism rather than the sun god. Less pyramids perhaps, but equally monumental architecture and statuary, as well as a tendency towards equally grandiose and gigantic projects.

Ironically, despite this imperial chic, Egypt was not so much of an empire itself, except of course to its own subjects, as it largely kept within its own borders to the Nile. The exception is the imperial Egypt of the New Kingdom, when it extended southwards to Nubia and northwards through the Levant – under pharaohs such as Rameses, whose title in Greek gave us the figure in Shelley’s poem.

Also ironically, Egypt has consistently played an important role within empires, but more as imperial prize rather than ruling empire itself – starting with its conquest by Assyrian, Persian and Macedonian empires in turn.

The last also reveals something of an odd recurring tendency, for foreign invaders or subjects from an empire conquering or ruling Egypt to break away from that empire with their own dynasty within Egypt, which is then effectively regarded as Egyptian.

First and foremost among those was the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Alexander’s general Ptolemy as a successor state of the Macedonian empire and regarded as the last dynasty of ancient Egypt. It was the dynasty that gave history Egypt’s most famous female monarch, Cleopatra – also Egypt’s last reigning monarch, before its fall to the Roman Empire. Indeed, its fall transformed the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

Kudos to Cleopatra, however, for almost pulling all a second breakaway dynasty based in Egypt, this time from the Roman Empire in its eastern half, through her alliance with Mark Antony. Yes – it was a long shot but it’s tempting to imagine the counterfactual of their victory, perhaps anticipating the eastern Roman Empire by three centuries, except from Alexandria rather than Constantinople, with Greek as its lingua franca at an earlier date. Or alternatively something like the short-lived breakaway Palmyrene empire under Zenobia two centuries ahead of the Crisis of the Third Century.

Egypt then became an imperial prize for the Roman Empire – and its richest, the proverbial breadbasket of its empire. That always strikes me as strange from my perspective of contemporary Egypt and its comparative poverty – but then that is part of the more general strange feature that the Roman Empire’s eastern or southern African and Asian provinces were richer than its western and northern European provinces, the reverse of our contemporary perspective.

From there, it was briefly a battlefield between the eastern Roman (or Byzantine) empire and the resurgent Persian (or Sassanid) empire, before falling to the Arab conquest that defeated one and conquered the other.

Egypt remained in the hands of one caliphate after another, but rose to new prominence as the seat of power for the Fatimid Caliphate. The Fatimids did not quite fall within that recurring tendency for Egyptian breakaway dynasties, except perhaps in the last stages of their decline when their rule was effectively confined to Egypt – but the Mamluks did, the slave mercenary military case that rose to rule their own Sultanate in Egypt and beyond, even famously defeating the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalat in 1260.

The Mamluks declined in turn, but their role was replayed by Albanian mercenaries with Egypt as a province in the Ottoman Empire, led by their commander Muhammed Ali Pasha, who founded his own dynasty, nominally subject to but effectively independent from the Ottoman Empire.

Egypt became a protectorate of the British Empire, as Egypt again rose to prominence as an imperial prize, not for its agriculture but for the newly constructed Suez Canal as maritime trade route.

And once again ironically, Egypt and the Suez Canal subsequently rose to prominence as the imperial humiliation of the British Empire, with the Suez Crisis in 1956 – often cited as one of the end points of the British Empire.

We’re not quite done with Egypt and its imperial ironies yet – as finally modern Egypt echoed the imperial heights of its ancient New Kingdom with the short-lived United Arab Republic, when it formed a sovereign union with Syria from 1958 to 1961.

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention) (2) First World War

Posted on by

Collage of images from the most iconic front of the war – from Wikipedia “Western Front (First World War”) under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

 

(2) FIRST WORLD WAR (1914-1918)

 

Before it was known as the First World War, it was the Great War – “the biggest, bloodiest, most expensive, most disruptive, most damaging and most traumatizing war the world had ever seen up to that point”.

It also tends to be seen in almost entirely negative terms, as one of the most unpopular and pointless wars in history, particularly when compared to its successor.

In the words of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, “both World Wars were tragic, but World War I was remembered as an unmitigated tragedy, a grinding apocalyptic process whose outcome was always foreseeable, even though some of the details (like the USA’s entry into the conflict) might have been unexpected at the time”.

“World War II, on the other hand, has been remembered as a melodrama, full of strange and uncanny ups and downs, with terrifying new weapons galore, feats of derring-do on a daily basis, and protagonists who were not only monsters in real life but also, in fictional terms, highly effective icons of villainy”.

It does not help that the First World War was hailed at one point as “the war to end all wars” – an epithet doomed to fail and be replaced by the jaded cynicism that has seen the international agreement that brought it to an end dubbed as “the peace to end all peace”.

A slur for which, as a Treaty of Versailles fan, I will not stand! Well, perhaps fan is overstating it, but I do think the Treaty of Versailles is unjustly maligned, a topic worthy of its own top ten. To put it simply, the Treaty of Versailles was not that bad – while Germany should have spent a lot more time sucking it up and a lot less time bitching about it.

Much the same goes for the First World War itself, particularly in comparison to the Second World War – albeit the former is not so much unjustly maligned, as it earns much of its claim to futility and pointlessness. And much of that is of course the Western Front, the relentless slogging match that remained largely static despite millions of casualties.

Even that, however, is somewhat unfair to the Western Front, which finally showed some dynamism in 1918, although one might observe that took long enough.

More fundamentally, it is the Western Front that provides the enduring imagery of the war, and for that matter of modern war itself, of total war and trench warfare. Its battles, as costly and futile as they were, still read like a roll call of modern military history – with perhaps Verdun and the Somme as the most definitive. Not to mention much of the definitive technology of modern war had its debut or development in the Western Front – notably tanks and aircraft.

There is also the cultural impact of the Western Front – not least on modern literary fantasy (hence the Encyclopedia of Fantasy entry), notably through J.R.R. Tolkien. Such is the cultural impact that it might be summed up by the title of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

And speaking of modern memory, it is the First World War that looms larger in national commemorations honoring the day of its armistice – not to mention, nations such as Australia, for whom their national identity was essentially shaped in battle, even in defeat, during the war at Gallipoli, commemorated by Anzac Day.

The static stalemate of the Western Front obscures the war’s more dynamic nature elsewhere – on the Eastern Front (including the Russian Revolution), in the Balkans, in the Middle East (including the Arab Revolt), at sea, in the air, and my favorite as well as the most impressive military achievement through the entire war, the German guerilla warfare led by von Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa.

Arguably, the Germans fought better in the First World War than they did in the Second, despite succeeding in 1940 where they had failed in 1914 – while the Americans also arguably waged a better war, despite failing to do what they should have done in the peace after the First what they did after the Second. Japan and Italy also chose the better side in the First than in the Second, although that might be attributed more to failures in the interwar years.

But I stand by the First World War being unfairly contrasted with the Second World War – usually in terms of the comparison of casualty rates, with the former seen as pointlessly higher without the greater mobility or movement of the latter to show for it.

Firstly, that is not quite true. In blunt terms, the Western Front was just as static for most of the Second World War – it’s just that the trench was bigger, in the form of the English Channel. And also that the Western allies effectively outsourced their casualties to the Eastern Front, where casualty rates could be very high indeed. Even on the Western front from Normany onwards, casualty rates at the sharp end could also be high enough to compare to the First World War.

And in the air for that matter – it’s ironic that Bomber Harris saw the bombing campaign as a way of avoiding the high casualty rates of the Western Front in the First World War, only for the allies to replicate those rates during the bombing campaign.

Secondly, this comparison belies that, if anything, it was the Second World War that was anomalous, while the First World War was more truly characteristic of twentieth century wars as static wars of attrition – as reflected by my favorite historian, H.P. Willmott, when he quipped, seemingly as a paradox, that WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the nineteenth century and WW1 as the first war of the twentieth century. Partly this is that for a brief shining moment, the technology and technique of offensive mobility won out over defensive firepower, but as Willmott observed, it started swinging back as defensive firepower rebounded from 1942 onwards.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy continues that “despite the attempts of propagandists on both sides, no wholly evil figure emerges from World War I to occupy the world’s imagination, no one of a viciousness so unmitigated that it seems almost supernatural; Hitler, on the other hand, has all the lineaments of a Dark Lord, and the Reich he hoped to found was a parody of the true Land”.

But it’s the Germans as bad guys – I’m a fan of the Fischer thesis.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)