cover image Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse: Contemplating the Future with Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, and Others

Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse: Contemplating the Future with Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, and Others

David Jay Brown. Palgrave MacMillan, $28 (270pp) ISBN 978-1-4039-6532-5

The Big Questions addressed in these hazy, wearisome interviews-Is there a God? Does consciousness survive death?-are the kind of imponderables your Aunt Martha would know as much about as the thinkers showcased here. But these interviewees are more likely than Aunt Martha to invoke ""nonlocality"" and ""quantum holography"" to give their mysticism a pseudo-scientific gloss. Brown, author of interview collections like Mavericks of the Mind, has a rigid, checklist style of interviewing in which he invites discussion of his pet spiritual and New Age hobbyhorses, including parapsychology and extraterrestrials. Sheldrake, Dean Radin and Apollo-14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, all of the ""Institute of Noetic Sciences,"" insist on the ""vast abundance of compelling scientific evidence for psychic phenomena,"" while the late Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack calls the alien abduction phenomenon ""totally real,"" although he's ""not sure how it's real-in other words, in what dimension it's occurring."" Brown is especially interested in the interviewees' ubiquitous use of psychedelic drugs for consciousness-raising; predictably, they respond with vague dilations (""psychedelics helped me to see the vastness, the nondimensional, the altered dimensional... a tumbling of awareness,"" says medical marijuana activist Valerie Corral) that readers will find an inadequate substitute for dropping acid themselves. Brown also includes some skeptics, like the redoubtable Chomsky and sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling, who pithily pours cold water on Brown's enthusiasms. On the whole, this is a dull, opaque and implausible commentary. Photos.