Our modern civilization has no coherent world view. That sentence by physicist David Bohm hit me hard. It rang true because it explains why our social and planetary crises feel so insoluble.
A worldview is the operating system of a culture or a person. It tells us what’s real, what matters, and where we belong in the world. Bohm argues that modern consciousness is fragmented: we experience life as separate, disconnected parts—individuals, factions, nations, races, ideologies—rather than as an integrated whole. Fragmentation breeds conflict and confusion, and makes cooperation nearly impossible. We see ourselves as separate from one another and from nature, and the results are visible everywhere: political disorder, social strife, and ecological destruction.
Medieval Europe had a coherent world view: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Judgment. Everyday life was lived in a larger cosmic drama, with the Church as the institution that connected the mundane to heaven and hell. The average person lived with a sense of purpose. God, saints, angels, the Devil and the dead were real forces in daily life.
After the late Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and global exploration expanded the known world. The cosmic order began shifting from sacramental mystery to a law-governed creation. But early modern Europe still had a worldview. People still lived in a moral universe even as it was increasingly shaped by print, markets, and bureaucracies. Salvation remained an urgent personal matter even as the rise of Protestant sects weakened certainty about who spoke for God.
Today, scattered themes of technology, progress, growth, innovation and choice are the closest thing we have to a worldview. There’s little shared sense of meaning or purpose. Science describes the world with increasing power, but the sacred quality of daily life has faded for most of us. Politics supplies identities and enemies, markets supply incentives, and social media supplies meaning-by-outrage, but none of them can hold a stable moral center.
The result is a familiar paradox: more information, less wisdom; more connection, less trust; more capability, less control. We still crave belonging, meaning and purpose, but in the absence of a shared story, we settle for weak substitutes —tribes, lifestyles, and narratives that can’t scale to a common vision. Meanwhile the physical world, indifferent to our confusion, pushes back through climate change, ecosystem decline, energy constraints, and geopolitical stress.
Iain McGilchrist argues that the core problem of modern thinking is reductionism: treating reality as nothing but parts with no meaning beyond their utility. It’s an abstraction, not the thing itself. But the universe isn’t made of isolated pieces; it’s made of relationships and processes. What we call things are mostly surface appearances of a deeper, dynamic order—always in motion, forever unfolding. When we treat things as primary, we miss the richness of reality, and smother the novelty and wonder of life.
Our brains evolved with two complementary ways of seeing. The left hemisphere narrows its focus, breaks things into parts, and builds simplified models so we can manipulate our environment. It’s oriented toward clarity, certainty, control, and measurable outcomes. It’s indispensable for tools, plans, and engineering—exactly what you’d want for short-term survival.
The right hemisphere takes in the whole. It sees context, relationships, ambiguity, and interconnectedness. It’s attuned to the living world, to empathy and depth, and to the reality that everything is connected and always changing. It keeps us grounded in what matters, not just what is useful.
Breaking reality into component parts is a powerful way to simplify the world, and within science it has delivered enormous gains. But when reductionism becomes the only way of seeing, it flattens life, meaning, value, and moral obligation into whatever can be measured, managed, and exploited. On its own, it becomes predatory.
Healthy culture depends on balance. But the left hemisphere is not content with partnership. It starts to believe its map is the territory, its model is reality. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. It jumps to conclusions and struggles to admit error. Over time, especially in the modern West, its style of attention—control, abstraction, and the belief that nature is a machine—has become dominant. The right hemisphere has atrophied.
We have only to look at the failures in communicating climate change and Covid-19 to see the limits of reductionism. In both cases, specialists produced valuable knowledge inside narrow scientific boundaries, but the public response was shaped by the whole system: politics, media incentives, institutional credibility, human psychology, and the uneven distribution of costs and benefits. Climate models and virology were never the whole story, yet they were often used to dictate policy by themselves.
That mismatch mattered. Many official statements were more certain than the data justified, and guidance went further than the situation required. When new information emerged and directives shifted, many people concluded that the experts either didn’t understand the world as it is or weren’t telling the truth.
Public trust was lost. Climate science is now dismissed by many as alarmism or as a pretext for economic and social repression by elites. Public health and immunology are increasingly viewed as either a failure to protect or a rationale for government overreach.
The United States has become “a sadder, meaner, and more pessimistic country,” wrote David Brooks. The deepest cultural wound isn’t politics or economics, he argued; it’s the loss of a shared moral order. When nothing is sacred—no heroes, no texts, no ideals—anxiety rises, people retreat into isolation, and self-interest becomes the only directive.
Brooks is describing the loss of a guiding mythology. In a reductionist age, myth has become a synonym for something naïve or false. But for most of human history, it functioned as our collective memory: a shared symbolic template that helped people choose wisdom over expediency and duty over impulse.
Joseph Campbell believed the real engine of civilization isn’t control; it’s aspiration. When a society’s stories and ideals align with lived experience, they inspire creativity, sacrifice, and cohesion. Living myth reconciles us to the mystery of existence, gives us a unified world-image, binds us to a moral order, and, most vitally, guides the individual toward inner wholeness.
It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religion, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
When traditional mythologies lose their power to unify and guide, science and technology step in—not as true replacements, but as symptoms of deeper fragmentation. What once grounded people in shared meaning is replaced by a material focus that leaves us spiritually empty. That’s the modern world.
This is not an argument against technology. It’s a warning about what happens when we pursue manipulation and control without the moral framework to use power wisely. That’s the lesson of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: the wizard’s student uses a spell to make a broom do his chores, but he doesn’t understand what he has unleashed and can’t stop the process once it starts. Power without wisdom becomes chaos.
Myth operates on two levels. At the deepest level are what Adolf Bastian called elementary ideas: universal patterns rooted in the human psyche—birth, death, separation, ordeal, renewal, and wonder. These don’t become outdated because they’re part of who we are. What can become obsolete are Bastian’s ethnic ideas: the cultural packaging of those patterns as particular gods, cosmologies, rituals, and institutional forms. In an age of rapid technological change, social flux, and pluralism, many inherited forms no longer match how people actually live, so their vitality weakens. People lose contact with the perennial wisdom those traditions still carry.
Many thoughtful contemporary figures recognize the problem, but their instinct is to retreat into medieval religion as the remedy. In a recent Oxford lecture, for example, Peter Thiel described fragmentation and the loss of the larger whole in terms similar to Bohm and McGilchrist, yet framed the context in biblical categories of Antichrist and Armageddon.
Campbell argued that what’s needed is reformulation similar to what happened in the Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE), when new spiritual and philosophical frameworks arose that still anchor civilizations today. Those teachings emerged amid upheaval. The spread of iron weapons and mobile warfare intensified political instability. Growing populations, expanding trade and state power, and widening literacy produced social and cultural dislocations. The old myths no longer fit the circumstances. Visionaries such as the Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, and the Hebrew prophets reworked perennial truths into forms appropriate to their times. Jesus and Muhammad later built on that earlier foundation.
Modernity has unleashed forces of its own, and Axial Age forms are wearing thin. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam embrace the fallacy that spirit is separate from nature. Western culture has been at war with nature through technology. The Old Testament God is frequently portrayed as unpredictable, wrathful, and jealous—qualities that mirror nature’s indifference to our plans. From that perspective, prayer, ritual, and sacrifice can function not only as gratitude and devotion, but as a hedge against the dangerous side of reality: an attempt to negotiate with, appease, or secure protection from God-as-Nature. I think much of the West’s scriptural preoccupation with apocalypse grows from an unconscious realization that we are violating the order of things through our abuse of the natural world.
The widespread adoption of fossil fuels, especially oil, in the quarter-century after World War II accelerated prosperity and technological power on a scale unique in human history. Complexity expanded with it. And with that came new vulnerabilities, new forms of dependence, and new system-wide consequences. The ground beneath inherited meanings began to shift, again.
David Brooks has identified what may become the defining theme of the twenty-first century: a collapse of trust in government, education, finance, science, and even in ourselves. We yearn for a way to live that isn’t just lurching from one crisis to the next. Wendell Berry argues that this is the social consequence of deeper intellectual and moral incoherence: modern life is divided into silos, each with its own jargon and motives, each largely ignorant of what lies outside its narrow purview, until real conversation across boundaries dies.
The business of universities has become fundraising and administration rather than eduction. Science treats people and the world like laboratory equipment. Economics is absorbed in elegant equations while losing contact with physical reality. Government has become a patronage machine. The public concludes that everyone is pursuing self-interest until checked by stronger self-interest. Trust collapses everywhere, not only in politics.
The new Axial Age has not yet materialized but Berry has given us something to ponder. Can we learn to live as creatures—members of the world—instead of insisting on being its masters? That is the central question of our time, and it will decide whether we find a way through the metacrisis—or deepen the planetary predicament until it breaks us.
By the same author:
Requiem For An Oil Glut
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
|
|Back to Title|
LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE
LINK TO THE HOME PAGE
