Winner of the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award! This fresh perspective on
crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures
have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into
the minds of a vast range of different peoples: early hunter-gatherers
and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders
of Christianity, trail-blazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those
who constructed our modern consumer society. Taking the reader on an
archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and
sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and
systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's
cultural norms. Uprooting the tired cliches of the science-religion
debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an
incubator for scientific thought, which in turn shaped our modern vision
of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of
unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human
nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental
patterns that could conceivably be reshaped. By shining a light on our
possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two
contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of
artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future
arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural
world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play
a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.
