The Trajectory of Humanity: Towards a New Arcadia?

By Antony Raymont

This book reviews scientific information on the origin and evolution of the the universe, the earth and humankind. It adds a description and interpretation based on philosopy and spiritual exploration. The related problems of environmental damage and social injustice are described, and our needs for support, happiness and meaning are discussed. Finally, grounds for a outcome are given.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483547398

Book preview

emotions.

I. Introduction

Many people lead comfortable lives and, if longevity reflects comfort, there are more comfortable people alive today than there have ever been. At the same time, many people die from the diseases of poverty, over the last century there has been widespread war and genocide, and the future is overshadowed by the possibility of ecological collapse. Further, populations of rich western countries are divided by inequality and citizens are more anxious and less happy than they were fifty years ago.

Human society and its interaction with planet Earth need radical reform. We must answer the question What should we do? and I suggest that we need to answer two prior questions What is the nature of the universe? and What is the nature of humankind? Then we can consider how we should behave and how society could be structured in order that people may be nourished and the natural environment protected.

Realms of Understanding

It is necessary, before we can attempt to answer these questions, to consider the different realms of understanding. Popper has suggested that there are three worlds. The first is the noumenal world of reality – what Kant called the thing-in-itself. The second is the world of subjective experience and arises from the senses – classically vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell. It also includes proprioception - awareness of the position of, and the tension within, the body, and according to Buddhist philosophy, vedana, our positive and negative reactions to experience. The third world is the product of language – essentially what we say, both to ourselves and to others. When we describe the real world or our subjective experience we bring them into this third world.

The third world has the peculiar characteristic of being dependent on culture. Thus, while the eye can distinguish all parts of the spectrum, some cultures do not name certain colours and these shades are not recognised by members of that culture. Anthropology may be seen as seeking to understand what is real – part of the third world – for different peoples.

All cultures have a set of understandings about the nature of the world; these include a classification of objects and a description of processes; science can be seen as the most recent version. And while this version has expanded the universal time-frame from six thousand to almost fourteen billion years and replaced God with natural processes, its essential explanatory purpose is the same as the stories that preceded it.

Natural science describes the components and workings of the natural world from fundamental particles to the universe itself, traversing in the process the world of life. The essential processes are seen as unchanging – all carbon atoms behave the same - although species and the planet evolve.

Social science covers the world of humanity (and intelligent animals). This world is evolving rapidly and history, sociology and psychology are needed to account for the fact that people, despite underlying constants, are different from each other, both individually, in groups and over time. Social life is created by beliefs and change as beliefs change.

There are examples of natural science discoveries that were opposed on theological and social grounds – well known examples being the rejection of Galileo’s demonstration of geo-centricity and Darwin’s account of evolution. A more recent example is the rejection of scientific evidence for global warming. In social science, the Marxian analysis of conflict between owners and workers, and Eisler’s analysis of the dominator society have also been resisted and here resistance is ongoing.

In both types of science, the essential methodology is observation and the outcome is a description of the world which is two removes from the thing-in-itself; first it is a verbal (or mathematical) account and secondly it is moulded by theory. Theory itself evolves both as a general view of the world, culture, and as formal science; the move from religion to science is an example of this evolution.

The idea of modern science as observation and theory needs to be expanded in two directions. First, there are conceptual pursuits divorced from any actual objects. Mathematics can be used to summarise and interpret findings but it can also generate understanding of the relationships between numbers themselves. Second, philosophy is an intuitive process that creates theories of the nature of reality.

In addition to objective science, there are important human activities based in the second world - non-conceptual, expressive pursuits. Music and painting may be seen as ways of sharing wordless, subjective, experience; poetry, too, operates in this realm. Just as we can use science to create new objects, from stone tools to the internet, we can generate new subjective experiences for ourselves and for each other through the arts, expressed through social relationships.

Further, since the earliest humans, a form of knowing based on internal exploration has been recognised. Before towns and cities, shamans and medicine men (and women) explored the world of spirits and gods, and many religions, based on the truth revealed by authority, have included a mystic subgroup insisting that adherents should only believe what they can themselves discover. Examples include the Cabbalistic tradition in Judaism, the Christian Gnostics and the (mainly) Islamic Sufis. Buddhists follow the path (dharma) of Siddhartha Gautama but their aim is to change their experience; meditation and mindfulness are key paths towards refined experiential understanding (world II). It is recognised that this understanding is radically transformed if converted into talk (world III), even self-talk. Communication about internal exploration has often been in the form of myth and symbol.

There is evidence that the subjective understanding of the world and of our place in it has remarkable commonalities across time, culture and methods of exploration.

Implications

It is concluded that, for many topics, adequate understanding may require exploration of: the unchanging processes of the natural world; the culturally variable concepts of the social world; the shared experience manifest in the arts; and mystic knowledge of the inner world. This scheme is suggested by Ken Wilber in "A Theory of Everything"[1] in which he distinguishes objective and subjective experience, and individual and collective spheres. He also suggests in "The Fourth Turning"[2] that spiritual experience, found in the subjective and individual quadrant, should be distinguished from spiritual intelligence, found in the objective, individual quadrant; the latter determines how we see the world (see discussion in section VI).

There seems to be a circle of understanding. If objective science is ordered by the complexity and variability of the subject matter, one moves from physics to chemistry to biology to sociology to (objective) psychology. If subjective understanding is ordered by the interiority of the subject matter, one moves from (subjective) psychology to mysticism. There is obviously a connection from objective to subjective psychology. And from mysticism emerge descriptions of the cosmos based on levels of reality and including the idea of the unity of all things; this can be expressed mathematically and is beginning to be a key feature of theoretical physics – thereby closing the circle. Both physics and mysticism can talk of mind as the basic field.[3]

Outline of the Essay

First I review stories of evolution (II) and philosophical and mystical accounts of the Comos (III), which allows a discussion of the nature and capacities of humankind (IV); these are things we cannot change. Section V examines the evolution of social life and Section VI reviews formalised accounts of levels of social development; these are things we might change. Section VII defines human needs and Section VIII looks at happiness. Section IX considers values and section X looks at inequality and its impact, especially in the modern world. Section XI considers social rules and the need for compassion, virtue and social justice. Finally, Section XII considers how we might move forward.

Justification

The ideas in this essay are not original and may be found in the books and publications listed at the end. Where a particular section is mainly drawn from an individual book, the author and title are recognised in the text.

I am emboldened to write by the sense that ideas from a wide variety of sources can now be integrated and presented in a simple and accessible way. The presentation is necessarily impressionistic and may engender outrage among specialists.

There are two motives for writing this essay. First, I am concerned about the state of the world and would like understand how we got here and to suggest how we might move forward with hope. Second, having started with a low key religious upbringing (daily chapel at nominally Christian schools), having moved through a rigorously non-spiritual professional phase and then entered the New Age replete with Encounter Groups, spiritual healers, Tarot Cards and Astrology, I wanted to define, for myself, a mature position with regard to beliefs about the world, humankind and the future.

Dedication

This essay is dedicated to my partner, Diane; my children, Emma, Alex and Savannah; and to my grand-children, Cory and Pery.

II. Accounts of Creation

This section presents the history of accounts of evolution, looking to answer the question of our origin. The pre-scientific accounts come mainly from Walter Wink’s 1998 book "The Powers that Be: theology for a new millenium."[4] Much of the scientific account it is drawn from Lloyd Geering’s book, published in 2013, "From the Big Bang to God"[5] which was innocently responsible for encouraging me to try to sort out my ideas about the human condition.

Historical Accounts of Creation

All social groups have a story that they use to explain existence and to give themselves guidance as to how they should behave. Hunters and gatherers, as we know from those who remain, account for the universe in terms of human experience; the universe is created by super-human ancestors and events are caused by entities, not by inanimate processes; indeed, animate and inanimate are not clearly distinguished.

In early societies practising herding and agriculture more generic concepts emerged – the forest rather than the tree – and acquired names – for example, Gaia, the mother Earth, and Uranus, the Sky. Subsequently, individual tribes selected particular gods and used such expressions as The God of the Israelites. About 2500 years ago belief in a single God emerged, manifested, for example, in the Jewish religion and Zoroastrianism. The revised explanation of the world was that it was created by God and He ordained how it worked and how humans should behave.

While monotheism, as manifest in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions, may seem, from a Western perspective, the dominant faith of the last two millennia it is interesting that in the period when monotheism was emerging, the Buddha was declaring the gods irrelevant and focussing on "dharma (the path to fulfilment), the Greeks were talking about eternal forms" and Confucius was ignoring the gods altogether in favour of a code of appropriate behaviour.

Indeed, the words of Jesus may be re-read as advice on how to lead a good life, continuing the tradition of wisdom found in the Old Testament, particularly Ecclesiastes, but adding meaning to that bleak view of a random universe. He may be seen, not as the incarnation of God, but as the incarnation of virtue – specifically of love.

From about 1200AD individuals began to base their understandings of the natural world on observation. This process was based on a belief in a God who had created an orderly natural world and is a natural successor to monotheism rather than its opposition.

Key intellectual changes were expressed in the Renaissance (14th – 17th Century) when the classical Greek texts were rediscovery and the Enlightenment (17th – 19th Century) which emphasised a reliance on reason rather than tradition, creating a world of philosophy and, ultimately, natural science, separated from the world of revelation and faith. Thinkers from Spinoza to Newton began to see god as a personification of everything all together, as a personification of the creativity of the universe. The key change, as voiced by Feuerback in the mid-1800s, was that humankind made god, not God humankind.

The Scientific Account of Evolution

The account of creation