Human beings have always been the most adaptable creatures on the planet, and they should be able to chart a new course for themselves. Some of that charting is already being done. The old mind today is being challenged and changed by many scattered efforts. Can we bring these efforts together to produce a large-scale program for a rapid 'change-of-mind'? We know what the problem is. The 'solution' is not simple -- to generate the social and political will to move a program of conscious evolution to the top of the human agenda.
Psychologist Robert Ornstein's wide-ranging and multidisciplinary work has won him awards from more than a dozen organizations, including the American Psychological Association and UNESCO. His pioneering research on the bilateral specialization of the brain has done much to advance our understanding of how we think.
He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from City University of New York in 1964 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968. His doctoral thesis won the American Institutes for Research Creative Talent Award and was published immediately as a book, On the Experience of Time.
Since then he has written or co-written more than twenty other books on the nature of the human mind and brain and their relationship to thought, health and individual and social consciousness, which have sold over six million copies and been translated into a dozen other languages. His textbooks have been used in more than 20,000 university classes.
Dr. Ornstein has taught at the University of California Medical Center and Stanford University, and he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities in the U.S. and overseas. He is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), an educational nonprofit dedicated to bringing important discoveries concerning human nature to the general public.
Among his many honors and awards are the UNESCO award for Best Contribution to Psychology and the American Psychological Foundation Media Award "for increasing the public understanding of psychology."
An amazing book with brilliant insight into how the human mind has evolved to respond to short term and immediate challenges and thus is unsuitable for the world we have affected - with it's dangerous long range and long term consequences. Ornstein and Ehrlich summarise it best themselves:
We have made two observations over and over again in this book. The first is that the world is an increasingly dangerous place, and many of its new dangers are not instantaneously obvious. The second is that our reactions to the modern world are often inappropriate because of the nature of our minds and the training we give them. This mismatch threatens the destruction of civilisation. pp 189-190
This book is so relevant to today that I can hardly believe it was published in 1989. Just goes to show that intelligent and aware people, as well as the scientific community, have known for quite some time that we are pushing our world to the brink unsustainably. This book explains exactly why, however, most people are not acting to stop their destruction. It's the same principles as the news media - "a fly in the eye is more interesting than a flood in China".
The best thing about New World New Mind is that it offers some solutions and suggestions as to how we can retrain our minds (and culture) to acknowledge and act on the information we now have - of how our actions have long term effects. Education is key, but this is also more of a long term plan itself. More immediately they suggest increasing public debate and awareness of the issues - and most importantly, to do so in ways that engage the old mind. Rather than just stats they suggest appealing emotionally and personally to people (a hot topic among sustainability advocates today). Another tactic suggested is to change what is viewed as "news" and/or to make the stats and information that surround climate change, social injustice, overpopulation, inequality and other sustainability topics into "news" - frame those topics in a "newsworthy" way. And of course, promoting the idea that progress does not necessarily mean growth.
Having only recently shed my own narrow minded thinking - that the world as I know it is exactly as it has and always will be - and started to really see that the Earth and its ecosystems cannot support life if humans continue to live in this way, New World New Mind gave a voice and scientific background to what I have experienced - an epiphany of New Mind thinking. I think that everyone would benefit from reading this book and becoming more aware of our minds limitations. Reading it certainly helps to open the mind, which will in turn help us to make the world a better place and save it from ourselves.
30 years out of date but it does show how little we have moved in the direction of a "new mind." It also reveals the somewhat limited thinking of its own authors, who persist in "should" and "can" based on positive social trends at the time of writing, none or few of which have survived.