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13:29

(In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

The step from love to art is short. In his book The Master and his Emissary, British philosopher Iain McGilchrist pins his hopes for humanity on art and religion. According to McGilchrist, art and religion are the human expressions that can be used effectively in order to confront the big threat – what McGilchrist calls the condition of anomie. As is well-known, the term anomie was coined by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late 19th century. According to Durkheim, anomie starts with a total and irrevocable internal alienation and dissolution of values, which invokes an intense existential consciousness, which in turn generates a complete and devastating external paralysis. Durkheim expresses this by saying that the anomic human being can no longer see the world, but instead is staring back at existence; a blank stare that at once is both neurotically paralysing and psychotically megalomaniacal.