The American Psyche in Search of its Soul: A Meditation on Government, Business, Science, Education, Media and Family

Life in ancient and medieval times - teeming with poverty, disease, early death, cruelty and war - was hardly enviable. The concern of the Enlightenment was to alter this. Rather than a world of countless suffering serfs and a few princes living in luxury off of everyone else's labor, a great humanitarian endeavor was undertaken to elevate suffering humanity and provide a good life for all. The value of this endeavor is undeniable. But the cost has been enormous. In far too many ways, the Enlightenment agenda of open-minded scientific inquiry and the unfettered exercise of human reason has been overwhelmed by commercialism and turned into scientism and group-think. Now we are the heirs of 'Logical Positivism', a philosophical endeavor that seeks to impose scientific thinking into every aspect of our lives by suggesting that all forms of human knowledge should aspire to the same sort of rigorous rationality as science. Thus do we attempt to reject all the wonder and mystery of life, which means, on the one hand, that we are lying to ourselves (under the guise of being rational and intellectually sophisticated), and on the other hand, that our constricted minds have seceded from our emotions and intuitions, shattering the soul into fragments. This enormous encroachment of scientific methodology into all aspects of human life, coupled with the barren assumptions that all of creation can be explained by mechanics and all of human psychology can be explained by sexual and monetary greed, confers a dead, hollow universe, increasingly filled with violence and terror, in which a debased humanity finds no greater purpose than to go shopping. "The American Psyche in Search of its Soul" is about restoring a genuine sense of meaning and purpose to our lives and culture.