Individual Consciousness and Collective Culture: The Evolution of Consciousness Part 10
Image: (NEIL CONWAY / Flickr CC BY 2.0)
Like many other successful complex systems—the Internet, biological ecosystems, living organisms and Life, itself—culture exists as “a nested fractal network of independent beings” in continual change.[i] The human brain can be crudely imagined as a pulsing circuitry of a hundred billion cells or nodes within a network, making perhaps as many a quadrillion connections.[ii] One level up, each brain operates as a single node, connected to billions of others in a series of interconnected configurations, scales, and levels, of families, friends, organizations, communities, etc. All together they produce the global society. And just as a symphony is not composed simply of musicians fingering their instruments, but also of a shared and collaborative internal experience, the emergent symphony of humanity involves society and culture, the exterior and the interior experience of it, as Civilization. And the experiences of the symphony occur at all levels simultaneously. Civilization and the individual feedback upon each other (much like two facing mirrors), producing nearly infinite intercourse. And since their adaptive success is entwined, Civilization and the individual share a co-evolutionary existence.
The School of Athens, by Raphael
Even within the seemingly infinite inner experiences of the human and of humanity as a whole, we do recognize major evolutionary patterns. Beliefs and whole worldviews come and go. Animism, communalism, equality, ancestor worship, blood sacrifice, and slavery were once significant elements of human society.[iii] By the beginning of axial age (around 800 BCE), reverence for nature and gender equality had been completely replaced by God worship and patriarchy. In much of the world, the ancient warrior ethics of ruthlessness and brute force has since been replaced by an acceptance of the rule of law and the shenanigans of business.[iv] In the First World countries, dogma has been largely replaced by individualism, and the religious ideal of absolute truth is being replaced by a Postmodern sense of relativity and cultural context. In postmodern societies, an incongruous mix of devout atheism, religious faith, New Age mysticism, hyper-individualism and fierce patriotism, male dominance, and gender equality, “shopping until you drop,” and deep ecology all exist side-by-side.
Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons at the Versailles Palace
Through the millennia, the manner in which we perceive nearly everything imaginable has changed, including, of course, the nature of reality, itself. Time, for instance: the Hellenistic Greeks and the Vendanta philosophy of the Hindus regarded history as passing through great cycles, from times of perfection to chaos and back again.[v] The Medieval Christians viewed time as a linear devolutionary process from the initial Fall from grace, and our lives here on Earth as but a stopover to some form of everlasting life. All that has since been replaced in the industrializing world by a gathering sense that history is a linear flow not of woe, but rather of material progress.[vi] Simultaneously, and so consistent with a postmodern perspective, we understand that time, like everything else, is relative. The workday is recognized as being of absolute duration, from nine to five, let’s say, and yet each person’s phenomenological (actual internal) experience of those hours will be uniquely different. And, of course, the physicist and the cosmologist find the measurement of time completely dependent on one’s perspective, some mystics find “eternity in an hour,” and many mystics and scientists, alike, suggest that time is an illusion created by a species disconnected by thought from the whole.[vii]
Other Side of the Bridge, by Yves Tanguy
Although some warn us against interpreting this evolutionary process in terms of development or progress,[viii] others do find great advancement through time. Steve Pinker, in his books The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) finds that through the centuries, humanity has, as a whole, become less violent and more tolerant of others’ differences.[ix] Even during the murderous 20th century, proportionally less people were killed in wars than in the previous centuries. The homicide rate has been steadily decreasing, as has brutality, child beating, and animal brutality. Children’s television programs are less violent than traditional nursery rhymes. Moreover, societies are becoming generally less racist, less sexist, more tolerant of gender differences and of people with disabilities, and the ideal of civil rights has become more established globally.[x] In resonance with Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” people are increasingly vocal against injustices in faraway lands, whether it occurs in Tibet, Syria, or Myanmar. And when disaster strikes thousands of miles away, in Indonesia, Pakistan, New Orleans, Haiti, and Japan, millions of people rush to help. So consistent has been this change in worldview that Steve Pinker notes, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”[xi] Jeremy Rifkin suggests, “Each new stage of consciousness represents an enlarged CNS [central nervous system] encompassing broader and deeper realms of reality.”[xii]
The Inquisition, by Juaquin Pinto
There is much historical precedent for the notion that, along with our biological and societal evolution, there has been an evolution of culture and of human consciousness. The Eastern religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—are centered intrinsically on the notion of the evolution of human consciousness, of its progress and perfectibility.[xiii] According to these philosophies, human consciousness evolves both during a life and between lives. Westerners, too, have tended to believe that human progress is possible during the life of a person. Islam, particularly, and Christianity and Kabbalist Judaism to a lesser extent, view us as possessing the free will to improve our nature, and Western philosophy and psychology beginning with Plato have generally accepted the notion of perfectibility (if not always complete human perfection).[xiv] In this tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche’s overman (Übermensch) was the pinnacle of human possibility, the self-perfected man, the one who has acquired self-mastery.[xv] After Nietzsche, however, most of western philosophy left speculations about the nature of consciousness to the neuroscientists, psychologists, poets, and mystics.
The Contemplative Landscapes of German Romantic Painter Caspar David Friedrich
From this diversity of perspectives there has emerged a generally acknowledged evolutionary paradigm of human consciousness; one in which deliberation revolves mainly around the concepts by which the underlying structures can be mapped.
Table 1. To condense the enormous complexity of stages, variously called mentalities, worldviews, and “consciousness structures”[xvi] into a visually comprehensible map, simple charts have been often created by many of the contributors. The names given to represent a worldview are meant to capture the essence of the way in which reality is perceived or experienced by the people of the time. Since Ken Wilber has expressly focused on comparing and synthesizing the works of others in the field, I am using his maps as an example of how the dominant societal worldviews have changed (and with his last two stages, perhaps will change) through time.[xvii]
ENDNOTES
[i] Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. (1995:90) What is Life? University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
[ii] Pennisi, E. (2006) Brain Evolution of the Far Side, Science, v. 314, pp. 244-245. A node, by definition, can be thought of as any element (cell, brain, person, organization, town, etc.) that can be connected to other nodes (at all the different levels) in a complex of networks.
[iii] For the pervasiveness of human sacrifice in early civilization, see Gibbons, A. (2012) The Ultimate Sacrifice, Science, v. 336, pp. 834-837..
[iv] McIntosh, S. (2007) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Paragon House, St. Paul, MN.
[v] Rifkin, J. (1980:1-30) Entropy: A New World View, Viking Press, New York.
[vi] Wright, R. (2004) A Short History of Progress. Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, PA..
[vii] For example, Hawking (1988), Davies (2002), Barbour (2008), Callender (2010).
Hawking, S.W. (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam Books, Toronto.
Davies, P. (2002) That Mysterious Flow. Scientific American, September, pp. 40-47.
Barbour, J. (2008) The Nature of Time. FQXi Forum.
Callender, C. (2010) Is Time an Illusion? Scientific American, June, pp. 41-47
[viii] For example, Geber (1953:37), Murphy (1992:31-32), Wright (2004) and Fukuyama (2011:51).
Gebser, J. (1953) The Ever-Present Origin (Translation by Noel Bardstad with Algis Mickunas). Ohio University Press, Athens, OH.
Murphy, M. (1992) The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York.
Fukuyama, F. (2011) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
[ix] Pinker (2011).
Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. Viking, New York.
Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Reason and Progress. Viking, New York.
[x] Rifkin (2009), Goldstein and Pinker (2011), Kristof (2011), Pinker (2011).
Rifin, J. (2009) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.
Goldstein, J.S., and Pinker, S. (2011, December 17) War Really is going Out of Style, New York Times.[xi] Pinker (2011:476).
Kristof, N.D. (2011, November 23) Are We Getting Nicer? New York Times
[xii] Rifkin (2009:37).
[xiii] Rama et al. (1976), Coward (2008).
Rama, Ballentine, R., and Ajaya (1976) Yoga and Psychotherapy: the Evolution of Consciousness. Himalayan Institute Press, Honesdale, PA.
Coward, H. (2008) The Perfectibility of Human Nature in Eastern and Western Thought. State University Press, Albany.
[xiv] Rifkin (1980), Coward (2008:186-193). Christianity and Judaism are far more pessimistic than Islam on the questions of human perfectibility and on the natural state of human perfection. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, history itself is viewed as a Fall from God, as a devolution. In the past couple of centuries, however, history as an evolutionary process has taken root through the Western philosophers Johann Fichte, Friedrich Shelling, Georg Hegel, and Herbert Spencer, the economist Karl Marx, the scientist Charles Darwin, and the mystics Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (Wilber, 1998:103-105; Coward (2008:17)).
Wilber, K. (1998) The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, New York.
[xv] Kaufman, W. (1967, 1974:312).
Kaufman, W. (1967) Nietzsche, Friedrich, p. 504-514 in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York.
Kaufman, W. (1974) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Fourth Edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
[xvi] In a memoriam to Jean Gebser, Jean Keckeis defined “consciousness structures⁄as nothing other than the visibly emerging perception of reality throughout the various ages and civilizations.” Kekeis, J. in Gebser (1953:xx).
[xvii] Wilber (2000:215, 2007:21).
Wilber, K. (2000) Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Shambala, Boston.
Wilber, K. (2007) Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, Boston.
