The Consciousness Reformation

图书介绍

For some years, a gradual, largely imperceptible, yet overwhelmingly profound cultural shift has been taking place in American society. This shift has wrought changes in our basic conceptions of ourselves and in the meanings we ascribe to our worlds. Although there are perhaps many ways in which to describe this shift, its fundamental components can be readily identified: an ever declining willingness to attribute the ultimate governance of life to the supernatural; a correlative decline in the rugged individualistic ethos that flourished so prominently throughout the nineteenth century and that even today has far from disappeared; a dramatic increase in the prevalence of scientific understandings of life and perhaps most significantly of social scientific understandings which emphasize the importance of social, economic, and cultural forces in human affairs; and more recently, and therefore as yet less profound, an increase in the popularity of what might be called mystical or experiential understandings of reality which rely more on intuitive insights into the nature and meaning of life than on logical or philosophical explanations.
Societies are organized with reference to systems of ultimate meaning such as those just described. Conceptions of the forces ultimately and eternally governing reality serve either to undergird or to undermine systems of political authority, methods of distributing scarce economic resources, styles of family life, and standards of moral conduct in relation to one's self and to one's neighbor. When these conceptions change, changes in the concrete patterns of societies often follow. Our interest in the present volume is to examine the effects that the current cultural shift away from theism and individualism and toward science and mysticism is having in both the private and public realms of society. We are concerned chiefly with documenting the great extent to which the public's willingness to support or participate in various efforts to change life styles and social arrangements, on the one hand, and its tendency to resist such changes, on the other, is influenced by its location with respect to the alternative conceptions of reality that are now competing for ascendancy. Although much of our discussion is concerned with describing these influences in a strictly contemporary setting, we also present historical evidence which situates the cultural shifts at issue in a broader perspective and which allows some educated speculations to be made about the future.