When Hollywood and NASA join forces and send Matt Damon to Mars to grow potatoes, science becomes propaganda. Thousands sign up for a one way trip to Mars, the stock of Elon Musk companies goes up. My new book explains why this is bad for us.
Are Google, Facebook and the Mass Media “communities” the true embodiments of McLuhan’s Global Village, or are they, like Hannah Arendt warned us, the “iron band pressing masses of isolated men together, preparing each individual in his lonely isolation to set totalitarian movement into motion”?
The 21st century arrived in the splendor of scientific progress and the promise of a better world. It brought us instead, a drastic increase in violence, from individual acts of terror to the looming threat of global conflicts. Many of us see the world as spinning out of control and are longing to restore balance and meaning to our lives. The purpose of this book is to provide the understanding of the present troubles and the compass guiding the reader through the turbulent seas ahead of us.
The first part of the book provides a new theoretical framework for an understanding of the social dynamics of the modern world. The author started his search from the position of a technologist and atheist, assuming that science would provide the answers. Unexpectedly, he found out; science can not do that. The explanation is, somewhat surprisingly, that the prevalent “world centered” secular scientism, grounded in Cartesian dualism, separated our minds from our bodies 400 years ago. Since then, scientists are trying to convince us that the disembodied reason and logic replaced religious beliefs with “objective scientific truths." This book argues that they just replaced one set of beliefs with another.
Fortunately, there is a parallel, “human-centered” school of thinkers which this book explores. Starting with Anaxagoras, Aristoteles and Aquinas, leading up to the 20th century phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and George Mead, the biology of Wolfgang Kohler and Gerald Edelman, the psychology of Esther Thelen and the neural science of Walter Freeman, even the physics of Ilya Prigogine and the economics of Ludwig von Mises, these thinkers reconnected our minds with our bodies, and elevated man to the center stage of nature. The book argues that it is their ideas which may restore the balance and bring meaning again into our lives.