Quantum physicist David Bohm has said that to become wholistic thinkers and feeling beings we must drop the mechanistic order that virtually all of us have been conditioned in for the past 400 years. Our thought structures, and therefore the manner in which we conceptualize and communicate, have been guided by mechanistic themes, rather than from a deep sense of the whole weave each of us is an intrinsic part of, that everything is richly interconnected with everything else. Such mechanistic order is expressed through what Bohm calls the Cartesian Grid, where virtually everything has been contained and conditioned by our notions of order, our thinking, our senses, our feelings, our intuitions, our physical movement, our relationships with other people and society, in fact, every phase of our lives. We have been in a terrible, claustrophobic box that cannot see life as it really is. We make it up.
So we have to look at thought itself as a major cause of our problems. We accept the political and economic structures that exist as if they are written in stone, and have been with us forever. It is helpful to remind ourselves that everything cultural is a creation of human beings, and can be changed at any time it is deemed important or necessary to enhance species survival and enjoyment. Modern Western man has become addicted to materialism which has contaminated our thinking process and values such that we have become individualistic rather than communitarian beings, acquisitive rather than inquisitive, and competitive rather than cooperative. We are working against our intrinsic, archetypal nature.
The wise Australian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, in his classic work, Man makes Himself (1936), concluded (now the language would substitute “human(s)” for “man/men”): “Just because tradition is created by societies of men and transmitted in distinctively human and rational ways, it is not fixed and immutable: it is constantly changing as society deals with ever new circumstances. Tradition makes the man, by circumscribing his behavior within certain bounds; but it is equally true that man makes the traditions. And so, we can repeat with deeper insight, Man makes himself.”
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After reading this, I would suggest that you’ll definitely want to check out Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, which puts the whole shebang in historical context (something connected with this on my last post at The Dark Age Blog (soon to be retired) on the “emergence of Probable Man”
http://www.darkage.ca/blog/_archives/2009/12/29/4415375.html
I’d suggest reading Lynn White Jr.’s essay “”Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology”
White argues that a mechanistic world view is very deeply embedded in Western culture, with evidence going back all the way into the 9th century:
The first symptom of this tendency to identify advanced technology with high morality appeared in the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht University Library, Aevum med., script. eccles. 484), illuminated near Rheims between 816 and 834. Bruce Spiegelberg of Colby College has pointed out to me the clear implication of fol. 35v (Fig. 2) decorating Psalm 63 (64). On the right is the Psalmist being blessed by God and protected by an angel and a small band of the righteous. On the left are the evil-doers. Between them lies a pit (of Hell?) or snare (cf. verse 6). The central intrest of the picture lies in the sharpening of a sword in each camp (cf. verse 4), but by very different means. The iniquitous are content to employ an old fashioned whetstone. The virtuous, in spectacular contrast, are using the first known example of the rotary grindstone, and it is being turned by the first mechanical crank to appear outside China. Since the substitution of continuous rotary motion for reciprocating motion was basic to the development of machine design, this illumniation marks a great moment in the history of technology. But its psychological content is no less portentous than its purely technological import.”
185-186
Medieval Religion and Technology
collected essays
lynn white, Jr
university of california press, berkeley
1978
Thanks for deepening this probing. The first person who got me thinking about the relationship between tools/machines and human thinking?soul is Lewis Mumford, and it goes on from there all the way to Derrick Jensen.