"We Are As Gods:" The virtue of the Whole Earth Catalog

At the Whole Earth Catalog 50th Reunion party, held in San Francisco on October 13, I made some remarks about the significance of the Catalog -- and its relevance to questions about the value of human activity. I was asked to make the remarks available online, and here they are. I published a longer essay ("Google in Paperback Form") about this in strategy+business the same week. The talk gets to the point a little faster... you may like it...

I'm going to say a few words, while we're waiting, on behalf of all the people who worked at Whole Earth, as editors at least, over the years. I want to talk about the phrase that introduced the Whole Earth Catalog: "We are as gods; we might as well get good at it." And how profoundly dangerous a phrase it is. 

When I worked at Whole Earth in the 1980s, I think it’s fair to say I lived and breathed those words. But I never really appreciated what they mean until recently, because I've been thinking about them. 

As you may know, the words go back to the Garden of Eden story in the Book of Genesis. The serpent, tempting Eve, reassures her that Adam and Eve won’t die if they consume an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “Your eyes shall be opened,” says the serpent, “and you shall be as gods.”

So Adam and Eve ate the apple and the world went to hell. Life is suffering. People are imperfect; cruel; narcissistic; neglectful; tempted by our own cravings; subject to addiction; untrustworthy. We are brutal to the environment, to each other, and to ourselves. We are immensely brutal. Icarus figures, flying too close to the sun, are everywhere. And when we fall we do incredible damage. You can't trust people to do the right thing. 

And of course it's gotten worse in the last few years. With the internet, with immense amounts of data gathered about human activity all the time, with robotics and genetic engineering and innovations in power, if people are not omniscient and omnipotent, at least in aggregate, we might as well be. 

Humanity has internalized that view over centuries. That’s one reason, I think, why knowledge is so guarded by professionals. We restrict knowledge and action to highly credentialed people, and we protect those credentials, through institutions: Government. Corporations. Universities. Unions. Church. Family. Unfortunately, they turned out to be just as corruptible as the rest of us. It's enough to make you despair that things could ever get better. 

And that has been the established wisdom of our time. But then here came along this book: this popular, practical, friendly countercultural catalog, with oversized pages and a picture of the Earth on the cover — that suggests – we are already as gods. And oh so casually, it said, we should embrace our mastery. Without anxiety. We "might as well" get good at it.

And there's an important implication here: People can be trusted with knowledge. Enough people will be virtuous enough, enough of the time, that even if they indulge themselves and seek pleasure and fulfillment, even outside the strictures of political, religious, or family authority, things will turn out better than they were before.

Original virtue is a profoundly radical idea. It wasn't new with the Whole Earth Catalog – but Stewart and his colleagues, including most or all of us in this room, popularized it in a new way with these publications. That's why people talk about the Catalog changing their lives, or giving them the courage to try things. It spoke to a faith in people themselves, that we get it right often enough, because of who we are, because of everything inside us. 

The Whole Earth ethic carries with it a kind of responsibility to make the most of every aspect of ourselves, including the aspects we might feel ashamed about. And as Stewart wrote in Whole Earth Discipline, the message is no longer "we might as well get good at it." We have to get good at it. It's a responsibility, and it requires a kind of discipline that we may not be used to. But it's a responsibility you can treat with joy. You can see it here, in this room, in every one of us, and many, many more people who embody some part of the Whole Earth spirit. We are as people, and we have to get good at it.