Remembering the Future

Book by William Irwin Thompson: Here is a quote on page 1

Like an image before us in the rearview mirror of a car, the picture of where we have been keeps changing as we move forward in space and time. The narrative of the past from even so short a time ago as the beginning of the twentieth century now no longer describe us, and thus each generation must reinvent the past to make it correspond to its sense of the present. In much the same way, the twentieth-century futurism was little more than a not very imaginative managerial description of the implications of its present.

page 4

In the Kyoto School of Nishitani, the East reconceptualized the West to show how the ultimate development of materialism led to nihilism. But it takes no mirror made in Japan to make us see that about ourselves, for we need only turn the pages of a history of Western painting to see the full story.

page 7

Both see the mental habit of the West as one in which Being is posted as a being and called "God"; in which process is arrested in substance and called "material reality"; and in which Mind is made into an organism without an environment and called "the self". For both Bateson and Valera, all three of these cultural activities are part of the same process of reification that isolates God from nature, mind from matter, and organism from the environment; and each ends up giving us a system of abstraction that we mistake for reality, to the destruction of both culture and nature.

Looks to be interesting -- only 190 pages to go.