Time Interview: The Mechanists and the Mystics

Four years ago when he was 30, William Irwin Thompson left his teaching post at MIT, dismayed at what he called the "mindless, liberal technocratic managerial vision" he found there. At York University in Toronto he became a professor of humanities and wrote At the Edge of History, a provocative little book greeted variously as "dazzling" and as "not so much an analysis of the decadence of our civilization as a symptom of its decline." Wrote one reviewer: "Thompson's Edge is to Charles Reich's The Greening of America what chess is to Chinese...