In Gebser’s terminology, when a new structure of consciousness emerges, the old becomes deficient as the new becomes efficient. Shamanism is the efficient structure in archaic societies, but in the shift to civilized societies based upon myth and archaeoastronomy, shamanism becomes the deficient form of sorcery, black magic, and human sacrifice. The battle between the magical and the mythic structures of consciousness is registered in the stories of Orpheus in Greece and Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerica. For our times of emergence from industrial to planetary culture, postmodernism is the deficient form of the perspectival consciousness of the Mental structure and not the emergent form of the Integral. This understanding of emergence and complex dynamical systems enabled both Gebser and McLuhan to avoid the political slips to left and right that characterized those academics who became caught by the fascism of Heidegger or the Stalinist apologetics of Althuser.

The old mental structure of perspectival consciousness – of a single individual in his book-lined study looking out at the world from the perspective of an ideology – is now being replaced by a more complex ecology of consciousness in which, as Niels Bohr once said of wave and particle, the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth is another profound truth. This new planetary culture emerges where several cognitive domains cross and interpenetrate, as in the Dalai Lama’s Mind Life Conferences in which Tibetan meditation masters and neuroscientists come together to explore the nature of consciousness. The university department becomes the anaerobic dark where the old methane atmosphere of poisonous ideologies hides from the light and the wide blue sky of the planet as a whole. So although textual sociologists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha speak of subaltern studies and giving a voice to the voiceless, they ignore the cognitive domains of contemporary spirituality and the contemporary sciences of complexity. Since they cannot change, and English departments are now followers of this ideological movement, there is no likelihood that the shift to an appreciation of complex dynamical systems will occur until after this generation has retired. As Max Planck said of the physicists opposed to the new quantum mechanics, old scientists do not change their minds; they simply die, and new and younger scientists come along for whom the new paradigm is not so threatening.