If you know Dr. Berman by way of The Twilight of American Culture, hit the reset button, for this is a far different animal. This book is his current masterpiece. The thesis here is far too complex for summary, but suffice to say that it is forcefully argued and thoroughly researched. I imagine that this work is less popular with academic philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists than it perhaps should be for several subjective reasons. Its central argument is based on Freud's concept of the self, which has become deeply unfashionable in recent years. Also, Berman offers an iconoclastic interpretation of Wittgenstein that steps on the toes of quite a few important philosophical thinkers. You'll also find elements of Camus' concept of absurdity and William James' pragmatism (i.e. truth, independent of empirical evidence, is what "works" rather than what "is"), though I don't believe the similarities are intentional. The author has a tendency to bend the evidence to his conclusions and can, at times, piece elements of others' works into a collage of quotations and statements that appears to offer little original thought, but those cases are exceptional rather than the rule.

All in all, it's difficult to come away from this book unconvinced. It's difficult to read it and not think that Dr. Berman has his fingers (and mind) on the truth.

Morris Berman's masterful book, Wandering God, argues that humakind lost its way once agriculture and sedentary life styles set in. Even though humans have the same brains and bodies that characterized their prehistoric ancestors, they worship a vertical god (in the "heavens") and arrange their societies in vertical hierarchies. Berman touts the advantages of horizontal, egalitatarian relationships and spiritual practices, even though it necessitates living in the paradoxes that come with self-awareness. Although he depends too much on the Freudian notion of "infantile attachment" to make his case, Berman's message is provocative and visionary.

A paradigm addict's worst nightmare, "Wandering God" eschews everything from the intellectual dishonesty of Deconstructionism to the reassuring but ultimately flawed cross-cultural Comparativism of modern-day idols, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung.

Third in his trilogy on Human Consciousness, W.G. is Berman's leanest and most densely packed argument so far. The book abounds with scintillating insights on diverse subjects, such as the role that child-rearing has on modern life, and boldly rejects the conventional thesis that Ludwig Wittgenstein's "lost years" were actually so. What on this good green Earth do these two subjects have in common? More than you think.

But this brief and quixotic description is putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

Berman's main focus is in articulating the difference between traditional hunter-gatherer and sedentary consciousnesses, how both are part of our common heritage, and how vestiges of the former (horizontal, paradoxical) collide with the dominant zeitgeist of the latter (vertical, power-driven).

Many have been attracted to this book by the Idries Shah-like cover, a desert caravan image, or lulled into thinking W.G. is another in the endless junkpile of New Age tomes with the word "spirituality" in its sub-title. Those of us who know Berman's work can already see beyond the lamentable dust-jacket design. "Wandering God" moves adroitly across precise, scientific vistas into uncharted terrain - the depths of the human mind and body. By the book's end, one has witnessed, and participated in, the eruption of an intellectual volcano.

Some reviewers have been put off by Berman's unwillingness to neatly package and tie off his theses, and stake his academical prize. But that just confirms what Berman claims about the vertical, ascent underpinnings of modern human life, which are driven by a need to conquer and achieve, be it political power or mental/spiritual proselytizing.

This book is highly recommended.

I can't say I agree with the glowing reviews otherwise posted here. It would be a one-star for me but I've added the extra just from the lurking suspicion that maybe I just didn't "get it". I'm willing to admit as much but only suggest you consider if you mightn't end up in the same boat...

I know Berman to be a writer who presents powerful ideas in an engagingly eclectic fashion from reading his "Twilight of American Culture" - see my review here at Amazon - but I found this book to be incomprehensible and unfocused.

In "Twilight..." he ties a clean structure (essentially 'tell em what you're gonna tell 'em - then tell 'em - then tell 'em what you just said) to his eclectic collection of sources and exemplary material - it works. In "Coming to Our Senses..." he does not do that. I'm still not sure what his central theme was (except from reading reviews here, for instance). His ecclecticism overwhelms.

I came to this book extremely enthusiastically after reading "Twilight...". SO it was not through lack of motivation that I just put it down, finally. I will still take a look at his other books in this earlier trilogy - but with caution.

Read it. You will literally hear your skull bones crack form expansion. This book is, metaphorically speaking, a drop in the breaking wave of history that we are all in these days... The central idea is something that will bear infinite repetition before it finally settles in the public mind: human life is an experience, not an idea. As such, an individual's experience is infinetely more valuable to understand than the accompanying external circumstances...The described view is not new by any stretch, but the presentation is awesomely fresh, which makes the book worth any "educated" human's while.
However, for a book which talks at such lengths and with such persuasion about the virtues of experience... the aim of this lovely title as you read it should be to kick you into exploration, not guide you into meditation...For someone able to write this sort of book, such horrible lack of intellectual rigor should be punishable by community service.

About once or, (if you are very fortunate), twice in a lifetime you discover true love. The same rare infrequency applies to great books that have the implicate energy to invade our paradigms.

Morris Berman's "Coming to Our Senses" hits you in the gut, pure and simple. Like the path of love, it takes you on a journey filled with joy, familiar whisperings, strange and beguiling propositions, self-revelation and hidden oubliettes.

What is this book about? Well, it's about your body, and how your "you" is a temporal repository of all that can be known. It is about how our "body-selves" contain the organic architecture of virtually everything we see and sense each day, including "history", political structures, philosophic insights, ego-identification, family relations, human interaction, and more.

And it deserves to be read by anyone inhabiting this mortal coil.

Unlike many "New Age" and "Self-Help" books, CTOS will not take you on a blissful sojourn through meadows filled with the trill of Larks. Instead, it will probably challenge every safe and comforting assumption you have about yourself, your identity, and the nature of the human world.

For that reason alone, this work will either be remembered as a brilliant marker, or relegated to the ash-bin of history. You will agree with the former or the latter depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go to chase Berman.

Morris Berman accurately describes America's millennial malaise -- from runaway global corporatism to anti-intellectual infotainment. He also provides an excellent path for individuals to resist this tidal wave, a monastic Thoreau-like lifestyle dedicated to preserving our arts and humanities.

I have one problem with the book -- it's overwhelming pessimism about American democracy. I disagree with Berman's belief that the current problems in America are beyond repair and that it is either useless or destructive to participate in public life. I'd prefer the path of Enlightened Populism -- like Bruce Springsteen, I believe in a promised land. Our inability to use our democratic tools effectively may, in part, be due to this fashionable dropping out, which Baby Boomers seem to wear like a badge of honor.

Read Berman for his excellent analysis of what's wrong with our modern culture, but ignore his pessimism. There is always a way out of the morass.

Morris Berman's "The Twilight of American Culture" stands as a wonderfully well-thought out cultural study of America's current state of affairs, as it predicts prophetically future events and the slow road of capitalism and it's effect on this society and the rest of the world. Using various examples he illuminates the pages with astounding data showing the decline of America socially and economically while providing a historical roadmap to how we live in a society in which, "The cash value of things is the only value of things", and how the "mind-numbing global corporate consumerism" has produced a bunch of disturbing developments along class and educational
lines, among other misfires of these power games.

He states that America cannot survive in it's present condition and calls on the reader to try to live a life free of self-promotion, and living only for profit or materials, and lead challenging lives that may leave a memory trace to future American generations at what is humanly important, and what lasts. I have read other sources backing up his economic data, and to see this cultural vacuum of emptyness masquerading as energy and liveliness all one has to do is take in the whole "Horizon" and you will see the truth of his tale; And with current events like the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, it further cements his already fascinating thesis.

This is not at all a bash America fest, but of empiricism, brainwashing, social conditioning, and symbolism that ceases to stand for what a culture nourtured and protected as it's own values. This is an issue of freedom from barriers and chains that can hold our minds back, and free us from fundamentalism and encourage us to entertain ourselves and delight in this world full of so much wealth that cannot possibly be bought, let alone the whole universe of creation.

Scott Alan Wheeler

No beach book is this. Like John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Daniel Boorstein's The Image, Berman's The Twilight of American Culture is a book that inspires copious note-taking and several runs to the library to find the many texts to which he refers in making his impassioned argument for a monastic approach to preserving what is best about our culture.

Writes Berman, "Our entire consciousness, our intellectual-mental life, is being Starbuckized, condensed into a prefabricated designer look in a way that is reminiscent of that brilliant, terrible film, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a great metaphor for our time)."

Other reviewers may offer an erudite deconstruction of Berman's text; admittedly, his argument is flawed in places. But I am not as concerned with Berman's missteps because his abiding conviction that we must quietly, monastically pursue the preservation of what is best about our culture -- our history, our literature and music, our scientific knowledge, our ability to critically reason -- resonates with me.

In short, eschew McWorld. Be not afraid when you allude to Shakespeare, the bible, or Dickens and your audience looks at you askance. Be an alien in our culture's "hardening phase," when its form is preserved but its content is lost. Be like a lonely monk, gathering scraps of what is best about about us for the civilizations that follow after our dark age.

This is the first "New Age" book I read - in 1990 or so - so alot of the concepts were new to me then. I would recommend this book if you are interested in the history of ideas, since Berman paints a pretty stark picture of the world as a machine versus the world as an organism, or something alive. I particularly enjoyed reading about Newton's role as an alchemist. There are some streches here, but even if you don't "buy into" those stretches it still makes compelling reading. The book is well illustrated. The cover of the first edition paperback, by the way, is much more interesting than the new cover.

Far from being antiscientific, with definitive precision Berman demonstrates the neurotic distortions that the Cartesian paradigm has set in motion, revealing his visionary comprehension of the human experience and his insight into the entire Man, mind, body and soul.

He treats Newton with all fairness, unmoved by the applause of the sterile masses of University elite which have elevated the man to Godhood throughout the centuries. As the psalmist says, "What is Man but a breath that passes?...Where were you when I laid the foundations of the deep?"

Any world veiw that forgets this human composition must necessarily lead to severe disruption of the human family. Science, divorced from reason, wisdom tradition, and high theology, and the objective methods upon which it was founded, will lead to an impoverishing rationalism that starves the soul. It will become a sort of false magic entrancing men with debasing theories, desecting Man into a mere biologic product. Hence the rise of mass genocides in the 20th century.

This was an excellent read which deeply effected the course of my studies for years.

...then I would highly recommend that you read "Maps of Meaning" by Jordan B Peterson.