The Trajectory of Humanity: Towards a New Arcadia? (2nd Edition)

By Antony Raymont

The essay looks at scientific and spiritual evidence to answer the questions "Where do we come from?" and "Where are we going?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781543900774

Book preview

XV)

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 still 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 their 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 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 others and to ourselves. When we describe the 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 accounts 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 living things. 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 some 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 helio-centrism 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, inhabits this realm. Just as we can use science to create new objects from stone tools to the internet, so we can generate new subjective experiences for ourselves, and for each other, through the arts and expressed through social relationships.

Further, since the earliest humans, a form of knowing based on internal exploration has been recognised. Before farms, towns and cities, shamans and medicine men and women seers 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 and understanding of the world. 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 approach is suggested by Ken Wilber’s "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 and talk about the world.

There is 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]

Justification

The ideas in this essay are not original and may be found in the books and other publications referenced. 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 have been 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 understanding the world, humankind and the future – in accord with my newly identified Buddhism.

I hope that others, particularly those with a similar personal trajectory, will find the essay both stimulating and hopeful.

II. Accounts of Evolution

This section presents the history of accounts of evolution, looking to discover from whence we come. 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 science 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. Foragers (as hunters and gatherers are more accurately called), 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, to have been 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, from the same period, may be re-read as advice on how to lead a virtuous 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 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 was a 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 that emerged from scientific exploration is now outlined in four steps.

Cosmology - Since Einstein, it has come to be accepted that space, matter and time are inter-dependant and that energy and matter are inter-changeable. Science has studied the evolution of the universe aided by the fact that light from distant objects may have taken billions of years to reach earth and shows their status in the distant past. Since Hubble it has come to be accepted that the Universe is expanding. If the expansion is traced backwards, the data suggest that the universe came into being 13.75 billion years ago. Cosmologists call the starting point a singularity – a point of infinite density and zero volume. It makes no sense to talk of time, space or matter prior to the singularity.

Following this big bangi and over an immense period of (newly created) time, energy and particles interchanged themselves, atoms were formed and gas clouds, within which stars condensed, were formed. Big stars exploded as supernovae, creating the heavier chemical elements.

Geogenesis - In the neighbourhood of the sun, fragments of matter coalesced into the planets and asteroids. One, the Earth, formed about 4.5 billion years ago. In gradually cooling, it formed a solid central core, a molten mantle and a rigid but brittle crust. On the surface of the crust the hydrosphere condensed and was surrounded by the atmosphere. During this process it is likely that the planet was impacted by another body which may have changed the composition of the Earth, tilted the planet’s axis, speeded up rotation and, glancing off, formed the moon. External forces continued and continue to affect the Earth – these forces include collision with asteroids and variation in solar radiation.

Biogenesis – the development of life – is defined as the emergence of forms able to grow and reproduce themselves. It would appear that the first life-forms on Earth were the bacteria; how these originated is unclear but it is speculated that, about three billion years ago, a mixture of warm chemicals close to deep sea vents may have allowed a random combination of complex molecules that was self-replicating and which, over time, became more structured. Over a further immense period, combinations of bacteria formed cells and these further progressed into multi-celled organisms – in each case probably via some symbiotic process.

The development of more complex organisms proceeded slowly and was influenced by dramatic changes such as the formation and movement of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts. The archaeological record suggests that over the last 500 million years there have been at least five times when most of the life forms on earth ceased to exist. Initially attributed to asteroid impacts, recent research has suggested a relatively gradual, two-phase, process. First, asteroid impact or a massive volcanic eruption increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and led to global warming. Second, this led to a massive bloom of hydrogen sulphide producing organisms, otherwise present only in pockets of deep stagnant water, which poisoned almost all oceanic and land-based life-forms.[6] It is ironic that we are producing carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels mimicking the common factor in the previous extinctions of planetary life; the threshold appears to have been about 1000ppm of CO2. Life forms have previously reached back to affect the planet – blue green algae in the ocean generated oxygen which changed the composition of the atmosphere and formed the substrate for the production of ozone which filtered incoming radiation.

Anthropogenesis - Hominids developed 18 million years ago, the order Homo was present from two million years ago and Homo sapiens probably emerged 200 thousand years ago. One hundred thousand years ago the final biological leap was the development of speech. It required modification of the larynx and improved conscious control of the breath as evidenced in skeletons with wider spinal foramina.

It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the key change in the emergence of sapiens was the ability to tell stories; to recall, describe and even invent a series of events. Such stories facilitated understanding of the world and led almost immediately to two revolutionary developments. The first was the idea of choice and the second was judgment. As hominids began to tell stories, they became aware of themselves and of the possibility of choice, of the need to answer, for example, the question, "Shall we go North or South to hunt? Choice implied value judgements - Was it good to have chosen to go North?" Later, choices were made about social arrangements and the whole process of reasoning eventually spawned the development of science and technology.

While, from a qualitative point of view, the beginning of life, the emergence of hominids and the evolution of Homo sapiens may seem to have similar significance, it is worth remembering that the time required is measured in thousand fold decrements (billions, millions and thousands of years).

In