CALL it a paradigm shift, a wisdom transformation or weltanschauung crisis, I was thinking this morning that our species has evolutionarily experienced several major shifts in point-of-view, one of the more interesting for me being the shift from a “horizontal” to a “vertical” viewpoint.

We are, after all, descended from the oceans, with it’s particular, salty, “horizontal-axis” orientation, experiencing a major shift to airy, “vertical” bipedal orientation when our ancesto...