230520

The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Chapter 12: The Modern and Post-Modern Worlds

The ‘unworlding of the world’

Virginia Woolf is quoted as saying, ‘… on or about December 1910 human character changed’, but McGilchrist believes that the beginning of the modern era was less an avalanche after unexpected snow, than a landslide following years of erosion (p. 389). The changes affected all aspects of life: the ways in which we conceive the world, relate to one another and see ourselves in relation to the cosmos.

Modernity was marked by social disintegration, drift from rural to urban life, breakdown of familiar social orders, loss of a sense of belonging, and advances of scientific materialism and bureaucracy. Connection and cultural continuity were supplanted by capitalism, consumerism, greed, competition, adulation of power, and the rise of totalitarianism.  Industrial capitalism, abstraction, bureaucratism, social dislocation, globalisation, mobility, extreme pace of change in the physical environment, and fragmentation of social bonds, emptied life of meaning and destroyed the attachment to place and sense of belonging, which in turn threatened identity and sense of community.

The culture of modernity is characterised by a hunger for certainty, and reflects a world increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere.

Continue to:

Links

Link to: Chapter 12 Commentary

Link to: Image Credits

BACK