What is the central concern of the passage?

The central concern of a passage is the single idea to which every other detail in it is subordinate. Where a text opens by listing several conditions together, the central concern is the one the text treats as the source — the notion its argument returns to and builds on — while the remaining items function as that idea’s aspects, symptoms or effects. Identifying it therefore means asking which listed idea explains the others, not simply which idea is mentioned.

This passage opens by naming four features of the twentieth century together: uncontrollable development, consumerist society, political materialism and spiritual devaluation. The very next sentence carries just one of them forward — ‘This inordinate development has led to…’ — so excessive, unchecked growth is presented as the process, and the other three as what accompanies or follows from it. Everything after that is the author’s response to that process: the ‘first reality’ of enlightened rationalism and the ‘second reality’ of the Beyond have to be harmonised in a worthy state of man; est values (what we are) and esto values (what we ought to be) have both to move in the ebb and flow of consciousness; and the encounter of the ‘two cultures’, the scientific and the humane, has to restore a whole vision, so that human endeavour is not humanistically irresponsible.

Set against that argument, the other named conditions play these roles:

• Consumerism — named as ‘consumerist society’ and never developed into an argument of its own; it is one face of the growth the passage diagnoses.

• Materialism — appears as ‘political materialism’, and again where the materialistic foundations of science are said to have crumbled; it is a strand inside the argument rather than its frame.

• Spiritual devaluation — the loss the passage sets out to repair by harmonising the two realities; it is the consequence being addressed, not the process being diagnosed.

The central concern is therefore uncontrolled development — the inordinate growth from which consumerism, materialism and spiritual devaluation follow, and against which the passage sets its call for a harmonised, humanistically responsible vision of man.