The Growth of Minds and Cultures: A Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Experience

Dirk Leemans, P.Eng., lived in Toronto.

In our Western society, characterized by mainly technological attempts to control nature and by a high degree of unpredictability and turbulence, the relationships between society, culture, and individuals are becoming more and more opaque and difficult to trace. Professor Vanderburg, who teaches in the engineering and sociology faculties at the University of Toronto, aims, in this fascinating and difficult book, to unravel the complex structure of these interactions. His background and erudition ensure a novel and compelling look at the development of the human mind and the emergence of culture. His engineering qualifications and his studies with Jacques Ellul have given him a fascination with open systems theory and a penchant for treating the whole of human experience.

The book is wide ranging, from the development of the minds of children, including the memory system and the acquisition of language, to the role of religion in human societies. The strength of the book lies in its exposition of the organic relationships between all these topics. They are not discussed in a reductionist fashion. Emphasis is placed on the whole.

The problem with these fields of study is that they view man either as an individual (often in psychology) or as only a social being (often in sociology). Vanderburg takes the position that the individual and his experience form the basis for the culture, which derives from the development of the structure of experience. Society is founded on individuality, and Vanderburg develops in detail the relationships between individual experience, culture, and society, in that order. The book is meticulously researched, using extensively the work of Piaget, Kuhn, Toynbee, and Jung among others, as well as the ideas related to open systems theory.

The book, presenting this unified theory, was undoubtedly a challenge to write; unfortunately it is also a big challenge to read. The prose is terse and inelegant. The new theory cries out for illustrations demonstrating the different system levels and their links. Also, more demonstrative examples of the effectiveness of the theory would help. As written, the book becomes at times opaque, requiring considerable effort on the reader’s part to decode the beauty of the proposed theory.