The Global Brain Trust: A Vivisection
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Global Brain Trust: A Vivisection By Andrew Ferguson Since the end of the Cold War ... Is any opening sentence dreaded more by readers of newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion? After...
...In the mid-70s he became active in the anti-nuclear movement, chaining himself to bulldozers outside Midwestern power plants...
...He was still talking...
...Then came Sam Keen, the men's movement maven who was discovered by Bill Moyers...
...The nettlesome contrast recurred...
...I've spent enough time with him to know that he has a genuine insight into the spiritual dimension...
...3) Think about what "we can do as representatives of the people we represent...
...With his Forum co-chairman, James Garrison, Gorbachev has hand-picked the invitees, most of whom have paid $5,000 to attend...
...And not a penny more than sustainable-surely not to the point where those countries start exporting corn...
...Over the previous four days he had led a group in discussing "The New Architecture of Global Security...
...Where do we find ourselves six years after the breakup of the Soviet empire...
...What mysterious centrifugal force, beyond politeness, keeps the forum-goers in their seats...
...Gorbachev's global brain trust relishes its variety, drawn as it is, self-consciously, from the fields of business and religion, science and politics...
...Garrison, Gorbachev's co-chair and the man who brought the brain trust into being, declined to be interviewed at the Forum...
...under the radical theologian J.A.T Robinson...
...short as Gorbachev and half as heavy...
...In the four years since he felt the boot of the Russian people, he has gathered the experience necessary to serve as the brain trust's nucleus...
...But for now the braintrusters seem content merely to interface among themselves...
...ecological alarmism fills it, for like communism it is a unified field theory of social organization...
...In miniature, it is the story of the brain trust itself...
...A Vietnamese monk was on hand to instruct participants in meditation techniques...
...Gorbachev himself spoke freely of "transforming human consciousness...
...He's not comfortable talking about it...
...Such an extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge and spiritual insight, has not been seen in a single room since Bill Moyers dined alone...
...Jane Fonda, head lowered, squats out of her seat, does a duck walk to the exit...
...He travels the world these days as an international sage, attending forums on the 21st Century, the Future of Democracy, Democracy in the 21st Century, the Democracy of the Future, the Future of the 21st Century, and other stately themes...
...No absolutes...
...representative...
...Imagine the problems the global brain trust would present for the world if it had stormed from the Fairmont agitating to nationalize the banks or institute mandatory bedtime...
...At last Stephen Rhinesmith-identified as a "specialist on global business strategy implementation"-rose to close the session...
...Early Thursday morning, at the start of the first plenary session, I sat in the press pen, listening to keynoter Thabo Mbeki, the former South African ANC activist and now Nelson Mandela's number-two...
...2) Think about what we can do as a community...
...Each roundtable discussion group had a leader, and one by one they made their way to the dais to present their findings to Gorbachev and the assembled brain trust...
...Turner read with furrowed brow, his finger tracing down the page: "As the new vice chairman of Time Warner, Mr...
...I left the ballroom 20 minutes later...
...For the American Left, the introduction of New Age spirituality is the most significant development since the trial of the Scottsboro Boys-or at least since the divorce of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden...
...But we've known since Heisenberg and the 'uncertainty principle' that this paradigm isn't true...
...So what we're saying is: We must build our public policy-making institutions on this new view of what reality is...
...After the thunderous applause for Rhinesmith, people got up to go...
...On close inspection, however, the variety of the brain trust looks less various...
...Will the poor of the world be able to participate in our agenda...
...Like I was in the bathroom just now...
...Well, here is where some of us find ourselves, this Wednesday evening in late September: in the Grand Ballroom of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel, at the kick-off dinner of the State of the World Forum...
...His roundtable had produced eminently practical suggestions, he said...
...Another is the International Green Cross, of which he is president...
...First names...
...Turner tore open his copy of the day's New York Times and turned at once to the Business page...
...In the dark the seated figures begin to fidget...
...Staffers with walkie-talkies and earpieces quietly guided participants from event to event...
...and many others...
...David Packard and Ted Turner notwithstanding, the businessfolk tend to airy job descriptions-"specialists in international empowerment strategies" and "consultants" in such corporate shakedown rackets as "environmental performance" and "disability compliance...
...Slowly, as the Left eroded under the Reagan terror, Garrison felt the tug of commerce...
...For another half hour or longer he goes on, displaying a public-speaking technique refined over years of addressing iron-butted apparatchiks in endless Central Committee meetings...
...On the last day of the Forum, I buttonholed him outside the Grand Ballroom...
...I have a two-minute comment," he said...
...There was silence...
...Will they continue to be left behind in the communications revolution...
...Ecology: The New Science of the Sacred...
...Here's his good friend George Mitchell, and over there is his even better friend Alan Cranston...
...Will they have a say in the growing gap of wealth in the world...
...The Institute gained notoriety as the chief publicist for the "Secret Team" conspiracy theory, which characterized the Cold War as a fraud imposed upon a peace-loving planet by a shadowy team of American intelligence officers...
...Security Council...
...Among those in the brain trust, however, there is still room for paradox, if not friction...
...And so it went...
...And here is Thabo Mbeki, deputy president of South Africa, another good friend...
...The "global ecological crisis" proves that capitalism as well as communism has failed...
...A banner headline read: "Turner Pay Deal Said to Top $100 million...
...Synapses freeze, eyes glaze, brain cells die one by one...
...A revolution has to take place in people's minds," he likes to say...
...It is quasi-religious, allowing for talk of values and "the spiritual...
...And 4) Think of what we can do as participants in the global community...
...It is a distinguished company, including retired diplomats (George Shultz and Zbigniew Brzezinski), Nobel laureates (Guatemala's Rigoberto Menchu and the Bell Labs physicist Arno Penzias), science popularizers (Carl Sagan and Fritzjof Capra), movie stars (Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine), rich guys (Ted Turner and David Packard), New Age gurus (Sam Keen and Deepak Chopra), and many more-500 in all, leading lights from business, politics, religion, and the arts...
...Turner is to receive a five-year compensation package worth well in excess of $100 million...
...It is always "spirituality," by the way, never "religion...
...We must change the nature of consumption so that it is geared toward our cultural needs...
...Gorbachev, godfather of the New Civilization, seized the microphone...
...He has the quiet air of a divinity student, which he once was...
...Since the end of the Cold War, we have a brief window here where we can undo all the old paradigms...
...There are no ultimate integers of matter, just networks of potentialities...
...The next morning Gorbachev would host his friends George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, neither of whom attended the Forum proper, for an hour-long roundtable broadcast by CNN...
...A global infrastructure of foundations, philanthropists, corporate interests, and academic institutions sustains him and picks up the tab...
...Rhinesmith offered "four action steps-things we can all do as we move from this place...
...Meals were prepared by celebrity chefs, including Wolfgang Puck, and diners were serenaded by New Age musicians gently playing their dulcimers and tablas and bells...
...Rupert Sheldrake, for example, though once a biochemist at Cambridge, has spent the last several years working on a "morphic field theory of the mind," which aims to prove that the "sun is thinking...
...Most of the scientists labor in "New Science...
...For years, commentators speculated on Gorbachev's intellectual development, as he worked his way through the classics of Western political thought: from Aristotle to the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers, through Lincoln and even to Hayek...
...No company is so intent that the Third World achieve "sustainable development...
...He is still pointing out people in the audience...
...Having led the most environmentally profligate empire in history, Gorby in retirement has gone green...
...In the general catalepsy no one stirs...
...So there's a friendship thing happening...
...Mbeki wondered...
...Now that we are rid of this syndrome of imposing the communist model on people," he told Audubon, "I have to tell you Americans that you've been pushing your American way of life for decades...
...His Rolodex swelled...
...It is now almost 11 p.m...
...With the growing scarcity of resources, we must focus on the need to control the global process...
...A new civilization would mean, above all, solving the problems that exist between man and the rest of nature," he told Audubon magazine last year...
...But he's very into it...
...That, or something similar, would have been the agenda a mere decade ago, before the fall of the Wall, when the Left was in full flower...
...A couple of things can come from this Forum," he said, in his breathless manner...
...Bromide falls upon bromide...
...For four days," he said, "we have lived together, talked together, hoped together...
...The most profound need is to move away from a technology-centered to a culture-centered way of living...
...Is Gorbachev on board with this...
...Though 44, he looks a few months shy of getting his driver's license...
...speaking tours for Gorbachev, Eduard Shevardnadze, and Boris Yeltsin...
...At length Gorbachev seems to be winding down...
...Still, the great unanswered question of the Forum was the practical one: How to impose this new view of reality, how to create a New Civilization...
...Under the pitiless stage lights he looked like a woodcut by Edvard Munch...
...He is also enormously competent, a virtue seldom associated with people who chain themselves to bulldozers...
...Five more minutes pass...
...Garrison is a slight man...
...Today he is a very wealthy man, perhaps the only operator in the world who's on a first-name basis with both George Shultz and New Age healer Deepak Chopra-an embodiment of the New New Left...
...senator from California, went first...
...There are profound layers among the interfaces of politics, geopolitics, and philosophy," he says...
...After the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...All our present institutions are based on that rationalist model...
...Over the next four days Mikhail Gorbachev, along with Sam Keen and Ted Turner and Deepak Chopra and the rest, make the answer plain: They are busy creating a New Civilization-for all of us...
...For Gorbachev and his fellow brain trusters, environmentalism satisfies several needs at once...
...Will he list them all...
...And one can't help but wonder, there in the dark: Why not...
...Mbeki said...
...And now," he says, "my colleagues have suggested I give a broad overview of our current world situation...
...This is the first step in establishing a global brain trust," Gorbachev said that night, and the New Civilization is its top priority...
...And a little boredom is a small price to pay...
...Gorbachev has been talking for 25 minutes, in low tones followed by the high-pitched, stuttering translation of his interpreter...
...Turner kept reading: "Add that to the $75 million in salary, bonus and long-term compensation...
...The ballroom was packed...
...Drawing on his huge bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Deepak Chopra spoke of the seven levels of consciousness in one room, while New Economists outlined the Love Economy in the room next door...
...They were: 1) Think of what it all means to you...
...and never, God forbid, "God...
...Perhaps most important of all, environmentalism allows Gorbachev to speak in just such big, blowy tropes...
...among the brain trust, the process more often runs in the other direction...
...Aside from Garrison himself, no one understands this final, decadent phase of the Left better than Danny Sheehan, a well-known political activist who, like Garrison, was one of the founders of the Christic Institute...
...The themes were Gorbachevian-New Indicators for Measuring Sustainable Development...
...I was on a panel with him-and just now I called him 'Ruud.'" He calls Gorbachev "Michael...
...Yet no one dares follow Fonda to the exit...
...Peggy Dulany, to cite one case, is spending her legacy as a Rockefeller scion on squatter camps in Latin America...
...It's not accurate...
...Facing the Planet's Carrying Capacity...
...He is a global Polonius...
...When communism collapsed, he parlayed his network of friendships into investment opportunities...
...Sessions never ran overtime, unless Gorbachev wanted to say something...
...His tailored suits hang straight down from his shoulders...
...He studied at Harvard, then at Cambridge, where he earned a Ph.D...
...He deplored, gently, the sparse African presence at the Forum, insinuating that there might be a First World bias at work...
...I could leverage my contacts to meet a Kissinger or a George Shultz," he told SF Weekly...
...Mbeki asked from the podium...
...The ovation shook the chandeliers...
...Apocalyptic environmentalism is the creed that undergirds the global brain trust...
...But this plenary on Saturday afternoon was to be the official summing-up...
...But a recent profile in SF Weekly revealed his career to be a kind of synecdoche for the American left and its evolution over the last 20 years...
...He finished to polite applause...
...Gorbachev takes a breath...
...And just as important, environmentalism encourages Gorbachev and his colleagues to sustain the moral equivalence that was their chief rhetorical safeguard during the Cold War...
...I left Sheehan and walked into the final plenary session...
...The solutions to the crisis: "A re-enchantment of the world...
...His voice rose, but Ted didn't appear to be listening...
...Enlargement of the U.N...
...It is a good life, as he says himself: "I have many things to keep me busy...
...Americans have to be more modest in their desires...
...I said, "Wow...
...I became important because I could deliver important Soviets...
...The rest of the participants were drawn from what they call "civic society," a euphemism for non-profits...
...There is a sweeping crisis that threatens our civilization," Gorbachev told the Forum, more than once...
...Dinner has been served, the plates cleared away, and little candles cast sleepy pools of light across the crystal, showing the lipstick smudges and fingerprints made greasy from the beef medallions in shashlik marinade...
...And allowing people to vote for their country's UN...
...He later fused his spiritual interests with his activism by helping to found the Christic Institute...
...The politicians are all out of work: Brian Mulroney, Jim Sasser, Gorbachev himself...
...And at the dais, making welcoming remarks through an interpreter, is Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Throughout the 80s, as a freelance peacenik, he traveled often to the Soviet Union and established contacts within the Politburo...
...And I saw Ruud Lubbers [the former prime minister of the Netherlands...
...Alan Cranston, once a U.S...
...None of these, of course, is really "a thing to do," and from this fact the rest of us can take comfort...
...And over the vast ballroom the realization presses down like a damp blanket: He's just getting started...
...A ban on nuclear testing...
...Participants were brought to the Fairmont for a series of plenary sessions and roundtable discussions...
...He has mastered the alarmist platitude...
...The corn-producer Archer Daniels Midland underwrote the Forum for $250,000...
...Stopping the colonization of the spirit by commercial interests...
...His round-table had discussed "The Global Crisis of the Spirit...
...The statespersons get to be friends with the New Scientists who get to be friends with the spiritual leaders who get to be friends with the statespersons...
...If these problems are not solved, the rest is nonsense...
...All of which could sound sort of scary, until you actually watch our new global brain trust in action, or non-action...
...He has finally come to rest, on the Whole Earth Catalog...
...This was merely the first State of the World Forum...
...A makeshift bookstore sold CDs like "Sacred Healing Chants of Tibet" and "Exploring the Cosmic Christ" and books like Jesus, CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom, for Visionary Leadership...
...What impels Gorbachev to drone on, and his listeners to listen, here in a grand hotel, six years after the breakup of the Soviet empire...
...For its adherents and even its distant sympathizers, the implosion of communism left a void...
...His investment-consulting firm, based in San Francisco, flourished with deals in the former Soviet bloc...
...ADM is a conservative entity that feints left...
...There has to be a different approach...
...One of those is the Gorbachev Foundation, which he co-founded with Garrison in San Francisco and Moscow and which sponsored the State of the World Forum...
...In the ballroom, several brain trusters held hands...
...Everything is ultimately related to everything else...
...You know there's the old Newtonian, Cartesian paradigm-units of matter colliding in space like Ping-Pong balls...
...In the mainstream at last, he even ran for Congress, and is now said to be eyeing a Senate race...
...The brain trust plans to meet at least once a year through 2000, with Gorbachev as convener...
...The audience leans forward, poised for an ovation and hasty retreat...
...Religious leaders" are almost exclusively Buddhist, Vedantist, or Shirley MacLaine...
...At that moment, Ted Turner plopped down next to me, seeming agitated...
...He organized U.S...
...Its main product is talk-working papers and action plans, emphasis on the papers and plans...
...In the press room, reporters from Earth Times and Disarmament News did yogic stretching exercises, emitting little moans...
...This is potentially paradigm-impacting...
...The Forum was a massive logistical enterprise, and it operated with the elegant precision of a Swiss railroad...
...Michael Murphy, the founder of the Esalen Institute, has been investigating the mystical experiences of golfers...
...And one other idea: "If we cut the world's population by 90 percent, there won't be enough people left to do ecological damage...
...As these grand themes were chewed over, the variety of the participants' backgrounds was meant to result in unexpected synergies of insight...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 5
