Lapis Magazine

The First Int’l Registry of Social Scientists Literate in the Holistic Worldview by Gerardo Menendez

The holistic worldview has swayed many of the greatest minds of our time, and is a source of meaning and life orientation for millions around the world. However, a comprehensive account of this momentous social and cultural phenomenon has not yet been developed. Whereas the academic social sciences have remained almost blind to the emergence of new holistic values, those who embrace the holistic worldview have underestimated the need for an approach to their own culture from a rigorous, social science standpoint. Without a clear understanding of the holistic impulse, it is impossible to arrive at an accurate assessment of the forces currently driving social change and religious concern.

Gathering the Mavericks

Even if the academic social sciences as a whole have not paid heed to the holistic worldview and its social manifestations, academic institutions in the US and the world contain a surprising number of individual scholars and research groups acquainted with and interested in the holistic view, often stealthily gearing their academic work towards holistic issues and problems.

As with the holistic community at large, these professionals tend to lack a consciousness of their dimensions as a group, which hampers their potential to influence the priorities in the academic world.

Lapis would like to help to change this situation by allowing a hitherto disconnected collection of thinkers to become a functioning community that knows and discusses its members’ works, exchanges ideas and influences the academic agenda — thereby yielding beneficial results to society.

The first of these measures is the creation of the first international registry of social science academics that are literate in the holistic worldview. Gerardo R. Menendez, PhD, a pioneering sociologist of holism trained in Uruguay and Brazil, has already initiated the registry, which begins below with Martin Albrow.

This is a work in progress. Titles published by the authors will soon be added and further contact information included. We encourage readers to contact the registry’s author, Dr. Gerardo Menendez, at grm226@nyu.edu , to add their comments and suggestions.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTRY OF SOCIAL SCIENTISTS LITERATE IN THE HOLISTIC WORLDVIEW

Martin Albrow

Sociologist, Emeritus Professor of the University of Wales, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics

Albrow maintains that the Modern age is ending and is being supplanted by a new “epochal configuration” that he calls the “Global Age.” The transition, however, is subject to a fundamental paradox: “If everything new is by definition modern, then modernity cannot grasp its own end as the beginning of a new epoch.” Modernity claims “any innovation as its own, even a ‘new age,’” it “cannot imagine the future except as its own continuation, or else chaos.” Albrow suggests that the social sciences and their diagnoses are also products of the expiring period: either modernity or nothing. Even those social theorists that recognize globalization as a profound transformation, see it as an unbroken continuation or even an apogee of the modern era. The same applies to those who speak of a new “reflexive modernity,” and of “post-modernity.” To Albrow, post-modernity is the latest self-undermining expression of modernity. He belongs to a tiny minority of cultural sociologists who are not satisfied with the choice between everlasting modern rationality and the post-modern “victory of the irrational.”

Albrow contends that the principle of modernity is not rationality alone, but the use of the rationality/irrationality dichotomy, where both sides feed on each other, even to the point of the advocacy of irrationality by the post-moderns. Albrow believes that the paradoxical nature of the current transition is properly expressed by Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a “paradigm shift.” The “old paradigm” (modernity) is marked by binary logic, it rests on the belief that “yes” and “no”, true and false, rational and irrational are mutually exclusive, and that “there is nothing between being and not being. “Increase knowledge and ignorance diminishes; increase control and the world becomes more predictable.” To Albrow, there is no escape from modernity through ideas and binary logic alone. He points out that a central factor in the current “paradigm shift” has been exchange with civilizations such as India and China, which operate “with different conceptual frames in totally different configurations (karma, yin/yang).”

The new Global Age implies the resumption of pre-modern and non-modern directions, Albrow says. “If we acknowledge the contribution of the pre-modern and the non-Western we are better able to offer a positive conceptualization of an age after the modern.” Another central aspect of the new age, in Albrow’s view, is the inclusion of humanity’s encounters with nature, with factors outside the internal logic of intellectual rationalization. That is why “ecologists write better history than sociologists.” Neither the green nor the women’s movement are dominated by an intellectual elite the way socialism was. The new age has not been the product of intellectuals. Albrow advocates for a new kind of social science that leaves the modernist paradigm.

Wouter Hanegraff

Wouter Hanegraaff is a cultural historian (PhD, University of Utrecht, 1996), Full Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, and President of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.

Hanegraaff has specialized in Western Esotericism and the New Age Movement. Western culture, according to Hanegraaff, has been historically dominated by the polarity between Greek rationality and biblical faith, which subjugated a vast third current characterized by resistance to either pure rationality or doctrinal faith. This underground “third component of Western culture” is the Hermetic or Esoteric tradition, which amalgamates from the Gnostic and Hermeticist schools of antiquity, to Alchemy and various Medieval sects, to the Renaissance revival of numerous ancient forms of mysticism, to 16th century secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. In modern times, the esoteric tradition would subside while emphasis was placed on the opposition between Christian theology and Enlightenment rationality. But it was to have a new resurgence starting in the late 19th century in the form of Theosophy and the contemporary esoteric milieu.

Hanegraaff’s reflections have focused on the elusive relations between traditional esotericism and the New Age movement, a strongly polemical issue, as “serious” practitioners cast New Age beliefs as trivialized and commercialized travesties of “real” esotericism. Hanegraaff’s approach endeavors to avoid the polemic and apologetic style that marks most literature on Western esotericism by bringing in rigorous academic scholarship. Conversely, it seeks to legitimize an area of study regarded as inherently suspect by the academic community. From the outset, Hanegraaff was clear that interest for this sort of issue could easily endanger a scholar’s prestige among colleagues. However, he contends that this is an attitude that has blinded academics to fundamental aspects of our cultural development and our present culture.

Kyriacos Markides

Kyriacos Markides is a sociologist (PhD, Wayne State University, 1970) and Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Maine.

An acclaimed expert in Christian mysticism and the spiritual traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Markides is the author of six books on mystical Christian teachers and healers, and on Orthodox Christianity in Greece and his native Cyprus. His work combines the skepticism of a trained sociologist with the passion of a disciple, for which it has been widely compared to that of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. Markides is an extremely rare case of an academic sociologist at the same time interested in and influenced by holistic spirituality. Even more unusual, Markides has made his blend of observer and apprentice of the orthodox spiritual traditions his main theme of research at Maine’s sociology department, enjoying both full respectability as an academic and wide recognition as an inspirational author in the world of spirituality. Markides’ books have been published in 6 languages. During the last 15 years he has offered workshops throughout the US, Canada and overseas at such holistic centers as The New York Open Center and Omega Institute.

Alexandra Owen

Alexandra Owen is a social and cultural historian (PhD, University of Sussex, 1987), and Professor at the Department of History, Northwestern University.

A social and cultural historian specializing in 19th and 20th Century Britain, Owen is the author of The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. In this book, Owen draws attention to a phenomenon so far disregarded by the social sciences, and which defies the conventional magic-religion-science view of the march of cultural evolution. Owen contends that the received view of the late 19th century British intellectual scene as dominated by Darwinist scientism needs to be tempered by consideration of the then burgeoning and vibrant fin-de-siècle occultism, a broad pan-European and American movement dedicated to a variety of unorthodox spiritual activities that can be loosely termed “occult.” Owen sets out to suggest that this movement represented a “paradigmatic shift” that demands a revision of our traditional understanding both of modernity and of spirituality. In Owen’s words, she “set out to show that the new spirituality is itself constitutive of modernity,” which in turn implies “an argument about the nature of “‘the modern.’” Such argument would challenge both our traditional understanding of modern culture as characterized by a strictly secular-scientific outlook, and of occultism as necessarily opposed to the dictates of rationalism.

Owen suggests that the new spiritual movement “represented a paradigmatic shift” in which the universe and the place of humankind within it were rationalized but brought back into sharply spiritual focus.” In the occult arena, science was conceived as the handmaid of wisdom, and rational inquiry was dedicated to purely spiritual ends. In this sense, Owen contends, the book implies an adjustment to work in the sociology of religion, which—with its roots in the various approaches of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim—has often concerned itself with the so-called secularization thesis. More particularly, it represents an adjustment to the Weberian idea that modern “intellectual rationalization” and its concomitant institutionalization spelled an inherent process of “disenchantment.” Owen explains that far from being at odds with the modern outlook, the new spiritual movement was in close alignment with some of the most important intellectual currents and concerns of the day.

Paul H. Ray

Paul H. Ray is a sociologist (BA, cum laude, in Anthropology, Yale University; PhD in Sociology, University of Michigan) and Director of the Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture at Wisdom University.

Ray is widely known as co-author with psychologist Sherry Anderson of the successful book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World published in 2000. Ray contends that we live a “time of the between,” a time of transition between historical eras, a stage as much of danger as of promise, where the fate of humanity is at a great divide. On one hand, civilization is in danger of disintegration under the contradictions and maladies of Western modernity. On the other hand, an unheralded worldview and a coherent new subculture have been stealthily taking shape during the last quarter of a century, swaying as much as a quarter to a third of all adults in Western developed societies. This is the group that Ray and Anderson call the Cultural Creatives: fifty million Americans and seventy to eighty million Europeans “who care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationship, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self actualization, spirituality and self-expression.”

According to Ray, the cognitive stance and the value system of the Cultural Creatives transcends the two mindsets that have polarized Western culture: the traditional and the modern. In Ray’s view, the Cultural Creatives are the group that can lead the way for the integration of a planetary “Wisdom Civilization” that cuts across cultures and manages diversity within unity, prompting a range of positive developments, from more sustainable production to advance in social justice and human rights. According to Ray, the biggest impediment for this kind of scenario to take hold is the lack of awareness that the Cultural Creatives have of their own significance and power as a group.

Pablo Seman

Pablo Seman is a sociologist and anthropologist (BA, University of Buenos Aires; PhD, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), and Professor at the University of San Martin, Argentina.

Seman specializes in mass culture, and has reflected widely on the interpenetration between popular literature and religious traditions. Seman contends that there are both popular writers deeply rooted in cosmological traditions, as well as readers who, based on these traditions, resort to popular books to build “dense and systematic religious expectations.” Seman’s empirical research has focused on Argentinean and Brazilian society, where he has verified a high consumption of books related to New Age religiosity. For several years Seman has devoted himself to the study of the societal reception of the work of Brazilian novelist and spirituality icon Paulo Coelho. Seman suggests the emergence of a whole new genre that he calls “contemporary spiritual literature.” He affirms that these books inspired by spirituality, even those of the “lowest” pop-culture quality, do not fail to mobilize and nurture cosmological worldviews often considered incompatible with modern secular culture. He also points out that this literature typically prescribes some kind of practical work on the self (such as meditation, diet, prayer, breathing and so on). These injunctions are based upon a notion of the person that distances itself from the dualistic notions consecrated by modernity, in favor of the idea of a continuum of connections between the spiritual, the psychological and the biological. Seman concludes that contemporary spiritual and New Age literature convey a generalized shift in models and paradigms of the person in such a way that the classical modern boundaries lose their validity and the sacred reenters the scene.

Boaventura de Souza Santos

Boaventura de Souza Santos is a sociologist (PhD, Yale University, 1971) and Director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra.

Santos is a leading Portuguese social theorist and internationally recognized authority in the area of the sociology of law. He has written and published profusely on the issue of globalization and has been a prominent participant and mentor of the World Social Forum. In 1995 he published Toward a New Common Sense. Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigm Transition. The central thesis of the book is that “the paradigm of modernity has exhausted all its possibilities of renovation, and that the continuation of its prevalence as the dominant paradigm is due only to historical inertia.” Santos holds that we live in a “period of paradigmatic transition” similar to the one that occurred “in the scientific revolution or in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Santos says that knowledge according to the emergent paradigm tends to be non-dualistic and is based on the suppression of all the familiar distinctions that, until very recently, were considered obvious: subject/object; nature/culture; natural/artificial; mind/matter; observer/observed; subjective/objective. After the dismal consequences of modern science and technology, Santos raises the notion of a “prudent knowledge for a decent life” and defends an “ecology of knowledges.”

Otávio Velho

Otávio Velho is an anthropologist (MA in Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1970; PhD, University of Manchester, 1973), Full Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and President of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science.

Velho is a leading Brazilian anthropologist with a leaning toward sociology and political science. Since his early work, Velho has called attention to the relevance of Orientalist and non-dualistic views in our culture. He has also stressed the need to transcend the mere sociological analysis of these philosophies, and to take them seriously in their epistemological implications for the social sciences. In this vein, he has pointed out the tendency of social scientists to oversimplify the New Age and related phenomena, with some scholars reducing it to an exacerbation of Western individualism, and others suggesting a “paradigm shift” in culture — in the end, a Western concept itself. Velho believes that in order to comprehend these new views, the social sciences will have to transform themselves deeply.

In recent years, Velho has written about the needed transformations of anthropology in the wake of the crisis of Cartesian dualism and classical modernity. Based upon the ideas of anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Tim Ingold, Velho challenges the received ideas about the duty of anthropology. The crisis of Cartesian dualism is the crisis of oppositions, as in mind-body and culture-nature. This renders the anthropologist’s duty as deeper and more complex than simply “to go native.” Anthropologists should not only learn about humans and their societies, they should open themselves to new possibilities of being. To assume the native’s point of view does not seem to be achievable without a risk of contagion, Velho says. And contagion can very well be a saving experience for the scholar, as in the case of the anthropologist who found the cure for his own cancer in the practices and world views of the West African sorcerers that he studied. Velho advocates an opening up of anthropology and the social sciences, in ways suggested by Imanuel Wallerstein. The new social science should recognize its studied subjects not so much as informants but as interlocutors, and its aim should be not to produce definitive truth, but to promote dialogue between “alternative modernities,” leading to the constitution of a “transmodernity.”

Tomas Rodriguez Villasante

Tomas Rodriguez Villasante is a sociologist (PhD in Political Science and Sociology, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1982) and a Full Professor of Sociology, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.

In his capacity as an urban sociologist, Rodriguez Villasante has reflected intensely on the implications and use of the new science of complexity for social research and social action. Rodriguez Villasante points out that such ancient philosophies as Taoism, Zen Buddhism and the Socratic method agree with today’s science in giving value to paradoxical questions with no apparent solution, questions that can broaden the reasoning capacity of a system. This kind of paradoxical logic, Villasante suggests, is instrumental to emancipatory social practices, as with the passive cunning of women’s resistance against patriarchy, or of some colonized peoples against empires. Villasante calls these practices “reversive” (of “yes but no.”) All these practices situate us in contexts that broaden the reductionistic and closed typologies of academia. Drawing upon the ideas of sociologists and philosophers as Jesus Ibanez, Pablo Navarro, Edgar Morin, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Boaventura de Souza Santos, Villasante proposes new methodological strategies that go beyond not only quantitative positivism, but also more subtle forms of reductionism alive in the methods of “participant observation.”

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Gerardo R. Menendez, PhD, is a pioneering sociologist of holism trained in Uruguay and Brazil who works closely with Lapis on our project of bringing together academics who are making serious and well informed studies of the holistic movement.