I don't know how many more times I will get to do this. If anyone wants to give me a belateled birthday present please read this review of our book: Review of "Global Insanity" I had a good day yesterday. Tooted my horn a little and ate like royalty at our local resturant with the family. Actually it is my family through marriage. My own daughter abandoned me years ago and I have not seen my granddaughters for over ten years. Life goes on. I like our house which is sort of in the woods and look forward to this year's garden.
The first three hours of my birthday were unusual since I usually go to bed around midnite. This time I read until three in the morning. If you read on below the break I have some things to say about what I read and how it, among other things, made this a very special birthday.
This is the book I read until I finished it: Averting Global Extinction: Our Irrational Society as Therapy Patient. If you read the review of our book at the link above, the connection shoulkd be obvious. This book is very much in tune with ours but also fills in some holes in my own knowledge base.
Berger started in engineering like I did and then, after some time as a musician, went into clinical psychology. I transfered to psychology during my second year in a Civil Engineering program. My hope was to do premed stuff on the sly (I was on a NROTC regular scholarship and premed was forbidden.) Because of the disruptions in my schedule I took a night course in Projective Techniques with a bunch of practicing clinical psychologists. Like I often did, I set the curve in the course. Psychology seemed too easy so I got my degree in Biology in my last two years. Having all the engineering science and math I was a peculiar biologist to say the least. After my stint as a regular USMC officer (paying back for the NROTC scholarship to undergrad) I entered grad school in physiology at the University of Chicago and got my PhD in three years as a neurophysiologist. That was the closest I got to psychiatry because I could not afford med school and there were lots of fellowships for the PhD.
The first year I studied cental nervous system and comparative psychology. I changed couse because my mentor was Chinese and did not get tenure because the medical students did not like his accent. I becan teaching these snobs in the early 60s as a grad student. I have ever since.
The book by Berger is another interesting contradiction. I guess this is inescapable at this point in history. We are going through a paradigm shift and the idea of being able to just jump into a new evolving paradigm without baggage from the old paradigm is nonsense.
Berger's conclusions about the sickness of society are much in tune with ours. He is brave enough to try to lay down an approach to solving some of these problems using his skills as a therapist. Here is where he gets mired down in his own "box". He must since psychology, as it exists in the old paradigm, is definitely cut off from all the things it needs to be connected with as are all academic disciplines. That is a large part of why the old paradigm has failed us.
In our own book we were very conscious of all this and we constructed an interconnected paradigm as best we were able. That is why i am so gratified by all tyhe reviews so far including the one by Dorion Sagan (Carl's son) on Amazon.com. Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World. You can tell by the review above and Dorion's that we have been at least relatively successful in jumping out of the old paradigm with our eyes open.
At 77 I could be even more smug about having made it this far in my academic quest. Unfortunately, the context is not one that promotes smugness. The politics of our time can't wait for the slow acceptance of a new paradigm. I have all the confidence I need to know that the new paradigm is real and has in it many of the needed answers. So much to communicate and so little time! Any advice?