Morris Berman | |
---|---|
Born | Rochester, New York, United States | August 3, 1944
Occupation | Educator, scholar, writer |
Language | English, Spanish |
Nationality | American |
Citizenship | US (born); Mexico (resides) |
Alma mater | Cornell University (BA, Mathematics, 1966) Johns Hopkins University (PhD, History of Science, 1971) |
Notable works | The Reenchantment of the World, The Twilight of American Culture |
Notable awards | Rollo May Center Grant (1992) Neil Postman Award (2013) |
Website | |
Dark Ages America |
Morris Berman (born August 3, 1944) [1] is an American historian and social critic. He earned a BA in mathematics at Cornell University in 1966 and a PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. [2] Berman is an academic humanist cultural critic who specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history.
Berman has served on the faculties of a number of universities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Berman emigrated from the U.S. to Mexico in 2006, where he was a visiting professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico City from 2008 to 2009. During this period he continued writing for various publications including Parteaguas, a quarterly magazine. [3]
Berman has written several books for a general audience. [4] They deal with the state of Western civilization and with an ethical, historically responsible, or enlightened approach to living within it. His work emphasizes the legacies of the European Enlightenment and the historical place of present-day American culture.
He wrote a trilogy on consciousness and spirituality, published between 1981 and 2000, and another trilogy on the American decline, published between 2000 and 2011. Book reviewer George Scialabba commented:
Most historians would be content to have written one deeply researched and interpretively wide-ranging trilogy on a large and important subject. Berman has written two... The second trilogy, a grimly fascinating inventory of the pathologies of contemporary America and an unsparing portrait of American history and national character, is a masterpiece. [5]
The term participating consciousness was introduced by Berman in The Re-enchantment of the World (1981) [6] [7] expanding on Owen Barfield's concept of "original participation," to describe an ancient mode of human thinking that does not separate the perceiver from the world he or she perceives. Berman says that this original world view has been replaced during the past 400 years with the modern paradigm called Cartesian, Newtonian, or scientific, which depends on an isolated observer, proposing that we can understand the world only by distancing ourselves from it.
Max Weber, early 20th-century German sociologist, was concerned with the "disenchantment" he associated with the rise of modernity, capitalism, and scientific consciousness. Berman traces the history of this disenchantment. He argues that the modern consciousness is destructive to both the human psyche and the planetary environment. Berman challenges the supremacy of the modern world view and argues for some new form of the older holistic tradition, which he describes as follows:
"Participating consciousness" involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene. Alchemy, as it turns out, was the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West."
In 1990, Berman received the Governor's Writers Award (Washington State) for his book Coming to Our Senses. [8] In 1992, he was the recipient of the first annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies. In 2000, Berman's book The Twilight of American Culture was named one of the ten most recommended books of the year by the Christian Science Monitor [9] and was named a "Notable Book" by The New York Times . [10] In 2013 he received the "Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity" from the Media Ecology Association. [11] Berman moved to Mexico in 2006 where he continues to reside as of 2023 [update] . [3]
James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
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In social science, disenchantment is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, in which "the world remains a great enchanted garden".
Reuben Hersh was an American mathematician and academic, best known for his writings on the nature, practice, and social impact of mathematics. Although he was generally known as Reuben Hersh, late in life he sometimes used the name Reuben Laznovsky in recognition of his father's ancestral family name. His work challenges and complements mainstream philosophy of mathematics.
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The Ādittapariyāya Sutta, is a discourse from the Pali Canon, popularly known as the Fire Sermon. In this discourse, the Buddha preaches about achieving liberation from suffering through detachment from the five senses and mind.
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I was Ph.D. from Hopkins in 1971 as well. All my bios, including Wikipedia, have it as 1972, but in fact it was 15 Feb 1971. Go figure.