The Reenchantment of the World Read Online Free

that huge numbers in this age group

regularly came to school drunk. Dr. Darold Treffert, of Wisconsin's Mental

Health Institute, observed that millions of children and young adults are

now plagued by a gnawing emptiness or meaninglessness expressed not as a

fear of what may happen to them, but rather as a fear that nothing will

happen to them." Official figures from government reports released during

1971-72 recorded that the United States has 4 million schizophrenics, 4

million seriously disturbed children, 9 million alcoholics, and 10 million

people suffering from severely disabling depression. In the early 1970s,

it was reported that 25 million adults were using Valium; by 1980, Food

and Drug Administration figures indicated that Americans were downing

benzodiazepines (the class of tranquilizers which includes Valium) at a

rate of 5 billion pills a year. Hundreds of thousands of the nation's

children, according to "The Myth of the Hyperactive Child" by Peter

Schrag and Diane Divoky (1975), are being drugged in the schools, and

one-fourth of the American female population in the thirty-to-sixty age

group uses psychoactive prescription drugs on a regular basis. Articles in

popular magazines such as "Cosmopolitan" urge sufferers from depression

to drop in to the local mental hospital for drugs or shock treatments,

so that they can return to their jobs as quickly as possible. "The drug

and the mental hospital," writes one political scientist, "have become

the indispensable lubricating oil and reservicing factory needed to

prevent the complete breakdown of the human engine."10
     
     
These figures are American in degree, but not in kind. Poland and

Russia are world leaders in the consumption of hard liquor; the

suicide rate in France has been growing steadily; in West Germany,

the suicide rate doubled between 1966 and 1976.11 The insanity of Los

Angeles and Pittsburgh is archetypal, and the "misery index" has been

climbing in Leningrad, Stockholm, Milan, Frankfurt and other cities

since midcentury. If America is the frontier of the Great Collapse,

the other industrial nations are not far behind.
     
     
It is an argument of this book that we are not witnessing a peculiar

twist in the fortunes of postwar Europe and America, an aberration that

can be tied to such late twentieth-century problems as inflation, loss of

empire, and the like. Rather, we are witnessing the inevitable outcome

of a logic that is already centuries old, and which is being played out

in our own lifetime. I am not trying to argue that science is the cause

of our predicament; causality is a type of historical explanation which

I find singularly unconvincing. What I am arguing is that the scientific

world view is integral to modernity, mass society, and the situation

described above. It is our consciousness, in the Western industrial

nations -- uniquely so -- and it is intimately bound up with the emergence

of our way of life from the Renaissance to the present. Science, and our

way of life, have been mutually reinforcing, and it is tor this reason

that the scientific world view has come under serious scrutiny at the

same time that the industrial nations are beginning to show signs of

severe strain, if not actual disintegration.
     
     
From this perspective, the transformations I shall be discussing, and the

solutions I dimly perceive, are epochal, and this is all the more reason

not to relegate them to the realm of theoretical abstraction. Indeed,

I shall argue that such fundamental transformations impinge upon the

details of our daily lives far more directly than the things we may think

to be most urgent: this Presidential candidate, that piece of pressing

legislation, and so on. There have been other periods in human history

when the accelerated pace of transformation has had such an impact on

individual lives, the Renaissance being the most recent example prior

to the present. During such periods, the