In case it wasn’t obvious, the Western mind is damaged goods. Many observers would say that this is a recent state of affairs, but in truth it’s something that has been slowly building for centuries. It started with the broad acceptance of Cartesian dualism, the conceptual separation of the mind from the body that developed as an over-mechanised response to the scientific discoveries of men like Copernicus and Kepler. This “analytical mindset,” in the original sense of analysis as “the resolution of something complex into simple elements,” destroyed the manifold intricacy of organic traditional society as it was conceptually applied...