We Are As Gods

Whole Earth, Winter, 1998 by Stewart Brand

Thirty years ago, Stewart and a handful of helpers compiled the first Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart tells the story of the 1968 Catalog and other early history on our web site (www.wholeearthmag.com) and on page 439 of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. After a few years, Stewart kept trying to let the Catalog die in order not to perpetuate an idea beyond its authentic vivid liveliness. But it wouldn't stay down--Last Whole Earth Catalogs and Whole Earth Epilogs and other permutations bobbed back up. The Last Whole Earth Catalog was awarded the National Book Award (1972). Stewart started the CoEvolution Quarterly as a supplement to the Catalog, originally with articles from the technical literature that he felt should have wider circulation. The Gaia Hypothesis was one such (see winter, 1998 issue, p. 4). Stewart co-founded the computer conferencing system known as the WELL and the annual Hacker's Conference CoEv evolved into the Whole Earth Review when it combined with the short lived Whole Earth Software Review. Even After Stewart left as editor (1985), his publication patterning and attitudes (e.g., only review good stuff, let the bad fade) guided the Catalogs and magazine.

Though readers steadfastly refuse to allow Stewart his independence after seventeen years of editing Whole Earth (I'm always asked: "Is Stewart still editor?"), he has been thoroughly independent, writing The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT(1987) and his well-regarded book, How Buildings Learn (1994). He also co-founded and is managing director of the Global Business Network, a consulting firm specializing in scenarios for the future. That doesn't mean that he isn't "family" or part of that indefinable presence called the Whole Earth community. Many of GBN's Network members overlap with Whole Earth writers/contributors. Stewart kindly showed up at the Marin Community Foundation to help us say: thirty years in Marin County is enough to be considered part of local cultural heritage and worthy of local philanthropic support. He's enthusiastic about getting Whole Earth's library out of containers and available to the public. He allows us to pirate book choices from his GBN selections.

Stewart has just finished a new book on time and is co-founder of the Long Now Project to make a 10,000 year clock (winter issue, p. 3). He's refurbished Mirene, his Columbia River tugboat, so that it can cruise the Bay, and he keeps in shape with a veteran's group that treks and exercises near Mt. Tamalpais. He's definitely been my educational mentor, asking, like all great teachers, specific and directed questions that need attention but seem buried in the subconscious--until asked. While my talents reside in scouting nature, Stewart's genius is as a great scout of culture and history. His keen senses hunt down the most interesting experiments, ideas (and their spokespeople) and celebrations. I always check out the tools on his belt and his current mind- tools for building robust and resilient deeper structures. Along the way, his tool kits have changed America in ways from which it cannot go back.--Peter Warshall

As unexpected and ungrammatical as a clap of thunder on a sunny day was the opening line of that first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968:

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

Credit where it's due: I stole the line. Page one, chapter one of A Runaway World? by British anthropologist Edmund Leach (Oxford, 1968) begins:

Men have become like gods. Isn't it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be? How might these fears be resolved?

Leach's book was based on his 1967 Reith Lectures broadcast on the BBC. With their bold optimism, the lectures were highly popular and also ferociously criticized in academe and the press. Alistair Cooke predicted in the Chicago Sun-Times, "Leach has suddenly come roaring up in England and no doubt will soon explode here, as middle-aged hero of the rebel young." So far as I know, I was the only rebel youngster (then age 30) to respond, but my rebroadcast of Leach's line did have a certain explosive effect. The Whole Earth Catalog also borrowed some of Leach's attitude, evident in paragraphs of his such as:

By participating in history instead of standing by to watch we shall at least be able to enjoy the present. The cult of scientific detachment and the orderly fragmented way of living that goes with it, serve only to isolate the human individual from his environment and from his neighbors--they reduce him to a lonely, impotent and terrified observer of a runaway world. A more positive attitude to change will not mean that you will always feel secure, it will just give you a sense of purpose. You should read your Homer. Gods who manipulate the course of destiny are no more likely to achieve their private ambitions than are men who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; but gods have much more fun!