Peter Drucker has also commented on an even more entrenched academic mentality in the medical schools at the time of the French Revolution. So committed were the professors to Galenic medicine and so resistant were they to clinical medicine, that there was absolutely no hope of introducing clinical medicine in the education of doctors. So the French Revolution closed the medical schools and started all over again. We, however, won’t have to close the English departments because they are already going through their own process of capitalistic deconstruction, but I do hope that new colleges can arise in which the Dalai Lama’s program of contemplative studies and the process of cultural phenomenology I am outlining here can become the basis of a new curriculum. What Hutchins did for the University of Chicago at the time of George Steiner needs to be done all over again, but this time not just for the culture of Western Civilization, but for the whole world. As a step in this new direction, here is one way of miniaturizing the cultural phenomenology of planet Earth into a four-year curriculum for a liberal arts education.

The Literary Milestones of the Arithmetic Mentality:

Formative: Sumerian, “Inanna’s Transfer of the Arts of Civilization from Eridu to Erech” (This work shows the archetypal and generative power of the list.)

Dominant: “Inanna’s Descent into the Netherworld.” (This work shows the cultural shift from village agriculture to the city-state in which a priestly class develops astronomy as a mythopoeic system of knowledge.)

Climactic: The Gilgamesh Cycle, both the Sumerian cycle, and the Akkadian epic. Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. (The Gilgamesh epic shows the war of the sexes and the tension between matristic systems of prehistoric authority and charismatic military leadership with its new heroic system of values. The Tao Te Ching is the swan song for the anarchic, pre-state values of the Eternal Feminine and the creative and generative power of the Tao.)

The Literary Milestones of the Geometric Mentality:

Formative: The Babylonian Creation Epic, “Enuma Elish”; the Egyptian play “The Triumph of Horus.” (The Babylonian text shows the destruction of the prehistoric Great Mother and the shift to the military patriarchal state. The Egyptian text shows the rise of the power of the Father and dynastic succession with the son and the consequent displacement of power from the mother’s brother.)

Dominant: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the Chinese Book of Odes. (These texts are supreme examples of the shift from prehistoric blood rituals to rationality, temple formation, and patriarchal succession.)

Climactic Plato’s Timaeus, Confucius’s Analect, the canonized Old Testament (these documents become “classics” and therefore lock in patriarchy and geometrical order as the system of civilization for temple and state.)