A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II

Abstract

In 1971 Barry Commoner identified the “first law of ecology” as the proposition, “Everything is connected to everything else” (p. 50). This assertion might sum up the “holistic worldviews” that Linda Sargent Wood finds ubiquitous in American thought during “the long 1960s” (p. 6). In this finely wrought book, Wood elucidates holism as a key to the work of five figures: the pioneering ecologist Rachel Carson; the architect and global visionary R. Buckminster Fuller; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his pursuit of “the beloved community”; the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw godly fulfillment in the ultimate outcome of Darwinian evolution; and a leader of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow, who imagined whole personalities both realizing and overcoming ego in transcendent “peak experiences.” The book concludes with a compelling sixth chapter on the countercultural Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, a center for new psychotherapies, alternative lifestyles, and studies in the spiritual traditions of “the East.” Esalen represented, according to Wood, “holism's triumph and its demise” as the 1960s spirit ebbed and countercultural individualism overshadowed an original vision combining self and community (p. 197).