Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture

Philip Slater

Oct 2008 · Liverpool University Press

About this ebook

This book shows that the chaos and conflict experienced world-wide today are the result of a global cultural metamorphosis, one which has accelerated so rapidly in recent decades as to provoke fierce resistance. Many of the changes that have taken place in the last fifty years -- the feminist movement, the rapid spread of democracy, the global economy, quantum physics, minority movements, the peace movement, the sexual revolution -- are part of this cultural transformation. Contrary to accepted opinion, the conflict it engenders is not a struggle between Left and Right, or between the West and Islam, but one taking place within the Left, within the Right, within the West, within Islam, within everyone and every institution. Currently, the world is in the middle of an adaptive process, moving toward a cultural ethos more appropriate to a species living in a shrinking world and in danger of destroying its habitat -- a world that increasingly demands for its survival integrative thinking, unlimited communication, and global co-operation. Award-winning author Philip Slater explains the metamorphosis of global culture through the analogy of the transition from caterpillar to butterfly -- the Chrysalis Effect -- whereby by old cultural assumptions are challenged and innovations are seen as a social ill, a critical moral infection, and attacked as such by the upholders of tradition. And when the budding culture replaces the previous one, it doesn't create a new way of being out of nothing, but merely rearranges old patterns to make the new ones. Today our world is caught in the middle of this disturbing transformative process -- a process that creates confusion over values, loss of ethical certainty, and a bewildering lack of consensus about almost everything. "The Chrysalis Effect" provides an answer to the question: Why is the world in such a mess?

About the author

Philip Slater is the author of the bestseller, The Pursuit of Loneliness, and nine other non-fiction books, including Wealth Addiction and A Dream Deferred, as well as a novel, How I Saved the World. He has also written twenty plays, and has taught writing and playwriting at UCSC and in private workshops since 1989. His blogs appear frequently in The Huffington Post.