Customer Reviews

Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age

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I read all the way through John David Ebert's "Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of Age," but there isn't much meat in the text. It's inspiring, in a way, that one can get a published book out of just asking eight philosophers to comment on the history and place of their own work. Aside from that, Ebert's contribution is an annotated timeline of about 120 books since 1894. This begins with Rudolf Steiner and works through Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, Fritjof Capra, and many others, away from mechanical models of the universe and toward mythical and biological models. We can now use man's shared and perhaps universal myths to think about our place in the growth and interaction of natural ecologies -- perhaps including the Earth ("Gaia") or the universe as living systems. If that proves a productive line of reasoning, these philosophers will have been among the pioneers. Some of the most interesting themes come from attempted syntheses of Western and Eastern thought. I might look up some of the cited authors, especially Stanislav Grof, William Irwin Thompson, and at least the early writings of Deepak Chopra.

Some of this is New Age babble of the most annoying sort, the usual concoction of pseudo science and nineteenth century vitalism. Ebert, who conducts the "conversations" with eight current New Age illuminati that form the bulk of the book, is a pretty fancy babble master himself, proving without half trying that he can speak pseudobabblese with the best of them. Consider this formulation as he converses with Rupert Sheldrake on page 46: "So your theory that information can be transmitted by these non-material morphic fields makes plausible a paradigm in which phenomena such as telepathy or ESP can be understood. Can you explain how your paradigm makes sense out of this type of phenomena?"

Note that Ebert is incorporating into his talk scientific-sounding terminology shorn of any scientific meaning. It's a sort of sly of mouth that lends a "scientific" gloss to the babbling. Ebert's "non-material morphic fields" (from Sheldrake), for example, sounds good since we have "field theory" in physics. Sheldrake chimes in with talk of "fields of perception." Note especially, however, the killer word "paradigm." For the last couple of decades or so, one way to test a book's BS content has been to count the number of times the word "paradigm" appears. Once every ten pages or so is tolerable. More than that should start your BS-detector to crackling. New Age babblers never use the word "construct" or "idea" or such a phrase as "body of knowledge" when they can throw in "paradigm" instead. In general they like to spice up their discourse with a plethora of scientific sounding words and phrases such as "psychokinetic influence," "fusion," "quantum events," "cultural hybrids," etc., as Ebert and Sheldon do on, for example, page 48. On pages 94 and 95, in the space of nine sentences, Ebert manages to use the New Age shibboleth "resonance" six times.

There's also the patterning of words to imitate a reasoned discourse, a weighing and choosing of plausibilities as though weighing evidence or comparing experimental results. Thus Sheldrake says on page 47, "...[S]ome...phenomena of parapsychology are hard to explain from the point of view of morphic fields and morphic resonance. For example, anything to do with precognition or premonition doesn't fit into an idea of influences just coming in from the past. So, I don't think this is going to give a blanket explanation of all parapsychological phenomena, but I think it's going to make some of it, at least, seem normal rather than paranormal." Notice how this mumbo jumbo makes it seem like something is being explained. Not all of this is annoying, thankfully. The conversation with psychedelic guru Terence McKenna is interesting and invigorating, and the chat with Deepak Chopra is uplifting and admirable, which is what New Age thought in general tries to be. The New Age movement itself, which is easy to make fun of (it takes itself so seriously, I can't resist), is actually a noble enterprise engaged in trying to free us from the shackles of antiquated religions and the limitations of scientific materialism. The New Age in fact is a new religion in the making. In view of the stupidity and intolerance of some world religions, this is a welcome development. The problem is that many New Age apostles in skirting scientific materialism, skirt the scientific method as well. Much of the conversation in this book wants to substitute pronouncements for trial and error experiments. Thus Sheldrake can postulate morphic fields and morphic resonance, and continue on as though such notions had been experimentally verified and independently confirmed. And the terrible thing is I really don't think a lot of the New Agers really know the difference between asserting something and presenting an idea in a scientifically verifiable manner. Ebert is perhaps aware of this criticism because on page 92 he pays considerable homage to the scientific method, but then continues on as if it didn't matter.

In short, this book has a beautiful title, but it's a little after the fact since quantum mechanics killed the clockwork god a long time ago. Instead we have the god who plays dice, a much more sophisticated god who can Be or Not Be in the twinkling of a probability function. To find out more about this god we need the kind of speculation sometimes found in New Age thinking, but more than that we need the scientific method, a process that Ebert and friends would prefer to ignore.

Apologies for the title of this review, it is indeed the title to John Hogan's excellent collection of interviews with various New Age 'philosophers' like Ken Wilber, Terence McKenna and the rest of the pro-life movement. By pro-life, I mean the opposite to scientific nihilism.

While Hogan's effort had glowing reviews in the press and now on Amazon, Ebert has been lampooned. Ok, I guess we should laugh at John David Ebert for having the audacity to publish a collection of interesting interviews, and without the public-relations machine John Hogan had, and so we should give this independent author rubbish reviews, especially when he and Hogan have basically written the same entertaining book. Go figure!

Twilight of the Clockwork God is written by a clever guy, so I will not be bitchy or snooty; even more so because Edert is an `independent' thinker (whatever that means) and he is enthusiastic in investigating the yet to be fully understood Death of God , when the rest of us are working the nine to five! So if you enjoy John Hogan then you will probably like John David Ebert's book. Though I do think that Ebert nudges passed Hogan in the brains stakes!

I read this book when it first came out, and I find it just as eye-opening today as it was then. Ebert wastes no time with his interviews. His grasp of each thinker's contributions to science, metaphysics, and philosophy makes for fast-paced reading. I enjoy interviewing as its own genre, and this is hands down the best thought-out and assembled set of interviews I have read. No matter what your opinion is of each thinker, you will still come out of reading this ready to discuss the new and developing ideas of our time. Don't miss it!

This is a work of uncontestable brilliance, the most important contribution to the history of thought since Nietzsche published "The Birth of Tragedy"; in addition to its own merits, it is a monumental work of the intellectual history of humanity from its origin in the protoplasmic goop of the Big Bang through the end of the 1990s.

Ebert's essays place him in that great line of scholars that starts with Nietzsche and branches out with Spengler and Jung, Jean Gebser, Joseph Campbell, and William Irwin Thompson. In terms of its creativity, one might call it a contemporary "Finnegans Wake" (without the puns).

And though his writing shines with Ra-like luminescence, and for all the passages of soaring lyrical grandeur (his prose at times evocative of the arias of Wagner), Ebert manages to keep his proverbial feet on the ground. He incisively interviews seven fascinating subjects from various academic and theoretical backgrounds, and applies the deft touch of Barbara Walters and razor-sharp intellect of Mike Wallace (his interviewing persona is a sort of hermaphroditic blend of those two) as these magnificent seven share with us fortunate readers the true essence, the cuori sacrissimi, of their various and sundry philosophaei.

After reading "Twilight of the Clockwork God," try as they might, readers will never be able to think of life, or humanity, or damned well anything, in the same way, ever again.

Be prepared for a mind-blowing paradigm shift on an unprecedented scale. Reading it is like flying on an airplane or losing your virginity.

An unbelievably pretentious and boring polemic on a less than fresh subject. A waste of time for any other than the dryest and dullest of academicians.