315 - Shaping the Future: Resources of the Post-Modern World

Shaping the Future: Resources of the Post-Modern World
By Frederick Ferré
New York, Harper & Row, 1976.197 pp. $7.95.

Judged by its appearance and style, this book is certainly not a ponderous study. The personal touch that sets its tone would rather place it in the class of impromptus. It is, however, well to recall that impromptus are just an artful way of creating the impression that the offering is the product of the spur of the moment. The Shaping of the Future has been in the making for years, a necessary requirement for securing reliability to a plan that concerns not details about the future but future itself.

Apart from the years of reflection that preceded the writing of this book, its structure too bespeaks considerable effort to put many thoughts and concerns into a tightly knit sequence. Indeed, the book is offered as a synthesis of basic principles that, according to the author, are the sole foundation of a viable future-environmentally, socially, and spiritually. This is not to suggest that the book is a rehash of battle cries made platitudinous during the 1960's, although the author draws heavily on material brought to the surface through the commotions of the last decade. Being concerned with the latest is not necessarily a sign of shallowness, and the topics treated by the author are not at all germane to a facile approach.

That science, which issued from a Christian matrix, found itself in the long run in opposition to it is a grave theme, and so is the fact that partly because of that opposition we find ourselves aliens in the world created by science. It should weigh just as heavily on one's mind that increasing technology is coming up against clearly discernible and

318 - Shaping the Future: Resources of the Post-Modern World

apparently insurmountable barriers. Again, anyone would nod in profound agreement on being reminded that lopsided reliance on technology produced a soulless culture that in turn provokes a return to the magical. All these themes the author presents with much incisiveness and vividness. The actual and widespread cavorting with magic is taken by the author, together with the limits of technocracy, as an evidence that we are on the threshold of a post-modern world. Its consciousness, if it is to show viability, will have to derive from what the author calls Polymythic Organicism, a broad development of Whitehead's process philosophy. Hope shall be realized in the measure in which religious, educational, economic, and political institutions will assimilate themselves to Polymythic Organicism and achieve in it a global synthesis of cultural values in terms of a thinking for which the master paradigm is the biological organism.

Reviewing such a message for a theological periodical demands emphasis on the theological issues involved, a choice all the more justified since a principal claim of the book is theological. It consists in conjuring up the vision of a post-modern Christianity very different from what the author calls "mainstream Christianity," embodied in the major traditional churches. It is not clear what role is reserved in Polymythic Organicism for Incarnation and Redemption. The former is mentioned once and passingly, the latter not at all. It seems that people of the viable future will have to base their hope on redeeming themselves through the assimilation of all cultural values, of which the author singles out with particular sympathy the Eastern, especially Buddhist, kind. Christ is mentioned approvingly, inasmuch as he had relied on the organismic viewpoint in some of his similes. Christianity is evaluated in terms of its relation to nature, a rather narrow perspective. It is not explained why Christian thought is responsible for the "crushing" of nature implied in the Hebrew parlance of Genesis. Of course, if the Hebrew mentality is thus relieved of its own burdens, the author's call for the Judaization of the world of the future will appear less burdensome. The call is predicated on the need for vigorous social consciousness that, the author believes, is the historical privilege and destiny of Judaism to provide. That Judaism had ever anything to do with the question of the Messiah as a religious redeemer is not discussed.

Clearly, these are lacunae that will be keenly noted by any theologically minded reader still having one foot in "mainstream Christianity." Philosophically minded readers will be puzzled by the one-stock argument that, since Whitehead said it so, becoming is more valuable than being. This may be correct in several respects but hardly when one looks for the primary principle that is to carry rational discourse about reality. Historians of science uneasy about ipse dixits will hardly go along with the author's endorsing as final verity Lynn White's claim that Christianity is chiefly responsible for the exploitation of nature by technology. It should rather have been pointed out that some scholars, until now most reluctant to give due credit to Christianity in the rise of

319 - Shaping the Future: Resources of the Post-Modern World

science, are all too willing to become fashionable by putting on Christianity the lion's share of guilt for the misuses of science.

Shortcomings like these are not necessarily inevitable in a book in which a spirited message is carried often by snapshots, presented with much artistry, of personal encounters, stories, and incidents. But the heavier one's message, the weaker are such facets to carry it convincingly. Polymythic Organicism will not be a source of reliable hope if it neglects a point related to another major claim of a book touching repeatedly on the philosophy of science. Despite one's longing for a synthesis, human knowledge of reality will keep showing mutually irreducible aspects. No articulation of words, unless it becomes a Hegelian dialectic, can fuse qualities into quantities or vice versa. The more men and women will be around with skill in both, or at least with the humble realization that skill in one is not skill in the other, the more we shall have of a hope that is more than hopeful vision.

Stanley L. Jaki
Seton Hall University
South Orange, New Jersey