In this probing work, Brown grapples with the reasons so many moderns worship the sensuous, the material, the colossal--but still feel empty and shallow. He finds the roots of cultural disintegration in the abandonment of the spiritual dimension.
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Editorial Reviews
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The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos And Transformation is a probing work grappling with the reasons so many moderns worship the sensuous, the material, the merely colossal -- but still feel empty and shallow. Building on the work of the late Pitirim Sorokin, Harold Brown finds the roots of cultural disintegration in the abandonment of the spiritual dimension. The author shows how most societies have descended from spiritual values to a period like our own, when materialism and sensuality rule. The result will be not just apostasy, but revolution, and the collapse of civilization. However, this need not be inevitable. The profound connections The Sensate Culture makes between Christianity and culture are accessible to every thoughtful person who takes seriously the crises faced by a world spinning out of control. -- Midwest Book Review
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Should have been 100 pages.,
By Dave Kresta (davek@model.com) (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Sensate Culture (Hardcover)
An interesting analysis of our culture. But Sorokin's paradigm of three steps to cultural disintegration (idealistic, ideational, sensate) is applied too broadly. At times it felt like Brown was fitting the square peg of this theory into every round hole that could be found. The examples started to get laborious to read through, with Brown spending too much time presenting data that fit the three step paradigm and not enough time analyzing things more broadly. If Brown would have condensed this thing to 100 pages or less, it would have still served it's purpose of alerting us to the progression history has seen in previous eras. At 250+ pages it should have moved well beyond the simple three-step theory.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent update on Sorokin's work,
By grapabo (Missouri) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Sensate Culture (Hardcover)
The subject matter of the book is familiar: many books have been written by pundits who have observed a general and long-running decline in Western culture: an egalitarian mood eschews rewarding or acknowledging excellence; all views in public, whether deserved or not, are given equal standing, while at the same time criticism of such syncretism is denounced as "judgmentalism"; materialism replaces a vigorous spiritual and moral foundation for the culture, while the idea of a transcendent moral culture is censored from public discussion. Individual autonomy that is taken to absolute proportions, regardless of the consequences, triumphs over attempts by the government to keep order. While many of these experts adequately describe the problem, the options on what can be done about it are more limited in range.Brown approaches the problem through a prism that, while it was not of his own invention, nevertheless provides fruitful insight into the current problems. The paradigm adopted by Brown was created by mid-20th century sociologist Pitrim Sorokin in Crisis of Our Age (which debt Brown expressly acknowledges early in the book), which measures the life of cultures as passing between three stages: ideational (eyes turned only toward God apart from the earthly realm), idealistic (eyes turned toward the earthly things as expressions of the beauty of God's creation), and the sensate (eyes turned toward the earthly things for only the sensory satisfaction in itself). The stages do not necessarily evolve (or devolve) in only one direction, which makes the analysis more interesting as a means to grapple with the problems of the sensate culture that Brown posits Western culture is or is close to transforming into. Brown, a theology professor and evangelical, isn't shy about describing the problem in biblical terms, but his goal in this book is broader than simply preaching to the choir. This transition to address this in secular terms is no small feat, and Brown himself acknowledges that even if some would-be reformers of our culture do not share Christian beliefs, then some other transcendent principle will most likely have to be a guide. As he writes on page 247: "The present analysis will have value for the reader who sees the facts described here and is aware of where they are likely to lead us. It will have value for one who does not look to God or divine grace only if it can be supplemented by a proposal that does not depend on a specific Christian or other religious commitment." This book was published in 1996, at about the same time as Robert Bork's book Slouching Towards Gomorrah came out, and the two address much of the same deterioration in the pillars of Western culture (law, ethics, religion, individual morality, etc.). While Bork's work is more weighty in highlighting the problem, Brown's book is more amply provided with ways to find solutions. The scope of Brown's book is limited due to the dependence on Sorokin, but it's still a good read.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incisive, Arresting View of Rising/Falling Cultures,
By
This review is from: The Sensate Culture (Hardcover)
Brown posits that cultural decline may NOT be inevitable for the West. He's not pollyanna-ish about where we are on the ripeness curve, but he's refreshingly optimistic about the impact individual Christians can have by being, in Jesus' words, the salt of the earth.
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