“What joins all these – in the book as in life – is the roaring current of change, a current so powerful today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values, and shrivels our roots.” – Alvin Toffler
“We come from God and we are in exile.” – Jan van Ruysbroeck
Modern human identity and awareness has been shaped by a host of potent cultural influences that include religion, science, philosophy, psychology, and political economy. In little more than five centuries these and allied influences have resulted in an unprecedented transformation in the way human beings experience themselves, the world, and existence as a whole. Most significantly, while our primal ancestors felt at home in a spiritually animated cosmos, we experience ourselves as ever-more alienated inhabitants of a disenchanted world.
Evolution of the Modern Self
To illustrate the extent of these changes it is instructive to compare the modern Western outlook with the “primal” worldview that characterises traditional and indigenous cultures. The contrast is stark, notes cultural historian Richard Tarnas:
“The primal human being perceives the surrounding natural world as permeated with meaning, meaning whose significance is at once human and cosmic. The primal world is ensouled. It communicates and has purposes. The world is animated by the same psychologically resonant realities that human beings experience within themselves.”
“The human being is a microcosm within the macrocosm of the world. Primal experience takes place within a world soul, an anima mundi, a living matrix of embodied meaning.”
The primal self knows itself as a subject embedded within a world of subjects with no absolute boundary in between. The modern self, by contrast, experiences itself as a subject apart from and set against an encompassing world of disconnected objects. The primal world is infused with intrinsic meaning. The world in which we now exist is perceived to be impersonal and lacking inherent purpose.
To understand how these radical changes came about it is vital to appreciate how closely intertwined are our identity and worldview. Since they are intimately linked, anything with the power to fundamentally alter our worldview sooner or later alters us because, consciously or not, the worldview we embrace moulds both our experience of reality and our very sense of self.
Numerous revisions of the Western worldview over the last five centuries have fostered gradual evolution of the modern self. As heirs of this legacy we carry within ourselves its cumulative effects and bear its manifold consequences.
Cosmic Displacement
The ancients believed the Creator placed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos, fitting abode for human beings who, the only creatures made in His image, were the epitome of perfection and culmination of divine creation.
In 1543 Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus overturned this timeless worldview. His claim the Earth was actually a minor planet orbiting the Sun helped initiate the process in which the universe construed by modern science gradually displaced the ancient mythological cosmos.
Dethronement of the Earth from its former pre-eminent location made it increasingly difficult to sustain the primacy Christian tradition assigned human existence. While it was once accepted everything had a purpose related to human life as centrepiece of God’s creation, such notions became increasingly untenable: “The earth was a minor planet of a not especially distinguished star; astronomical distances were so vast that the earth, in comparison, was a mere pin-point. It seemed unlikely that this immense apparatus was all designed for the good of certain small creatures on this pin-point.”
Drastic as its effects were, the Copernican Revolution was only the beginning of a long process of decline, each step accelerating humankind’s seemingly inexorable fall from grace.
Islands of Consciousness in a Clockwork Universe
The modern Western worldview elaborated in the seventeenth century entailed a rigorously materialistic view of human life and the cosmos founded on the ideas of French philosopher René Descartes and English physicist/mathematician Isaac Newton.
Descartes conceived the cosmos as a giant machine or clockwork mechanism devoid of spirit, life or purpose, functioning in blind obedience to universal mathematical laws. He envisaged the human soul as an immaterial “occupant” of the body. Henceforth people came to experience themselves as an essentially isolated self residing inside the body – literally a “skin-encapsulated ego”.
This view of the cosmos as an elaborate machine was completed with Newton’s identification of the fundamental principles regulating the behaviour of physical matter, discoveries hailed crowning achievements of the Scientific Revolution and the paradigm of all future scientific endeavour.
The Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm profoundly influenced modern views about human life and the cosmos. Earlier conceptions of the universe as divinely created and regulated gave way and science replaced religion as preeminent intellectual authority. Human identity was irrevocably altered: “With the world no longer a divine creation a certain spiritual nobility seemed to have departed from it, an impoverishment that also necessarily touched man, its erstwhile crown.”
Descent of Man
Publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was a momentous historical event with human consequences as significant as those ensuing from the revelations of Copernicus, Descartes, and Newton. In a real sense Darwin’s theory of evolution had an even more immediate and direct impact than did the earlier revelations concerning planetary motion, laws of physics, and mind-body relations.
“The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons”, Darwin acknowledged. “But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.”
Darwin redefined humankind as essentially animal in nature – not divinely created as in Biblical tales of Adam and Eve, but having descended the long chain linking humans to primitive life forms, non-human species, and to our closest biological relatives, apes. Humankind did not originate in some pristine Garden of Eden but a foul, primeval swamp. “If you really want to know where you come from, go to the zoo, and study that parody of yourself, the great ape.”
Humans are merely biological organisms pitted in a struggle for “survival of the fittest”. As end-products of “natural selection” we are simply advanced primates: not sons and daughters of God but offspring of apes with no special relationship to God, no favoured role in creation, perhaps not even a soul.
The Most Wounding Blow
Psychoanalysis was the first modern psychological school to profess in-depth understanding of the human mind. Its founder, Sigmund Freud, claimed the mind’s unconscious realm had vastly more influence than previously realised and that, far from masters of their own destiny, human beings are driven by mental forces whose existence they barely suspect.
Beneath a veneer of civility seethes the primitive unconscious, foul cesspit of perverse libidinal fantasy and sadistic impulses which, Freud claimed, reflect the unvarnished truth about human nature.
Psychoanalysis espoused a decidedly negative and pessimistic view of life and human beings, reflected in its fundamental premise: “Man is a creature whose animal appetites, shaped by the experiences of childhood, constitute the main motivations that drive him to action throughout his life.”
Freud was adamant religion provided no respite from the tragic plight of human life. Belief in God was merely a psychological crutch for an infantile type of mind longing for the emotional security of childhood, while religion itself was no more than a comforting illusion, the “universal neurosis of mankind”.
In revealing the ego’s vulnerability to the power of the unconscious Freud felt psychoanalysis had delivered a fatal yet psychologically justified blow to human pride, its deflationary impact adding to those already inflicted by Copernicus and Darwin.
Cogs in the Machine
While Freud revealed the stark reality of human beings at the mercy of powerful and irrational inner forces, revolutionary socialist Karl Marx exposed the harmful consequences, personal and collective, of capitalist economies.
Marx claimed capitalism “cripples” human beings by alienating them from their true nature and authentic selves, a wounding masked by “commodity fetishism”, a seductively deceptive state wherein material goods assume a life of their own to which people merely adapt.
Marx alleged the capitalist state is run by a ruling class intent on maintaining control over the means of production to the ultimate detriment of a coerced and dehumanised working class who, blinded by the “false consciousness” induced by its social structures, are oblivious to their true plight.
Unrelenting exposure to the dehumanizing impact of mindless routine, debilitating stress, and the insidious assault of mass media erodes human individuality, rendering it ever more tenuous and anonymous. Class culture, declared Marx, “is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine”.
Their destinies subsumed by powerful political and economic imperatives and daily subject to injustice and oppression, many succumb to consumerism, rigid conformism, alienation, and estrangement. Thus are human beings distanced from their glorious estate: “Just as man had become a meaningless speck in the modern universe, so had individual persons become insignificant ciphers in modern states, to be manipulated and coerced by the millions.”
Internet and social media have greatly increased the scope of this manipulation. As one senior Facebook executive recently warned: “You are being programmed. You probably think it can’t happen to you. That attitude makes you even more vulnerable.”
Veil of Perception
While human knowledge and understanding were once expected to increase without limit, such notions came to seem woefully naïve as philosophy gradually undermined prior confidence in its extent and reliability.
In 1690 English philosopher John Locke argued we cannot be sure our mental impressions accurately reflect the objects they supposedly represent. All we can know by direct experience are the contents of our own minds that we naively assume are reliable reflections of an external world. Such confidence is not justified, Locke claimed: human understanding is therefore ineluctably constrained by an impenetrable “veil of perception”.
In 1710 George Berkeley argued that, since it is impossible to get outside the mind to compare mental impressions with objects they supposedly reflect, existence of an outer material world can never be verified, only assumed. “All that can be known with certainty to exist is the mind and its ideas. The ideas in the mind are the final truth.”
In 1748 David Hume maintained that, since the mind is incapable of seeing beyond the veil of its own subjective experience, certain knowledge of reality is unattainable. Because the mind only has direct access to its own experience, the world it apprehends can never be more than its own interpretation of that world.
All human knowledge, even of supposedly “objective” facts, is merely subjective interpretation and thus inescapably relative and fallible, Hume concluded.
Such analyses shattered the Western worldview’s previous confident assumptions. Henceforth human knowledge was understood as nothing more than a complex array of mind-constructed fictions.
These developments had profound implications for ideas about God, the soul, and the meaning of life. While people may choose to believe in God, an immortal soul, or a higher purpose to their lives, they cannot be truly certain of their reality. Thus, religious and spiritual beliefs once thought to be self-evidently true became increasingly suspect.
The West’s quest for understanding undermined confidence in religion and philosophy, two of humankind’s ancient and revered sources of wisdom. As psychologist Carl Jung noted, our rapid intellectual evolution had a profoundly ambiguous legacy: “The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primal oneness with the universe.”
World of Shadows
Early in the twentieth century a stunning revolution occurred that undermined the foundations of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm and provoked total revision of the prevailing scientific worldview.
The radical new conceptual system of quantum theory replaced previous notions of a universe composed of isolated building blocks (atoms) with one comprised of energy in dynamic flux. A momentous conceptual shift had occurred, away from a mechanical view toward a vibrantly animated one in which “things” were replaced by energetic patterns affected by the subject observing them.
Scientists were forced to accept the possibility paradox, mystery, and enigma were in-built features of the cosmos.
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what – that is what our theory amounts to”, declared astrophysicist Arthur Eddington.
Quantum physics had an unprecedented impact on humankind’s perception of reality. The scale of this new worldview was breathtaking, opined Eddington: “The revelation by modern physics of the void within the atom is more disturbing than the revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space.”
The new scientific worldview irrevocably diminished human confidence in its ability to fully comprehend or control awesome mysteries it was uncovering. Science, like philosophy, now faced the prospect of there being matters forever beyond the reach of human comprehension.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we think”, suggested physicist Werner Heisenberg, “it is stranger than we can think.”
As Tarnas observed, humankind’s ardent quest for scientific truth inadvertently exacerbated our sense of helplessness and estrangement: “The intellectual contradictions and obscurities of the new physics only heightened the sense of human relativity and alienation growing since the Copernican revolution.”
Disenchantment
With a seemingly limitless stream of discoveries, insights, and inventions as proof its validity, materialist science was seen as offering the most accurate account of both the natural and human worlds. Eclipsing religion and philosophy, science emerged as the West’s prime intellectual authority and, with the collective beliefs of an educated populace beholden to it, came to define its shared understanding of reality and truth.
As science flourished, traditional religious and esoteric views about human life and the natural world were inexorably displaced. Once seen as being alive and permeated by a divine nature and spirit, the universe was now considered a purely mechanistic affair, an impersonal material realm behaving in accord with mathematical laws and devoid of higher meaning or purpose. In this secular milieu traditional views were rejected as obsolete, and concern with transcendent realities was expunged from scientific discourse. “Science became scientism – scientific materialism and scientific imperialism – which soon became the dominant ‘official’ worldview of modernity. This scientific materialism very soon pronounced other value spheres worthless, ‘not scientific’, illusory, or worse.”
Human beings awakened to an ever more impersonal world, rich in facts but emptied of value and meaning, no longer a realm of divine wonder and mystery but one now shadowed by a haunting sense of alienation and uncertainty: “that new world was disenchanted of all those personal and spiritual qualities that for millennia had given human beings their sense of cosmic meaning”, Tarnas noted. “The new universe was a machine, a self-contained mechanism of force and matter, devoid of goals or purpose, bereft of intelligence or consciousness, its character fundamentally alien to that of man.”
Stripped of the numinous spiritual character attributed to it in all pre-scientific cosmologies, this new worldview carried the full authority of science. Alternate views were tainted with the suspicion of being ill-informed and primitive: “Science may have revealed a cold, impersonal world, but it was the true one nonetheless. Despite any nostalgia for the venerable but now disproved cosmic womb, one could not go backward.”
Losing Consciousness
When psychologist J.B. Watson launched his doctrine of Behaviourism in 1914 he insisted psychology should abandon concern with subjective mental phenomena and focus solely on observable behaviour.
Claiming that “consciousness” and other “mentalistic concepts” such as “mind”, “thinking”, and “feeling” were irrelevant to scientific understanding of human behaviour, Watson urged their banishment from psychology’s lexicon: “Psychology is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs consciousness as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.”
All subjective phenomena – consciousness included – were thereby relegated to imponderable or illusory status: “Unobservable internal events, according to behaviourism, are myths of a pre-scientific age, akin to ghosts and demons. A science of human life should not appeal to such mythical notions, any more than a science of physics should appeal to poltergeists and the intervention of God.”
Behaviourism’s eminently testable claims ensured it soon became the dominant influence in mainstream psychology. As a consequence, academic psychology departments no longer gave consciousness serious attention: “People were to be studied as ‘black boxes’ that received stimuli as input and provided behaviours as output. Correlating the behaviours with the stimuli was all that science needed to say about what goes on inside. If you knew the behaviour corresponding to every stimulus, you knew all there is to know about the mind.”
Advances in neuroimaging technology galvanised the belief contemporary neuroscience would eventually reveal consciousness to be entirely a result of neural activity. Nobel prize-winning scientists like Francis Crick endorsed the view that mind and consciousness are merely reflections of the operation of specialised “awareness neurons” in the “neuronal machine” of the human brain.
The most intimately subjective of all human experiences – the felt inner sense of conscious awareness, personhood and free will – was now considered by many a seductive psychological mirage: “Our experience of ourselves as causally effective agents has come increasingly to be portrayed as mere illusion, with consciousness itself at best a causally ineffectual by-product of the grinding of our neural machinery. There is in reality nobody in charge, no executive. We are nothing but self-organizing packs of neurons.”
Reduction of mind and consciousness to the status of unfathomable “mentalistic concepts” banished phenomena that had intrigued students of human nature for millennia. While psychology’s pioneers regarded consciousness as the primary fact of human existence, by the modern era it had been reduced to a peripheral concern, even an unwelcome distraction.
Assertions once thought outrageous are now regarded as unremarkable. Thus, many neuroscientists would be quite comfortable with psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s bold assertion: “Human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery.”
A Kind Of Aimless Weather
While intellectual and scientific progress over the past five hundred years has been astonishing, the brilliance of these achievements obscures an ominous shadow. The collective achievements of generations of philosophers, theologians, scientists, psychologists and others has yielded a peculiarly ambiguous legacy, at once elevating and diminishing. Spectacular widening of the horizons of human knowledge has been accompanied by relentless erosion of the confidence human beings once enjoyed in their unique identity, status, and role in a universe imbued with cosmic order and sacred purpose.
Although they may have never even heard of Copernicus, Descartes, Kant, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, Marx or Watson, the beliefs, self-image, and outlook of everyone in the modern West have been irrevocably affected by the worldview these seminal thinkers helped create.
All must navigate a world in which religious belief has been rendered suspect, science has exposed human life as the chance result of blind evolutionary processes occurring on an insignificant planet adrift in a vast indifferent cosmos, and consciousness – along with venerable notions of a sacred human soul – have been widely dismissed as illusory artefacts of neural activity.
Knowingly or not, we all must now contend with the stark fact the modern West is the first major civilisation in the history of the human race to spurn the timeless wisdom enshrined in the primal worldview of our ancestors. “This is a stupendous re-orientation”, observes philosopher Anthony Grayling, but “millions have not yet quite grasped this shift of view, still less its implications.”
Recommended Reading
- Richard Tarnas The Passion of the Western Mind
- Thomas Kuhn The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
- A.C. Grayling The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
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