My book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning is published by Prometheus Books, with a Foreword by Fritjof Capra. Here’s what it’s about:
In 1405, Admiral Zheng set off from China with the greatest armada in history, leading three hundred magnificent ships on a thirty year odyssey to distant lands as far afield as Africa. Later that century, Columbus landed in the New World with three barely seaworthy boats. Zheng’s armada, for all its grandeur, left virtually no imprint on the world while Columbus changed the entire course of history. Why?
The Patterning Instinct provides a new answer to this question with a simple but compelling theme: Culture shapes values, and those values shape history. So even if Zheng had discovered America, the Chinese would never have conquered the New World because they were driven by a fundamentally different set of motivations from European explorers.
Pioneering the new field of cognitive history, The Patterning Instinct provides a fresh perspective on other crucial questions of history:
- Is it our true nature to be selfish and competitive, or empathic and community-minded?
- How did the rise of agriculture set the stage for our current ecological crisis?
- Why did the scientific revolution take place in Europe, and not in Chinese or Islamic civilization?
- What are the root causes of our modern culture of rampant consumerism and is there a way we can change it?
These questions have never mattered more than now. As we peer into the headlights of climate change and ever-accelerating technology we ask ourselves: where are we headed?
This book frames an answer by recognizing that our current crisis of unsustainability is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped.
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Taking the reader on an archaeological exploration of the mind, The Patterning Instinct offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different peoples: early hunter-gatherers and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders of Christianity, trail-blazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those who constructed our modern consumer society.
The book identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world from hunter-gatherer times to today’s global civilization, and demonstrates how these have affected the course of history. Uprooting the tired clichés of the science/religion debate, it shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which in turn shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature.
Shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.
Advance praise for The Patterning Instinct
“A tour de force on the biological and psychological background of the human predicament. If you are concerned about our future you should know about our past. This amazing, well-documented book should be read by every college student, and every congressman.” – Paul R. Ehrlich, author of Human Natures.
“A brilliant deep dive into the history of human cultures that brings us to today’s cultural dysfunctions that threaten the planet. Insight, illumination, and potential ways out of the seeming dead-end that we’ve walked ourselves into. I would recommend it! – Thom Hartmann, author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.
”This fascinating, page-turning exploration of the human journey from the stone age to the space shuttle gives us powerful new ways to see ourselves. Deeply researched and written with great clarity and style, this book is also full of hope about humanity’s possibilities in the 21st century.” – Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom.
“In prose that is a joy to read, Lent takes us on a tour of human history, guided by systems theory and cognitive science, to argue for the prominence of culture and the habits of the mind in shaping our collective destiny. If you’ve been too busy for the last twenty years to pay attention to the big ideas about the nature of the human animal, the engines of history, our place in the biosphere, and the shape of things to come, Lent can bring you up to date painlessly.” – J.R. McNeill, , Professor, Georgetown University, and author of Something New Under the Sun.
Patterns of Meaning 
This looks incredibly interesting. Hope it gets published real soon.
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It does indeed! Thanks for writing it for us all!
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Please contact a decent documentary production house and have this book be the bases of the best doco on history and possible futures of the human kind
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Thanks You may find this article useful
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html
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power of story telling is so central to shaping of human culture and consciousness that it might have deserved a bit more coverage in the book. on the other hand the book itself is a great story, and as most of the good stories used for the betterment of the human race
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