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This pioneering holistic work is still one of the best discussions of the spiritual havoc wrought by the 'disgodding' of nature and the split in the Western mind between facts and values. -Chip Brown, The List

This pioneering holistic work is still one of the best discussions of the spiritual havoc wrought by the 'disgodding' of nature and the split in the Western mind between facts and values. -Chip Brown, The List Morris Berman's book addresses what I consider to be the most important topic at our present moment in history. He is searching for the underpinnings of a new world view that can give rise to a culture capable of relating gently and self-sustainingly to the earth. -Frederick Ferre

The malaise of modernity, its cause and cure: a historian of science vividly diagnoses the familiar Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian syndrome and convincingly - more or less - prescribes heavy doses of Gregory Bateson. Berman gets his title from Max Weber and his analyses of the disenchanted world from all over the lot. Blake attacked Single vision & Newton's sleep (i.e., a frigidly mechanistic approach to nature), and Berman quotes him. He cites Jung's rehabilitation of alchemy, and praises alchemists for their attempt to practice science erotically, blending the sacred and the manipulative, unlike the heirs of Descartes who champion nonparticipating consciousness and the fantasy-abstraction of the value-free, objective observer. Berman enlists the aid of Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, and others in attacking ego psychology and its rationalist proponents, from Freud to Rollo May. For any sort of livable future, Berman argues, the Idol of the Head, the reified monster of angst-ridden Western individualism, will have to go. This paranoid construct (Lacan) is the basis of the frenzied competition, ecological havoc, dehumanized capitalism, and nuclear madness now harrowing us. And the best bet for a remedy is Batesonian holism, which doesn't separate fact and value, mind and body, subject and object; which views nature relationally, stresses the unconscious, prizes wisdom, beauty, grace over conscious, empirical control of matter. Berman is vague about how this humane epistemology might be translated into politics, but he makes, on the whole, a very strong case. If none of the components of his synergistic manifesto is original, he still shapes them and combines them with powerful lucidity - never drifting into the sentimentality of counter-cultural dreamers, even faulting Bateson on a number of issues. Some solid lessons in the history of ideas together with cogently presented radical cultural criticism: popularization at a high level. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Morris Berman is an Independent Scholar and Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America. His books include Coming to Our Senses, Wandering God, The Twilight of American Culture, and Dark Ages America.

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