The Patterning Instinct
A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning
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The Patterning Instinct
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Narrated by:
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Derek Perkins
This fresh perspective on crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different peoples: early hunter-gatherers and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders of Christianity, trailblazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those who constructed our modern consumer society.
Taking the listener on an archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's cultural norms. Uprooting the tired clichés of the science-religion debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which, in turn, shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped. By shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.
©2017 Jeremy Lent and Fritjof Capra (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Fantastic book
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Phenomenal
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What did you like most about The Patterning Instinct?
It provides a comprehensive learning experience through the history of man and presents a compelling argument for the routing of understanding and being. It's written expansively, sympathetically, transparently, compassionately and with a focus and pacing that impels one to continue on.Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
As someone quite new to reading deeply into the human condition and its developments, this book further motivated me to continue my learning. It taught me much and opened my mind to many new discoveries and yet many new questions.Any additional comments?
I can highly recommend this book. The narration is strong and intelligent and Jeremy Lent's effort here is to be seriously considered and pondered upon. I will surely look into his future work, of which I hope there is much.Broad and Focused
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Wide-ranging and thought-provoking
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This particular big history is effectively a very accessible history of these guiding explanatory concepts, stretching from pre-linguistic communication through to the potential coming Singularity and the Climate Crisis.
Core to this digest of big ideas is the strong emphasis on identifying underlying cultural assumptions at different times and places, and how these have created mental blind spots that really only became apparent in hindsight - with the "search for meaning" often blinding the searchers to the idea that, well, maybe existence is all just meaningless?
Short chapters and a readable writing style make this a fun one, easy to speed through. The narrator in the audiobook version also does a good job.
If I were to make one criticism - and its a fairly big one, almost leading to dropping a star - it's that despite much focus on comparisons between cultures, there's little focus on the differences of perspective from within those cultures. The history of ideas, and the driving force of dominant cultural concepts, isn't just about the intellectual elites. There was little here on class differences or - particularly notably - gender differences in perception and pattern- identification.
Of course, you could easily retort that this is a history of big, *dominant* ideas, and so sidelining groups without power is fair enough. But the author does such a good job elsewhere of pulling apart theories about why (e.g) "the West" made it to industrialisation and global dominance despite "the East"'s socio-intellectual head start that it seems odd there wasn't more on why patterns of thinking that created oppressed / disadvantaged groups *within* cultures have been so persistent. Especially when those groups make up a numerical majority.
(The obvious defence here is, of course, that the deep patterns that led to these oppressive social set-ups *are* covered - religion, physical force, capitalism, etc etc - but it still could have been interesting to explore this point explicitly, given the overdue recent shifts towards breaking down gender, racial and class barriers.)
Good big history
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