This searching examination of human development provides new
perspectives on the moral, political, scientific, emotional, and
intellectual divisions of our time. A physicist by profession,
Whyte looked beyond the boundaries of specialization for creative
ways to approach the basic problem facing modern Western
civilization: Why are we so competent technically and yet unable to
order our own affairs, socially and personally? He takes the reader
with him on a journey that is nothing less than a new
interpretation of the general development of human consciousness.
Whyte's thesis is that the current stage of human development makes
not only necessary, but inevitable, constructing a "unitary method
of thought" to overcome the dualism of the modern Western mind. He
argues that the deepest troubles of Western civilization are due,
in large part, to excessive reliance on the ancient Greek
postulates of "permanence" and "invariance" as an ordered form of
thought resulting in an extreme, mechanistic anti-humanism. What
culminated in two world wars, Whyte argued, is a European
dissociation, or "lesion." This dissociation represents an
achievement in terms of rational mastery of the natural and human
worlds, unique social dynamism and differentiation, and the
flowering of individuality. But the price was high: disordering of
thought, emotion, and will; conflict between our deliberate and
spontaneous, conscious, and unconscious energies; unstable
polarization between a delusive unchanging ideal world and the
reality of human transience and limitation. Whyte chooses nine
thinkers to illustrate this historical and evolutionary movement,
including Heraclitus, Marx, and Freud, and the resulting rignettes
are a synthesis of knowledge that suggest, as well, a reorientation
of thought, feeling, and action for the future. Lewis Mumford wrote
of "The Next Development of Mankind," "The book has intense and
immediate value both for the practical person and for the theoretic
thinker." Sixty years after its original publication it remains
pertinent to understanding the cultural and social tensions of the
new century.
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