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Glen Slater's Jung vs Borg is wide-ranging and offers rich, prophetic insights to contemporary culture's fluid nature. His multidisciplinary vision is both panoramic and scenic, historical and mythical, psychological and spiritual. Due to its size and scope, it is best read slowly, with one eye on his text and the other on the cultural and global implications of his insights. Through these perspectives we can discern the shifting mytho-historical pressures that globally unite us in spite of differences, while simultaneously undermining where we are united and in agreement.
The book's primary perspective grows out of applying C. G. Jung's pioneering work that still resonates with us today, to understanding the world of AI, cyborgs, and their effects on what he calls “the deeply human” (p. 3), which favours verticality, depth, enchantment, the poetics of everyday life, and the centrality of the arts and humanities in education. Slater's book is a gracefully written counter-cultural text that pushes against the horizontal world of information saturation, lies, distortions, the lust for power, the greed to control, and the inhumanity needed to further marginalize minorities and all individuals and communities who are different in appearance or whose beliefs differ from the entrenched power structures that deny all who do not fall under the thumb of a brittle orthodoxy. Slater pushes against the age of mechanization, especially in the way it stifles deeper knowing, contemplation, poetic musing and spiritual awakening. The question Slater poses throughout his study may be put this way: How in a posthuman world, can we find a new synthesis between technology and humanity so that such an accord furthers and enriches the lives of all people, not just those in power?
For Slater, cyberspace is the new frontier. He refers to it as “the new Wild West … and the horizon goes on forever. Cyberspace is thus a spiritual realm too” (p. 28). His argument crafts in complex and layered str