research & reviews IN THIS SECTION: Greeting a “breakout” book on science and medicine... “Iscador” is not only a significant treatement for cancer, it is a marker for an expansion of the healing arts. When a technology insider adds the holistic insights of anthroposophy to his resources, what can he tell us?
40 • being human
Reclaiming Hearts & Minds Hearts and Minds (Reclaiming the soul of science and medicine) by Walter Alexander; (Lindisfarne Books, 2019), 335 pages.
review by Frederick Dennehy Years ago, when I was on the board of Steiner Books, there were repeated discussions about what it would take to have a “breakout” book, one that would sell multiple thousands of print copies and make Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy household names. One suggestion that came up often was a personalized, intimate, “warts and all” non-hagiographic biography of Rudolf Steiner, preferably by a well-known and non-anthroposophist author—someone who could draw in the readers who very much wanted to hear about Steiner and what he had to say but didn’t yet know it. Others said that you had to break open the hard anthroposophical ground first—crack the shell— or the audience in waiting would not be prepared to listen. Owen Barfield had done something like that in academic circles in the latter part of the twentieth century, with Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, the reissued Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, and a host of other elegantly reasoned works. They had been widely respected in American universities, often assigned as reading in English departments. Barfield’s acknowledged purpose in writing Saving the Appearances had been precisely to remove the obstacles to a contemporary appreciation of Steiner and his teachings. The biographies that have appeared since that time—excellent ones by Lindemann, Selg, Lachman—have done little to move the needle in this country. Barfield is now largely forgotten on campuses, and even among many anthroposophists his writings are considered too “difficult,” “stylized” or “off-putting” to generate much interest. Removing the obstacles to an appreciation of Rudolf Steiner’s teaching has become tougher and trickier, precisely because those obstacles—the prevalence of reductionism and the shrinking sense of an inner life that follows from it—are more embedded than ever, both in in academia and in popular culture. Their removal today requires a deeper reach. Walter Alexander, in his Hearts and Minds (reclaiming the soul of science and medicine), does more than reach deep. In his engaging, user-friendly and penetrating study of the thinking that underlies orthodox science and medicine, he invites, coaxes and finally persuades his readers to come to their own awareness of the clear and present danger of reductionism, to prepare ground in which spiritual science might flourish. Reductionism is dangerous because at best it makes no room for, and at worst it outright denies, the willed activity of thinking. If we lose the understanding of the place of our own thinking, we have lost ourselves. Without a tenable experience of that self, an authentic questioning of our place in the social, political, economic, or communal world is meaningless. Hearts and Minds is a book about the possibility of restoration—restoration of the soul that orthodox science has estranged from us as well as from itself. That restoration, Mr. Alexander makes clear, depends not only on the arts and humanities, but on the victims/victimizers themselves, on the peripheral precincts of science and medicine. Mr. Alexander has no special training in medicine or any of the sciences he discusses in this book. He is, however, a freelance medical journalist of long standing—as he puts it, an expert at talking to experts—and, we should add, at decoding technical jargon into accessible prose and reformulating unfamiliar concepts on multiple levels. He introduces “Sound Check” sections that raise the reader’s level of focus in order to begin to connect at a higher level the disparate stories, interviews, and surveys that weave their way through the chapters. And there are the many “Trash Talk” digressions, where two of New York City’s sanitation workers attempt to make workaday sense of the scientific expositions and conundrums that have come before in the text.