Pride can be dangerous. In ancient Greek literature, men met their
downfall on account of hubris, an exaggerated kind of self-confidence:
The titular character of Sophocles' Oedipus the King kills his father
over a quarrel and then unwittingly sleeps with his own mother. He
gouges out his own eyes when he realizes the abomination.
But hubris is more than inflated ego—it's arrogance without the
knowledge to back it up. In the part-memoir, part-philosophic
dissertation 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, 416
pages, $26.95), Daniel Pinchbeck hypothesizes that a psychic shift will
occur when the current cycle of the ancient Mayan long-count calendar
ends on Dec. 21, 2012. He contends that this corresponds to the myth of
Quetzalcoatl—a half-bird half-serpent Meso-American deity who
represents the union of spirit and matter, and whose return will bring
about a new age of civilization. The book is also filled with theories
on how psychotropic drugs, shamanism, crop circles and the collective
unconscious point toward that "shift in the nature of the psyche" when
the Mayan calendar ends. He mentions the ideas of German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, the Global Consciousness Project at Stanford
University and French postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard as proof that
mankind will inevitably spiral toward destruction unless they reach the
same psychic awakening Pinchbeck achieved by tripping balls. He reveres
Terrence McKenna, a writer and professed user of psychedelic drugs who
posited that man evolved from apes by eating hallucinogenic mushrooms.
It is a difficult premise to swallow, but the most gag-inducing
aspect of Pinchbeck's (and McKenna's) theories is a singular reliance
on personal experience to prove his points. Pinchbeck has virtually no
education: He's a college dropout who admits in his book that he landed
jobs writing for Wired and Village Voice because his mom, beat poet
Jack Kerouac's former girlfriend, had "editorial connections." After a
hundred pages—wherein Pinchbeck has only mentioned the Mayan Calendar
twice—it becomes clear that 2012 is really about his own
psychedelic-drug use and quest to understand what he call his "psychic
wounds," and not about an impending apocalypse.
The problem is not that Pinchbeck's theories are completely
crackpot, but that he makes claims while admitting he lacks the
knowledge to justify them. Early in the book, he writes that he is
unable to find a Bible passage from St. Paul's letter to the
Corinthians, confessing to being "a Biblical illiterate." Several
chapters later, he argues that the "Book of Revelation is...disjointed,
doom-riddled, insufferably self-righteous annoyingly priggish." And
rather than prove this assertion with Biblical quotes, he uses someone
else's (here, psychologist Carl Jung's theory of archetypes) to loosely
defend his point.
At best, Pinchbeck wants to be the next Terrence McKenna; at worst, he's looking to be the new Nietzsche—and this is why 2012
fails. Pinchbeck should stick to what he knows: tying other people's
ideas together and composing descriptions of tripping that rival Tom
Wolfe's stories of dropping acid with Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Attempting to wax philosophic based on some hallucinogenic visions is
more hubris than even Oedipus Rex could bear. PAIGE RICHMOND.
WWeek 2015