Modern Man

"The problem of the devastation brought upon the environment by technology, the ecological crisis and the like, all issue from the malady of amnesia or forgetfulness from which modern as well as post modern man suffer.

Modern man has simply forgotten who he is. Living on the periphery of his own circle of existence, he has been able to gain a qualitatively superficial but quantitatively staggering knowledge of the world. He has projected the externalized and superficial image of himself upon the world. And then, having come to know the world in such externalized terms, he has sought to reconstruct an image of himself based upon this external knowledge.

There has been a series of ‘falls’ by means of which man has oscillated in a descending scale between an ever more externalized image of himself and of the world surrounding him, moving ever further from the Center both of himself and of his cosmic environment. The inner history of the so-called development of modem Western man from his historic background as traditional man — who represents at once his ancestor in time and his center in space — is a gradual alienation from the Center and the axis through the spokes of the wheel of existence to the rim, where modern man resides.

But just as the existence of the rim pre-supposes spokes which connect it to the axis of the wheel, so does the very fact of human existence imply the presence of the Center and the axis and hence an inevitable connection of men of all ages with Man in his primordial and eternal reality as he has been, is, and will continue to be, above all outward changes and transformations."

... Islam and the Plight of Modern Man, Seyyed Hossein Nasr