Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era

by Kelly Sean M.

One sees the mark of this complex in Spretnak’s summary of the values of modernity, which includes the following interrelated ideas: the restriction of human being to the sphere of economics (the notion of homo economicus) and the related ideal of unlimited economic expansion; the overvaluation of objectivism, rationalism, and reductionism coupled with the rule of mechanistic science; the standardization and bureaucratization of work; the compartmentalization of education, and indeed of all aspects of life (work, politics, social life, love life, spirituality); and finally, the “preference for competition and a dominance-or-submission dichotomy as the structure of all relationships in the spheres of modern life.”119 To summarize, one could characterize these dominant values of late modernity as expressions of a materialistic, power-seeking mentality that, in the pursuit of its ends, imposes a disjunctive or reductionistic logic—the mechanistic paradigm—on all aspects of life.