THE THIRD WAVE
In universities, meanwhile, more and more calls were heard f”i interdisciplinary thinking. While departmental barriers still block the cross-fertilization of ideas and the integration of information in most universities, this demand for inter- or multi- disciplinary work is now so widespread it has an almost ritual quality.
These changes in intellectual life were mirrored elsewhere in the culture as well. Eastern religions, for example, had long had a tiny fringe following among the European middle classes, but it was not until the disintegration of industrial society began in earnest that thousands of Western young people began lionizing Indian swamis, jamming the Astrodome to hear a 16-year-old guru, listening to ragas, opening Hindu-style vegetarian restaurants, and dancing down Fifth Avenue. The world, they suddenly chanted, was not broken into Cartesian chips: it was a “oneness.”
In the field of mental health, psychotherapists searched for ways to cure the “whole person” by employing gestalt therapy. A gestalt explosion erupted that saw the establishment of gestalt therapists and institutes throughout the United States. The goal of mis activity, according to psychotherapist Frederick S. Perls, was “to increase human potential through the process of integration” of the individual’s sensory awareness, perceptions, and relationships with the outside world.
In medicine, a “holistic health” movement has sprung up based on the notion that the well-being of the individual depends on an integration of the physical, the spiritual, and the mental. Mixing quackery with serious medical innovation, the movement gained enormous strength in thelate 1970’s.
“A few years ago,” reports Science, “it would have been unthinkable for the federal government to lend its sponsorship to a conference on health that featured such topics as faith healing, iridology, acupressure, Buddhist meditation, and electromedicine.” Since then there has been “a virtual explosion of interest in alternative healing methods and systems, all of which go under the name of holistic health.”
With so much activity, on so many different levels, it is hardly surprising that the terms “wholism” or “holism” should have crept into the popular vocabulary. Today they are used almost indiscriminately. A World Bank expert calls for “a holistic understanding of … urban shelter.” A research group in the United States Congress demands long-range “holistic” studies. A curriculum expert claims to employ “holistic reading and scoring” in teaching school children to write. And a Beverly Hills beauty gym offers “holistic exercise.”
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