RES PUBLICA

THE EVOLUTIONARY IMPERATIVE



I. THE EMERGENCE OF MIND AND THE CREATION OF THE TECHNOSPHERE


The world of our experience can be divided into two large parts: the world of NATURE and the world of HUMAN ARTIFICE. Everything that exists, that is, exists either independently of human activity or because of human activity.

The Natural World, it is fair to say, is amoral; that is, nothing in that world can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’1 Nature follows its own impersonal processes. The Human World, by contrast, while arising from the Natural World and subject to its processes, adds to these processes the ‘emergent property’ of Mind. That is, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described the natural process of evolution, out of the inorganic world—the ‘lithosphere’ (from ancient Greek, ‘world of stone’)—emerged living matter—the ‘biosphere’ (‘world of life’)–, which in turn gave rise to increasingly complex life forms eventuating in the emergence of Mind (Greek, nous), a radically new property or ‘substance’ that has evolved from simple to increasingly complex manifestations.2 Teilhard named this new substance the ‘noosphere’ (‘world of mind’), by which the matter of the biosphere becomes not only conscious of its environment (the defining characteristic of all living things) but conscious of itself; that is, the phenomenon of Mind amounts to consciousness of consciousness, or self-consciousness. A being with self-consciousness can regard itself as a subject, as having a point-of-view, and thus can regard its natural as well as its social environment as an object, or, more especially, as a set of objects differentiable into an indefinite number of subsets and individuals. Such a creature is thus capable of acquiring knowledge (Latin, scientia) and using that knowledge to extend its ‘natural’ capacities by creating a ‘technology’ (from Greek, techne, art, skill) to fabricate ‘artifacts’ (Latin, arte, skill; factum, something made) that help it to survive and prevail. Teilhard went on to say that if Mind is, essentially, Nature conscious of itself, then Mind is Nature conscious of its own processes; and if it is thus, then evolution, one of Nature’s processes—perhaps even Nature’s most fundamental process—becomes conscious of itself. And that would entail the consequence that Mind is in position to direct the next stage of evolutionary development. While traces of Mind can be inferred from the behavior of a variety of life forms (sea-going mammals such as whales and dolphins; cephalopods; simians), the primary bearers of Mind appear to be human beings. And since they collectively serve as the agents of Mind’s activity, human beings are now collectively responsible for the next stage of evolutionary development.

Self-consciousness, in addition to making possible the ability to acquire knowledge and combining that knowledge with technical skill to create an‘artificial’ world (a world of ‘artifacts’), also makes possible the mental activity of reflection: that is, the ability of the conscious agent to regard itself as an object. Mind as subject can turn its gaze from its environment to itself as a part of that environment, thus enabling the subject to regard itself and its behavior as itself an object of knowledge. In addition, the subjective process of reflection gives rise to the sense of time, by which the mental faculty of memory generates a ‘past’ and the mental faculty of imagination generates a ‘future.’ Reflection on past behaviors in turn generates the faculty of judgment, which assigns values to those behaviors. Since the basic goal of all living things is to survive and prosper, the reflective being, in examining its own behavior, can determine which of its behaviors have in the past led to outcomes that have enhanced survival and prosperity, and those which have not. The former behaviors would be considered ‘good,’ and the latter ‘bad.’ This activity of Mind thus eventually creates what is called morality, a systematic and codified set of principles and rules built up over time and maintained in memory and practice by both individuals (‘personal morality’) and by groups through their social institutions (‘collective morality’). Morality, then, is an aspect of the “world of human artifice”: it is an abstract social artifact created by the agents of Mind for the purpose of their survival and prosperity, which is indeed the primary motive for the creation of all human artifacts.

To sum up so far: “Human artifice” comprises everything that comes into being by human activity; “Nature” refers to everything that comes into being by non-human processes. Humans themselves come into being by non-human processes; and the distinguishing feature of humans is that they are the agents of the emergent property of Mind, which, upon its emergence, generated the noosphere, “the world of Mind,” the distinctive quality of which is self-consciousness. Mind enables humans to transcend the automatic processes of Nature for the purpose of enhancing their prospects of survival and prosperity—that is, their “happiness.”

Now, to continue the argument, what humans do to secure their survival and achieve prosperity is, essentially, to create by artifice an environment to live in. That is, they alter the natural environment in which they find themselves by adding to it an environment particularly suited to enhance the prospects of their survival and prosperity, or happiness. We can call this altered environment the “artificial” environment. Another name for it, however, would be the technological environment, or simply “technology”—the world that comes into being by virtue of human “skill” (techne). We could also by analogy call this world the technosphere (“world of skill”), as long as we understand that techne is not a distinct emergent property such as “life,” which is utterly distinct from inorganic matter, but is rather a manifestation of Mind, and as such is an aspect of the noosphere.

The technosphere, then, is essentially the artificial environment humans create to enhance their prospects for happiness. This artificial environment is all-pervasive, and building and maintaining it constitutes the great bulk of human activity. It includes all material artifacts as well as all non-material (i.e., mental) artifacts such as systems of government, law, economics, religion, and morality. Another way to refer to this artificial environment is to call it a kind of medium, in the sense that water is the medium in which fish live. This is the primary sense of the word as used by Marshall McLuhan in his seminal analysis of modernity, especially modern technology, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

McLuhan’s concept of media is far broader and deeper than is usually understood. Today the word “media” normally refers to communications media—radio, television, cinema, books, newsprint, etc.—and is even used as a singular noun (“The media was responsible for his rapid rise to fame.”) Here the sense of the word is restricted to “that which mediates,” something that makes possible a connection between two or more entities. A communications medium thus makes possible a transfer of information between a sender of information and a receiver of that information. McLuhan’s thesis, insofar as it is applied to the media of communication, is that a medium of communication as it were informs, literally gives form to, the raw data being communicated, and in so doing determines the meaning that that data has for the receiver. The word “meaning” has three senses: (1) the referential relation of a signifier to what is signified; (2) the intention of the sender of information; (3) the interpretation of the information by the receiver of the information. McLuhan focuses on the third sense, but instead of understanding “meaning” as an interpretive intellectual construction, he emphasizes the affective response to data informed by a particular medium.

Normally a datum is “meaningful” to the degree that it is perceived as having a relation to the interests of the perceiver. Thus, for example, if one hears of a dormitory fire in which thirty college students lost their lives, that datum would have little meaning beyond a vague sorrow for the victims and sympathy for their loved ones. If one then discovers that the fire took place at the college attended by one’s daughter, the vague sorrow at once becomes fear and apprehension, and one is primed to get more precise data. The “meaning” is the emotional response to the personally relational context of the datum. The sense of “meaning” implied in McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” however, while involving affect, is not quite the emotional sense as described above. In his analysis of media as either “hot” or “cool,” the differentiating factor is not so much degree of emotional response as it is what he calls the degree of the receiver’s “participation” in the communication transaction. A “hot” medium defines or overdetermines its information, thus inducing passivity in its receiver, whereas a “cool” medium underdetermines its information, thus inducing active participation in the construction of meaning in the interpretive sense. Each of the different communications media shapes or “informs” raw data in its own way, and thus while all of the different media may be focusing their attention on the same set of data, the information communicated will be different for each medium. This phenomenon is behind McLuhan’s famous catchphrase, “the medium is the message”: the content of information (the “raw data”) is literally quite meaningless (without effect, or without affect) until that content is “informed” by a particular medium. Each medium ‘informs’ raw data in its own way, and thus produces effects and affects that differ from those of other media. Most significantly, the polysemous character of the term “medium” lends itself to a double reference that McLuhan intends. A communications medium is simultaneously both “an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished” and “surrounding objects, conditions, or influences; an environment.” In other words, a medium “translates” the raw data of consciousness into meaningful “information,” which we understand as a “message”; at the same time, the “language” into which the raw data is translated constitutes a psychic “environment.” As an environment, it “conditions” and “influences” our response to the information it presents. McLuhan does not go so far as to claim, as a Skinnerian behaviorist would, that the “influence” of a medium is determinative to the extent that free will is questioned, but he does suggest that the influence is deep and pervasive. One of his ways of expressing this idea is by making a playful pun on his own catchphrase: “The medium is the massage.” The “massage” pun can in turn be seen as another pun: “The medium is the mass age,” which suggests that the rise of democratic systems of government in the modern world coupled with a concomitant development of the communications media of electric technology have created “the masses,” the huge majority of human beings, whose lives are to a large degree determined by the forces unleashed by the modern technosphere. Electric technology, which has done much to shape the human environment or “medium” of the modern world, is analogously an “extension” of a single human’s central nervous system, and its effects are so radical that it bears much responsibility for the discontinuities and disorder that have characterized modern global society. In that respect we could say, “The medium is the mess age!”

The modernist aesthetic that asserts that form is content applies here. McLuhan got much of his playful rhetorical style from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), an “experimental” novel that, among other features, employs multi-lingual puns. One effect of the novel is to create, as it were, an artificial environment that is the linguistic equivalent of a global consciousness that beholds the entire history of the human race from the viewpoint of a Dublin tavern-keeper (that is, anybody, or “everyman”). It is as if one were to refashion the contents of an entire encyclopedia (a logos) into a single continuous narrative (a mythos) by translating scientific knowledge (scientia) into poetic language (poesis, or mythos). It is not so much what is known but how something is known that really counts. Scientific knowledge is linear, fragmented, discontinuous; poetic knowledge is holistic, “organic,” interconnected. A Mondrian painting or a Stravinsky ballet suite is not about colored rectangles, nor the pagan sacrifice of a virginal girl; instead, those artworks are, so to speak, gateways into an artificial environment, a medium, a human-generated world in which we are invited to participate via an “artistic transaction.” While “in” that environment we undergo a “virtual” experience analogous to the vicarious experience we undergo when identifying with a character in a work of “realistic” narrative fiction. Since such experience is virtual or vicarious, its ontic status is purely imaginative—that is, such experience belongs only to Mind. Our ability to enter, to undergo, and to leave such mental experiences at will is pleasurable, and is so for the reason that it exercises Mind and explores it. As it is pleasurable to exercise the body in sport, so it is pleasurable to exercise Mind in the myriad and apparently endless ways it allows. Actualizing the possibilities of a potentiality in what we call play (or “autotelic behavior”) could very well be, in fact, what Mind is all about. The philosopher Martin Heidegger has a wonderfully poetic phrase that expresses our mental experience of beholding the world: das Spiegelgespiel des Seines, which translates to “the mirror-play of Being.” Our ability to play with Mind may indeed be the primary activity of our “pursuit of happiness.”

McLuhan’s true topic is not, then, limited to the media of communications, but rather comprises technology in general, what we are calling the technosphere, or everything that exists through the agency of human activity. He saw that humans, like any species of life, instinctively seek to survive, to thrive, and to perpetuate their kind. What distinguishes humans from all other living things is the extraordinary degree to which they can adjust to life-threatening changes in their environment and especially to modify their environment to enhance their chances for survival. Most distinctively, humans can create an alternate environment, a wholly artificial environment, custom-designed to suit their desires. This artificial environment—the technosphere–is constantly developing—indeed, evolving—as new inventions and discoveries are made and applied. It is fair to say that, whereas primitive or aboriginal human cultures continue to live in a mostly Natural environment, the human cultures devoted to scientific knowledge and the technology derived from it are increasingly living in an artificial environment of their own making. Another word for “environment” is medium, and this medium is the technosphere. It is composed of innumerable parts, all of them objects of human artifice, and all of them collectively referred to as media. To avoid confusion, we must understand that “technosphere” refers to the totality of the artificial environment humans have created to be, so to speak, their home; and that this technosphere is now the primary medium, or environment, in which humans live.

As McLuhan used the term, then, a medium, in its instrumental sense, is an “extension of man.” This sense of the term is nicely illustrated in the opening sequence of the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which a proto-human creature discovers through desultory play that he can gain an advantage in defending a water-hole against others of his kind by using an animal’s femur as a club. After he leads his clan in beating off their attackers using these femur-clubs, in the exultation of triumph he throws his “club” upward. The camera follows its course in the air, and as the twirling bone reaches the apex of its arc, it gradually slows its motion and morphs into—a space station. The clear implication of this scene is that once the proto-human discovered the concept of tool, it was simply a matter of time before that concept would lead to something as complex as a space station. In playing with a large bone, the proto-human discovered that by grasping it at one end and swinging it downward onto a pile of other bones, he could easily break those other bones. He had discovered, McLuhan would say, that he could extend a capacity he possessed naturally. He can “naturally” contract his hand into a fist and to use the hand so shaped to beat off an attacker, but he can also use his hand instead to grasp an object of suitable shape, weight, and hardness, and “artificially” use that object to achieve his purpose more effectively. The femur is transformed (or informed) into a club; the club is an “extension” of the proto-human’s fist. The bone-become-club thus represents symbolically the beginning of technology, an enterprise that in the course of some two to three million years has evolved to space exploration “and beyond.”

All technological objects—that is, all things that come into being through human agency—are, then, “extensions of man.” The main motive for the creation of such objects is greater efficiency in the achievement of desired ends, the ultimate end being survival and prosperity, or happiness. As the proto-human in Kubrick’s film discovered, he could achieve his end of defending his clan’s water-hole more efficiently by showing his mates that clubs do the job much better than fists. Thus, as McLuhan explains, clothing is an extension of skin; a wheel is an extension of bipedal or quadripedal motion; a table is an extension of a lap; cameras, microscopes, and telescopes are extensions of the eye; and so on. Today, most spectacularly, a computer is an extension of the brain, and the Internet—a global network of computers—can be seen as an extension of the collective “social brain” of humankind, the way Joyce presents his hero Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE, or “Here Comes Everybody,” who “Haveth Childers Everywhere” near “Howth Castle and Environs,” where Howth Castle is in Dublin and the “environs” is the entire world.

McLuhan’s reasoning by analogy is deeply suggestive, especially when the analogy between, say, brain and computer, is extended beyond the human organism as a single individual to include all human beings and what human beings have accomplished collectively—past, present, and potentially in the future–as a species. As essentially social beings, humans create culture, a way of living passed on through social institutions from one generation to the next. Most human cultures have evolved and continue to evolve to address more efficiently the achievement of their primary end of happiness. When their happiness is threatened by a change in their natural or social environment, they must either learn to adapt to the changed environment, or to change their environment. Those few cultures that do not evolve—the “primitive” or aboriginal cultures—have chosen not to evolve or change because they see no need to do so: they can continue to survive and prosper and achieve happiness because, in their relative isolation from other cultures and their particular geographical location, their basic natural and social environment has been stable. Of course, with the “globalization” phenomenon, no human society can sustain isolation, and the aboriginal cultures are therefore compelled to enter modernity whether they want to or not.

Implicit in the foregoing explanation of cultural evolution is the notion that the main driving force behind our increasingly sophisticated and complex technosphere is reaction to the various natural and social threats to human survival and happiness. While this explanation is largely true, an additional motive may have as much importance: curiosity. As Aristotle famously said, “All men by nature desire to know.” The desire for knowledge is as much a part of human being as the desire to survive, to reproduce, to be happy. If, again, we follow Teilhard’s argument, the emergence of life (biosphere) out of inert mineral matter (lithosphere) and the emergence of Mind (noosphere) out of living matter describes a course of evolutionary transcendence. If the primary reality has become the noosphere, or Mind, and if the noosphere, like the lithosphere and the biosphere that gave rise to it, is continuing to evolve, then we are compelled to consider the notion that Mind, as a medium, has its own end in addition to being a means of human survival and happiness. That end, of course, would be knowledge. Knowledge, that is, “for its own sake,” which is a definition of “curiosity.” The ancient Hindu expression, tat tuam asi (“thou art that”)—believed to be “the goal of all wisdom and spiritual practices”—asserts the ultimate identity of the Self (atman) with the Absolute (brahman). In the terms of our discussion, it describes the activity of Mind: in the act of Knowing, Subject (“thou”) merges with Object (“that”). The goal of curiosity, of knowledge, and thus of human activity, is the unification of the Many with the One. The final end of this goal is what the paleontologist-Jesuit priest Teilhard, in his extraordinary combination of rigorous scientific speculation and Christian mysticism, calls “the Omega Point,” otherwise known as “God.”

Teilhard’s is one way of talking about the activity of “the human phenomenon” (le phenomene humain). It is especially refreshing because it flatly rejects any oppositional relation between science and religion, or the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of meaning. Indeed, far from being oppositional, they are complementary. We seek knowledge both for its instrumental value for survival and happiness, and “for its own sake,” as an end in itself, as a pleasurable activity, as exercising and playing with Mind. Such activity can be described as “spiritual” as well as “mental.” Indeed, “spiritual” would be the religious term for it, as “mental” would be the scientific term. Teilhard the scientist propounded a theory to explain the scientific evidence available to him; Teilhard the theologian sought to understand the ultimate meaning of this evidence as it affects the prospects for human happiness. In Christian doctrine, such a concern is expressed as “salvation from a state of sin.” Theologically, “sin” is separation from God, and “salvation” is the result of a process by which such separation is overcome. This process can also be described as one of overcoming ignorance by acquiring knowledge, and then applying that knowledge to promote our happiness. If humans are essentially the agents of Mind (or, the instruments of God’s will), then our scientific activity of increasing our knowledge of Nature (or, God’s Creation) and ourselves (or, the images of God) is our primary activity, our main job, our great task.



II. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MORAL SENSE: THE MYTH OF THE FALL (PART ONE)


The emergence of self-consciousness as the constitutive foundation of Mind, and how it gave rise to such expressions of Mind as knowledge and morality, is figuratively described in the great myth of ‘The Fall’ in the Biblical book of Genesis. In the interpretive analysis that follows, the word “myth” is used to refer to a narrative or story (Greek, mythos) that attempts to express, through highly symbolic language, fundamental spiritual and moral truths about the human condition. The purpose of a myth is not to describe or relate a set of historical facts or occurrences, but to express certain values and meanings related to human experience. A myth’s “truth,” then, aims not at a “truth of correspondence” but rather a kind of “truth of coherence” in which symbolic values cohere or are unified by a set of premises. In the various narratives of the Judeo-Christian Bible, the fundamental premise is that the relation of human beings to what philosophers call the Absolute is a personal relation, dialogical if not dialectical. In this relation, which amounts to a relationship, humans’ questions about the whys and wherefores of their existence are addressed to an anthropomorphic authority (the Author, so to speak, of all that exists) who responds in various ways (through language, through historical events, through natural phenomena, through dreams, through inspiration of “prophets” [Greek, prophetes, one who speaks for the gods]). These ways are most often indirect and even obscure, requiring great subtlety and acuteness of mind to interpret and so make meaningful. That is, the full resources of Mind or spiritual intelligence are needed to understand the communications of the Divine.


Adam and Eve, male and female—who represent all of humanity–are created in the “image” of their creator, God, who gives them two tasks. The first task is to “tend the garden and to keep it”; the second is to give a name to “every living creature.”

God first creates Adam, and then fashions the Garden as a home for him. A garden is by definition a plot of land set aside for the cultivation of plants desirable for their practical or aesthetic value for human beings. The Garden, then, is a special environment set off from the rest of the natural world. It represents a particularly human environment, in which the matter of the natural world is ordered so that it may serve to satisfy human needs and desires. The objects of these desires are symbolically presented in the form of trees:

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the Garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The first human desire implied, surprisingly enough, is for beauty (“every tree that is pleasant to the sight”); the second desire is for sustenance (“every tree that is . . . good for food”). If this order implies value priority, then beauty has a higher value than physical existence. Since there can of course be no perception and experience of beauty without physical existence, the only logical implication of this order is that the essence of humankind is not material but spiritual or mental; and indeed, if humans are the “image” of God, then their essence as spiritual beings—or as agents of Mind—would seem to follow. In the various Biblical stories (mythoi) of the Divine world in communication with the human world, God and his “heavenly host” are typically presented as disembodied spirits figuratively represented by fire, thunder, wind, earthquake, and especially a voice, sometimes very loud (“his majestic voice will thunder”) [Job, 37:4] and sometimes very quiet (“a still, small voice”) [I Kings, 19:12]. A disembodied voice, then, represents a non-material spirit; that is, an expression of Mind.

In addition to the human desires for beauty and for material sustenance, the third desire implied here is that for immortality, represented by the Tree of Life. At this point in the narrative, immortality is simply provided for humans along with the beauty of the Garden and the food that abundantly grows there. Adam’s and Eve’s survival and prosperity, however, are contingent upon their activity. The Garden was designed by God as an environment suited for human enjoyment, but it must be maintained by humans. Humans must “tend the Garden and [. . . .] keep it”; and they must “replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion [ . . . ] over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (The power to name things, by the way, is the power to define them; and such power implies “dominion” over them. The text thus also implies Adam’s dominion over Eve, who receives her name from him.) These activities require judgment, for the humans must be able to identify weeds (which are “bad” in that they threaten the plants that are “good” to behold and to eat); and of course the humans must be able to decide which of their actions would “replenish the earth” rather than deplete it. Yet how can judgment be exercised without moral understanding? That is, if humans cannot distinguish between what is good for them and what is bad for them (what promotes survival and prosperity as opposed to what promotes death and misery), then how can they maintain the Garden and “replenish the earth”? The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or moral understanding, which the text symbolizes as a fourth fundamental object of human desire, is forbidden to them. To put it into Teilhard’s terms, the noosphere—the “globe of Mind”—is tantalizingly just beyond their reach; and yet their very survival requires that they attain it! The only way they can achieve it is to transcend their status as merely living things conscious of their environment and become living things conscious of themselves as conscious beings.

The process by which Adam and Eve achieve self-consciousness is described in Chapter 3. It starts with God’s prohibition of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Since Adam and Eve do not as yet have moral understanding—that aspect of Mind that involves moral judgment–, they can only understand this prohibition in a primitive way; that is, as in Lawrence Kohlberg’s schema of moral development, they have a “pre-conventional” understanding of morality: a “good” action entails a pleasurable reward, a “bad” action entails painful punishment. Thus, when God says that the consequence of disobedience to his prohibition is death, they must infer that “death” is painful, and therefore “bad.” They cannot understand “good” and “bad” as being anything other than words for “pleasure” and “pain,” not as moral terms relating to survival and prosperity and their opposites.

Symbolically, the Tree of Life—from which Adam and Eve may eat–represents immortality, or Life; and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represents mortality, or Death.

The Serpent, whose defining characteristic is his mental sophistication, or sophistry (the Hebrew ‘arum being variously translated as “crafty,” “subtle,” “cunning,” etc.), provides the agency for the humans’ transcendence of their child-like pre-moral innocence, in which they are conscious of their environment but not of themselves as subjects. He uses the grammar of language to manipulate Eve’s perception of reality by beginning a question with a conditional clause that he knows to be a false premise. His first sentence is normally translated as a question: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (KJV), whereas it would be more accurate to note that Eve interrupts the serpent’s first utterance to correct its error: “’Though (‘ap ki-) God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden—‘ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘From the fruit of the garden’s trees we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden God has said, ‘You shall not eat of it and you shall not touch it, lest you die’” [trans. Robert Alter]. At this point, Eve cannot imagine the Serpent’s utterance to be anything other than a mistake, an error of perception. She could have no notion that the Serpent would deliberately utter a falsehood, for such an action is morally ambiguous, and she does not yet possess moral understanding. What she is getting, however, is a tacit tutorial from the Serpent on how to think, to argue, and to persuade by using language, Mind’s primary medium.

It’s worthwhile now to pause and reflect on what morality is. We have noted that morality requires judgment, and judgment is the faculty of Mind that, as Kant said, “subsumes particulars under universals.” Judgment properly determines what course of action is likely to lead to survival and prosperity (“good”), or to the opposite (“bad”). But the survival and prosperity of whom? The motive for deceit and prevarication, as used by the Serpent, is to gain an advantage over others; that is to say, to promote one’s own personal or group’s survival and prosperity at the expense of another’s survival and prosperity. If such deceit is successful, if it promotes the survival or prosperity of the deceiver, can it not then be “good”? The answer to such a question is unclear, and as such calls for the exercise of a highly sophisticated moral judgment. To possess such judgment does not guarantee “happiness” (which term we will use hereafter for the phrase “survival and prosperity”), but it is a necessary if not sufficient condition for it. Other animals must suffer their fates; the best they can have is a kind of contentment. Only humans, because they possess moral judgment, have some control over the course of their individual and collective lives. Because their decisions and actions are free and unconstrained, they bear responsibility for the consequences of their decisions and actions; and because of this responsibility, they have the capacity for happiness, and, of course, its opposite.

Eve’s correction of the Serpent’s disingenuous question engages that part of Mind concerned with perception and the representation of perception in language. She re-presents the prohibition that God gave to Adam, which means she re-presents Adam’s representation to her of what God said to him. The prohibition has achieved a kind of cause-effect, if-then facticity: If you eat the fruit, then you will die. She is confident that the Serpent is mistaken, but her confidence is based on trust, not perception. She could only know that the prohibited fruit would entail death upon consumption by observing it happen, or by experiencing it for herself. In short, her “knowledge” is a belief based on her trust that God’s words represent or refer to reality. Eve is now in a linguistic world, the world of logos and logic, symbol and metaphor, a world of expression, information, and persuasion that has its own rules—an aspect of the medium of Mind.

The extraordinary artfulness of Biblical narrative is evidenced by Eve’s reply to the Serpent. As noted by Robert Alter in his commentary on his translation, “Eve enlarges the divine prohibition in another direction, adding a ban on touching to the one on eating, and so perhaps setting herself up for transgression: having touched the fruit, and seeing no ill effect, she may proceed to eat.” Yet Eve has no motive for “setting herself up for transgression.” The so-called “J writer” (or Yahwist) who composed this version of the myth would have such a motive, but not the character. Is Eve’s addition of touching not rather an embellishment of the prohibition, whether added by herself or Adam, as a way to reinforce the danger that the fruit holds? The point here is that Eve (or Adam), is proceeding on a course of action that she believes will promote her chances for happiness. She has not simply and ingenuously repeated the words of God’s prohibition: she has embellished them, and has done so with a purpose. In other words, her response to the Serpent’s question implies that she already has the capacity for moral reasoning; she already understands good and evil. She has judgment, but she is unaware of what she has done. What she lacks is full self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-consciousness.

The Serpent, anticipating Eve’s correction of his false premise, sees that the moment is ripe for his purpose, to subvert Eve’s naïve understanding. Since she has corrected him, it is now his turn to “correct” her: “But you will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” First, he lies by denying the “bad” consequence of death; and then he ambiguously asserts the “good” consequence of moral knowledge: eating the fruit will entail a reward, not a punishment. This is psychological jiu-jitsu. By beginning his conversation with a premise he knows that she knows to be false, he is inviting her to demonstrate knowledge in the face of his “ignorance.” Being “cunning,” he knows that her response cannot be emotionally neutral; that, in short, by displaying her knowledge she will feel some degree of pride. Then he uses her feeling of pride in factual knowledge by deceitfully introducing the idea of deceit: that God has deliberately misinformed her to maintain his own pride!—that he has knowledge of something important that he does not want to share. Having aroused in Eve a pride of knowledge, he introduces an opportunity to increase her knowledge and so increase her pride. He thus presents her with an opportunity to transcend her condition as primus inter pares among the animals to become “like God”; which is to say, to enter into the world of Mind, the noosphere. A third desire is aroused in her in addition to survival (“the woman saw that the tree was good for food . . .”) and the pleasure of beholding beauty (“ . . . and that it was a delight to the eyes . . . “). Although this third object of desire is normally translated to mean wisdom (“ . . . and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise . . . “), Robert Alter notes that the term ta’awah, normally translated as “delight,” in most Hebrew contexts refers to intense desire, even lust, a desire not just to behold (as one does in the experience of the beautiful) but to possess. Thus is covetousness presented as the first sin, the wedge that begins the separation of humans from God. The great paradox, of course, is that Eve’s (and then Adam’s) desire to “be like God, knowing good and evil” is necessary for humans to do the work God assigns to them. Only by knowing the difference between what sustains life and what destroys it can they properly exercise their responsibility to “tend the Garden and to keep it”—that is, to be the caretakers of the Natural world as ordered for human use—and to “have dominion” over all living things.


INTERLUDE I: MIND AND THE TROPE OF PARADOX

In language, a paradox is a kind of trope, a figure of speech in which an apparent contradiction is used to express a truth that cannot be expressed literally. A well-known example is a saying attributed to Jesus: “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 10:39). Here the equivalence of losing and finding is literal nonsense. The only way such a statement can be understood as meaningful is to situate it in the context that Jesus has been in the process of establishing; namely, the notion that humans live and act simultaneously on two planes of reality and experience, the temporal and the eternal, or the physical and the spiritual, or the material and the mental. Given that notion as a premise in understanding the world of human experience, what is “lost” in one plane can be “found” in another. The key point is that once the premise is established through repeated use of such paradoxical statements, the priority of the spiritual (or mental) plane is also established.
In a narrative such as the Myth of the Fall, paradox can be expressed by a contradiction in normal expectation. In order for Adam and Eve to do what God assigns to them, they must have moral understanding, but in order to have moral understanding they must disobey God. In disobeying God they become alienated from God, but in their alienation they become “like God, knowing good and evil.” As a verbal paradox involves the establishment in language of a context in which two (or more) planes of reality are operative, so a narrative paradox involves a like bi-level context. God cannot simply give humans moral understanding and the free will required for exercising such understanding: humans must earn that understanding by exercising their capacity for it. Such understanding can only be gained through experience. Eve’s embellishment of God’s prohibition (to God’s “you shall not eat of the fruit . . .” she adds, seemingly gratuitously, “ . . . nor shall you touch it”) is evidence of her unconscious capacity for moral thinking: her desire to avoid what is “bad” or destructive leads her to reinforce the prohibition by embellishing it. While an embellishment is not exactly a lie, neither is it exactly the truth. Adam and Eve must become conscious of their mental activity so that they can exercise and develop it to the point where their judgment enables them to have such “dominion” over the Creation as to nurture and sustain it; so that, insofar as they are “the image of God,” they can behold their work and call it “good.”
The two planes of reality that establish the context of the narrative paradox of the Myth of the Fall are the world of natural law and the world of human freedom; or, the world of “necessity” and the human world of “free will.” The world of necessity follows implacable laws of cause and effect. It is the world of Nature described by the sciences of physics and chemistry, geology and biology, a world that exists and changes according to impersonal operations. Rivers flood and dry up; tectonic plates beneath the earth’s crust grind together and form mountain ranges, then separate and form valleys. The world of free will, the will to assert their desires that led Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, is the world of human action and responsibility. Free will is a transcendence of the world of natural law and a manifestation of the world of Mind. Indeed, the Myth of the Fall is a symbolic account of the emergence of Mind from living matter via the human capacity to act freely, undetermined by necessity. According to G. W. F. Hegel, the German philosopher who most profoundly explored the world of Mind, transcendence is a “sublation” (Aufhebung), a kind of paradox by which something is at once annulled and preserved. Free will in a sense annuls the hegemony of necessity while preserving the force of its reality within a larger context, the context of Mind. Analogously, whereas Einstein’s relativity theory and Planck’s quantum theory are refinements needed to understand certain phenomena that behave differently than Newtonian physics would predict, Newtonian physics nonetheless holds true for the phenomena of unaided, or unmediated, perception. The modern theories annul the validity of the older theory in its total application, but they nonetheless preserve the validity and usefulness of its basic claims. Hegelian logic thus denies the either-or premise of Aristotelian logic, which (via Parmenides) assumes a static substance, and proposes in its place the both-and premise of dialectical logic, which (via Heraclitus) assumes a dynamic substance. From the Aristotelian viewpoint, necessity and free will are contradictory, but from the Hegelian viewpoint they form a “synthesis,” a paradoxical combination of “thesis” and “antithesis” that inhabits a new plane of being that Teilhard called the noosphere.

III. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MORAL SENSE: THE MYTH OF THE FALL (PART TWO)

Eve eats the fruit, and gives some to Adam, and he eats. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Here, “knowing good and evil,” or moral understanding, is expressed through the figure of vision. Having closed eyes implies an unawareness of one’s true environment, as if one were asleep and dreaming. Having open eyes here implies not only perception of one’s environment, but understanding as well. Before their enlightenment, Adam and Eve were merely objects of God’s perception, but now they are themselves also perceiving subjects: they now can perceive and understand the world somewhat as God perceives and understands it—as an environment that they are simultaneously immersed in and outside of. They are now in a position to “tend the Garden and keep it” and to “dominate” the creatures in it. The objects of their environment have not changed, but their relation to those objects—including themselves!—has changed fundamentally. This change is figuratively expressed by the first thing that they now “see”: their nakedness. They cover their genitalia and hide from God, and when God calls to Adam, the latter explains that he is hiding because he is “naked.” God’s response—“Who told you that you were naked?”—indicates that God knows that the humans have transcended their status as mere objects and have become subjects as well. “Nakedness” is a word-concept that implies a moral category. It exists only in Mind, for it implies a distinction between private and public. The genitalia are not only the organs of sexual reproduction but also of urination, the evacuation of bodily waste. Considering the consequences of coition, it would be “bad” for sexual coupling to be indiscriminate, for anonymous fatherhood entails an abdication of responsibility for the offspring, a situation that would place those offspring at risk; and bodily waste, in addition to being useless, is also repulsive aesthetically and dangerous to health. Therefore, public exposure of genitalia is a gesture that implies a threat to human survival and happiness. Clothing, besides being an “extension of the skin,” as McLuhan said, is also an extension of Mind in its moral aspect. It is good to make a distinction between public and private; that is, to mark off what belongs exclusively to a self-conscious subject from what belongs indiscriminately to all is good because such a distinction promotes individual and collective happiness. Privacy implies the uniqueness of each individual; it implies personhood; it implies that the subjective experience of each individual human being is personal; and one does not indiscriminately share with others this personhood. Without such a distinction between private and public, humans would lack the autonomy needed to fulfill themselves as “tenders of the Garden,” or as agents of Mind. To tend the Garden, humans must freely exercise their capacity for judgment, and to do that they cannot be bound by “necessity” in the form of instinct, which they share with the other animals. Nor can humans be bound by an uncritical acceptance of social custom and tradition, which, although having the great value of preserving proven life-enhancing practices, can nonetheless frustrate the invention of policies and practices better suited to address new challenges in the natural and social environment. Such judgment can only begin with a free individual mind. Needless to say, a free mind capable of consistently good judgment is and always has been a rare achievement, and is arguably especially so in the modern “mass age.”

God, like a responsible parent, punishes Adam and Eve for their disobedience, for while their free act propelled them from the world of necessity and instinct into the transcendent world of Mind, their transcendence is also a transgression. They are now free beings, responsible for their own survival and happiness. Indeed, because of their freedom they can achieve happiness, as opposed to mere contentment with their fated lot. Such responsibility requires that they see their environment as it is, a complex and indiscriminate mix of what is good for them and what is bad for them. They must shed their illusions and use their critical intellectual and moral discernment to make their own way through this complex environment. God thrusts them out of the Garden that he made for them, as parents must eventually thrust their children from the family “garden” and into the changing world of time and circumstance. For the individual and collective gardens made by humans are not eternal but in time and history, and thus subject to change, for good or for ill, depending on how humans exercise their freedom to judge and to act with or against the forces of necessity.

The noosphere, the world of Mind, the world that came into being through reflexive consciousness, is the human world. Its emergence, as we saw, is poetically figured in the myth of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; and its distinguishing feature is Eve’s recognition, prompted by her dialogue with the Serpent, that she has a choice. She realizes that her behavior is not determined by instinct, that her responses to her environment are not necessarily automatic, and that she can grasp the contours of her immediate environment through an imaginative perspective that enables her to expand that environment to include alternative possibilities. The fruit of the tree “in the midst of the garden” previously understood as poisonous may not be poisonous at all but rather a source of great enrichment. This imaginative perspective, of course, is an aspect of reflexive consciousness, and is the source of Eve’s freedom. The mythical Mother of the human race becomes autonomous or “self-ruled” rather than governed by instinct alone; she transcends the category of animal behavior and becomes an agent capable of action. The imaginative perspective that enables her to expand her environment to include consciousness of alternatives and possibilities and therefore choices upon which to act thus introduces the moral category of responsibility. What Eve does in the myth, what she gets Adam to do, is to make a choice among possible alternatives and to act on that choice. From that point on, the human species is no longer bound exclusively to “necessity” or “fate.”

The myth presents the responsibility that goes with freedom as a punishment. Along with reason, imagination, judgment, and all the other faculties of Mind, reflexive consciousness makes possible the awareness of finitude, of being-in-time, of death, and this awareness leads to the existential anxiety of the anticipation of non-being. In the ironic if not paradoxical words of the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, humans are “condemned to be free.” According to the myth, the one doing the condemning is God, but since the language of myth is wholly figurative, the condemnation or punishment is a way of expressing and understanding that freedom makes action possible, and action (as opposed to mere behavior) implies responsibility, and responsibility is a kind of burden, the burden of a moral being. Responsibility is a human burden because free choices and actions based on those free choices have consequences, and humans have no assurance that these consequences will conform to their desires. Adam and Eve discover this melancholy fact in short order. In effect, by their choice and their action, they condemn themselves. God had previously informed them of what would be the consequence of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so by disregarding his warning they are in effect choosing death. “God” in this narrative, as in all the narratives of the Bible, represents Truth, or the Truth of Being, or What Is, or simply, Being. This representation is clarified in a later narrative when God tells Moses that his name is “I AM THAT I AM” (ehyeh-asher-ehyeh), or simply, “I AM” (Ex. 3:14). Adam and Eve, lacking enough experience to achieve wisdom, misuse their new ability to imagine alternatives by mis-imagining consequences.

The narrative notes that the Serpent is the “most clever” of God’s creatures; thus, in the context of our analysis, the Serpent represents Mind, especially that capacity of Mind to think, to calculate, to rationalize, to deceive. If, as Socrates says, “thinking is the silent inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself ” (Sophist, 263e), the dialogue the Serpent has with Eve thus represents Eve’s own mental activity in dialectical form. So understood, her thinking, her reflexive consciousness, would go something like the following:

“My survival is threatened by the presence of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God says that if I eat of its fruit I will die, so I must avoid it. I won’t even touch it, much less eat it. – But why would God include such a thing in the Garden? What’s the point? And why would he place it right in the middle of the Garden? [Note: In Gen. 2:9 we are told that God made to grow “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the Garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” In the next chapter, however, Eve identifies the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as the one “in the midst of the Garden” (3:3)! This implies either that both named trees are “in the midst of the Garden”—i.e., next to each other—or that Eve has confused the two trees, thus making the Tree of Life a Tree of Death! The narrative also introduces an ambiguity; namely, we are told that all the trees in the Garden are “pleasant to the sight, and good for food,” including the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That it is “pleasant to the sight” is corroborated by Eve in 3:6. Her belief that it is also “good for food” is not necessarily mistaken, because while it makes her mortal, it also makes her free!] Perhaps God does not want us to survive! But then why would he have made us in the first place? No, he wants us to survive, but on his terms. It must be that he doesn’t want us to ‘know good and evil,’ whatever that is. So, he must have ‘knowledge,’ whatever that is, and he doesn’t want us to share it. That suggests that ‘knowledge of good and evil’ has real value! Therefore, the fruit is not only pleasant to look at, but good for food, especially good for food. God misrepresented the consequences of eating that fruit. It will not only help us to survive, but to live the way God lives. We can become like God! — I will eat the fruit.”

Needless to say, Eve’s thought process, as figured in her spoken dialogue with the Serpent, includes the capacity not only for deception but also self-deception. Both she and the Serpent, whatever their respective motives, suffer consequences contrary to their desires. Neither reflexive consciousness nor moral knowledge guarantees wisdom, the ability and will to choose and act consistently in accordance with what is good. What they do guarantee is the possibility of freedom and its attendant responsibility.



IV. GUIDING THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS, PART ONE: THE ORTHOGENESIS HYPOTHESIS


The emergence, then, of living matter out of inert matter—the biosphere out of the lithosphere—entailed the emergence of consciousness. All living things, including plants, are to varying degrees conscious of their environment. Phototropism, for example, or the tendency of green plants to turn their leaves towards sunlight, indicates at least a responsiveness of green plants to the environmental sources of their survival. At the conclusion of The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), Charles Darwin exclaims, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicule (small projection from a root-stem) [ . . . ], having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals” (p. 574). Environmental consciousness is of course a more obvious inference from observing the behavior of animals. Unlike most plants, animals have the capacity of locomotion, which enables them to “change” their immediate environment by moving to another one that is more amenable to their survival. The evolution within the biosphere from this environmental-consciousness to self-consciousness—or consciousness of consciousness—led to the emergence of Mind, thus creating a new plane of being, namely, human being. All human beings, individually and collectively, are the agents of Mind. The course of human evolution describes the evolution of Mind.

As we can divide everything that exists into two realms, Nature and Human Artifice, so we can divide the evolutionary process into natural evolution and cultural evolution. Nature evolves in response to impersonal forces that Mind, by means of the scientific method as developed in the culture of the West, has been progressively and with great success beginning to understand. “Culture” is the general term used to refer to “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another”; or, in other words, the term “culture” is equivalent to what we have been calling “the world of human artifice,” or the technosphere. Again, by “technology” we intend to refer to all products, both the concrete and the abstract, created by human beings as the agents of Mind for the general purpose of enhancing their prospects for survival and happiness. In the process of their “pursuit of happiness,” human beings create a Culture—an artificial environment, or medium—in which to live. (These four terms—environment, culture, medium, technosphere—all have roughly the same referent and can be used interchangeably, except that “technosphere” is limited to the singular environment/culture/medium created by human beings as the agents of Mind.) This Culture, or technosphere, like the natural environment in which it is embedded, evolves.

Whether the term “evolution” refers merely to “any process of formation or growth” with no particular direction, just change; or whether it refers to something more purposive, as “progress” towards some telos or end, is matter of contention. The evolution of the non-living, inert matter of Nature (the lithosphere) would appear to be random changes in response to various natural forces. Theorists of the evolution of living matter (the biosphere), however, are divided into two basic camps: those that favor the explanation provided by “natural selection,” by which random changes in the reproduction of life forms enhance or diminish viability and survival (the neo-Darwinian theory); and those that favor some form of purposive or teleological mechanism that inclines evolutionary change towards some final or ultimate end or fulfillment (the “orthogenetic” theory). Teilhard, of course, is in the latter group, and as a Christian mystic he calls this ultimate end or goal “the Omega Point,” or, simply, “God.”

Teilhard’s orthogenetic theory is largely dismissed by today’s theorists because, they believe, the scientific evidence cannot support it. If orthogenesis referred only to all plant and animal life forms other than human beings, then it would indeed seem a doubtful hypothesis. The evolution of life forms is simply a record of the adaptations of the various species to changing conditions in their environments. Those life forms that cannot survive in an altered environment die out; those that possess the traits that enable them to survive environmental changes live on and reproduce their kind; and so one species or subspecies becomes extinct and another prevails. The changes in the lithosphere and the changes in the atmosphere lead to changes in the biosphere, and these changes are random. No doubt the emergence of living things from inert matter was also a random event: in the course of various natural forces producing changes in the lithosphere, certain chemicals dissolved in water combined in such a way as to produce cells that, like crystals, grew, but unlike crystals, replicated themselves. Once the process of replication became established, those cells through chemical bonding became attached to other cells, and some were different from others, and the differentiation allowed separation of function, and so on. Eventually this process produced an immense variety of living things, all in harmony with their environment until that environment changed, when some would cease to exist while others survived. The new environment would give rise to the emergence of life forms particularly well suited to that environment, while the life forms that survived the changes would simply continue on despite the changes, such as cockroaches and other arthropods that have continued to survive over the millennia. All of this evolutionary process describes random change. The lithospheric and atmospheric environments change, and the biospheric environment changes accordingly.

This random process, described so thoroughly by the geological and biological sciences, is an entirely natural process. The mere fact, however, that it can be described and at least partially understood indicates that something from within the evolutionary process has been able to in some sense step outside that process to observe it. Something has emerged (L. emergere, to rise up out of, as would a buoyant object immersed in water) from the process, analogous to the way life emerged from the lithosphere. Another word to describe this phenomenon is transcendence (L. transcendere, to climb beyond, over, or across). Consciousness, or perception, the property of all life forms that indicates awareness of their immediate environments, through some of the random changes characteristic of all natural processes, became in some living species reflexive. A new type of animal, the hominidae, emerged that exploited the possibilities of reflexive consciousness, or consciousness of consciousness, to the point of not only being able to adjust to environmental changes but to change the environment to suit its survival needs, and to change the environment so completely as to create an alternate environment in which to live. This new environment, the technosphere, is purposive throughout. Every part of it is made for a purpose, whether that part is, or is understood by analogy as, mechanical or organic. The ultimate purpose of the whole technosphere would seem to be to provide a completely supportive environment, or “home,” expressly designed by and for human beings (homo sapiens), the species of hominid whose capacity for reflexive consciousness has most thoroughly evolved.

To summarize the argument so far: Reflexive consciousness, or self-consciousness emerged from the biosphere. Human beings exploited this emergent, transcendent property to such a degree as to create an alternate environment, the technosphere. Reflexive consciousness, we have argued, is the fundamental constituent of Mind; and the evolution of human beings, as the primary agents of Mind, is coterminous with the evolution of the technosphere that human beings have made as Mind’s agents. The evolving technosphere, or everything that has come to be as a result of human activity, is the discernible evidence of the activity of Mind, the totality of which is called the noosphere. The evolution of the lithosphere and the biosphere appears to be random, but the evolution of the technosphere is certainly purposive; and if we include, as we should, the “techniques” of science, philosophy, and religion as the leading edges of the evolution of the noosphere, then we must deduce that the total evolutionary process is purposive. Orthogenesis, in this light, is a fully valid hypothesis.

Whether or not the purposiveness of the evolutionary process is an intrinsic property of the process as a whole and present from the beginning is a good question, but not necessarily an essential question. Certainly the notion of “emergence” or “transcendence” implies a tacit potentiality available for manifestation when and if the right circumstances occur. But we must understand that the notion of “emergence” is a metaphor based on an image of buoyancy, of something rising up and out of something else, as a sub-merged object e-merging from a yielding medium. The emergence metaphor thus implies that the property that comes-to-be has always-been or already-is, albeit in a potential state. An analogy would be the relation of a fertilized egg, the zygote, to its form as a mature adult: the zygote has within it the formal constituents of the adult. Yet the defining feature of an emergent property is its novelty: its appearance cannot be traced to a chain of causation. It appears to be utterly undetermined, at least by any system of logic and causality so far available to us. In the great instances of the emergence of the biosphere out of the lithosphere, and then the emergence of Mind out of the biosphere, radically new categories of being are created out of random combinations of disparate elements. But what changes everything in the process as a whole is that the emergence of Mind, reflexive consciousness, introduces purposiveness into Nature, into the evolutionary process, thus making at least part of that process purposive.

Human beings, as the agents of Mind, have been responsible for immense changes not only in the biosphere but in the lithosphere as well. In the pre-human eras such changes were caused by random events such as shifts of tectonic plates, tilting of the earth’s axis, meteor collisions, and so on; and for a million years or so, the activities of homo sapiens had little effect on the biosphere and no effect on the lithosphere. But since the Industrial Revolution—a mere two and a half centuries—the effects of human activity on the non-human world of Nature have been deep and pervasive. These effects are almost wholly negative and are largely attributable to the by-products of energy consumption and exploitation of natural resources. The various aims of human purposive activity are, of course, all focused on the one basic positive aim of all living things: survival and prosperity. The generation of unwanted and destructive by-products has been reluctantly tolerated as the unavoidable accompaniment to progress toward greater security and well-being. When the negative by-products of this progress have been judged to be so extensive as to threaten the positive ends of survival and prosperity, or happiness, humans as self-conscious agents of Mind have taken steps to ameliorate the situation. These steps include action in such institutional venues as law, government, education, and the communications media. Sometimes, however, the actions of amelioration are inadequate or mistaken, and sometimes these actions make matters worse: diplomacy may lead not to peace but war; fertilization of food crops may lead to pollution of water supplies; attention to symptoms may displace attention to root causes; and so on. Human beings may be the agents of Mind, but they are only potentially the agents of Wisdom.



V. GUIDING THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS, PART TWO: THE INWARD TURN


The emergence of Mind through reflexive consciousness, then, leads to the evolutionary process becoming aware of itself. Human beings, as the agents of Mind, thus have become aware that their continued existence is contingent upon the relative stability of their environment, or their ability to adapt to environmental changes, and/or their success in creating an artificial environment (a “home”) designed particularly to suit their needs and desires. Reflexive consciousness has enabled humans to regard themselves as subjects and the world around them as an object, or a complex of objects. Perhaps the chance mutation in their non-human ancestors that led to the opposable thumb, which enabled easy “manipulation” (Latin, manus [hand] + plere [to fill]) of the matter of their natural environment, was, as some believe, the stimulus that occasioned Mind to emerge. Whatever the occasion, humans’ ability to manipulate the stuff of their immediate environment led them to extend aspects of their natural selves to create an artificial environment, which includes abstractions and institutions such as states and governments as well as material things.

As social and political beings, humans have attempted many different kinds of political economy (from Greek, politeia, government + oikos, house, home) in hopes of achieving their goal of what the ancient Greeks called eudaemonia (literally, “positive spirit”), or happiness. Tribal chiefdoms, imperial monarchies, theocratic oligarchies, and fascist dictatorships have come and gone (or continue to linger, unconvinced of having been superseded), and today’s favored system is a free-market liberal democracy, which may or may not be the social evolutionary “end” of this experimentation, as some believe. Whatever the system, however, if the creation and maintenance of the artificial environment we have been calling the “technosphere” yields so many unwanted by-products as to threaten the stability of the biosphere of the natural environment, which is the foundation upon which the technosphere stands, then all is naught. To prevent the collapse of the “home” (oikos) humans have built—a cataclysmic event imagined in horror by numerous narratives of “science fiction” (or knowledge-based extrapolations of certain present conditions projected into possible future scenarios)—humans will be increasingly obliged to turn their attention from the objects of the world they have created to themselves as subjects. This inward turn, whereby the subject regards itself as an object for study, knowledge, and understanding, has been a human activity from the beginning, as we infer from evidence of symbolic objects and practices of prehistoric human communities. We call the activities that evolved out of this inward turn “religion” and “philosophy,” the difference between them being: whereas religion seeks insight primarily on emotional and intuitive grounds, philosophy seeks insight primarily on rational and intuitive grounds. [“Emotion” is here understood as a neuro-biological response to the exigencies of experience that readies the living agent for action. A positive emotional response indicates a desire to continue the experience, a negative emotional response seeks to discontinue the experience. Emotions are spontaneous, unbidden, instinctual, “hard-wired” mechanisms developed in the evolutionary process to enhance the prospects for survival and prosperity. Institutional religion, using the faculty of reason, formalizes, organizes, and unifies (i.e., institutionalizes) the various emotional responses to the existential experiences broadly shared and communicated within a human society, and so transmits a collective directive to guide the behavior of following generations. Emotion, in its refined aspect as “feeling,” is, like reason, a function of Mind, and is the source of human creativity, whereas reason is the source of human understanding.]

The institution of religion and the practice of philosophy are rooted in experience and the recording of that experience in memory (personal and natural) and in technospheric media (public and artificial). Experience, when recorded in symbolic notation, can be analyzed, rearranged, codified, “datafied,” combined, and recombined, like any set of objects. Reflection itself is an experience that can be reflected on. Thus, perceptions can be recorded in memory and then “manipulated” as objects, “translated” from an eidetic image into a symbol or metaphor, retranslated into an abstract concept, and “played with” until it forms a new “idea” that refers to nothing “objective” but may constitute a pattern or form that organizes and makes meaningful an experience or complex of experiences that were at first obscure or opaque. Mind, need it be said, is a field of play; and as children discover through play how their natural and social environments work, so in adulthood, as we apply the principles of play in combination with personal memory, disciplined organization, and access to the media of the recorded memory of the species, we discover more and more about our natural, social, and artificial environments.


Most importantly, humans’ ability individually and collectively to regard themselves as objects makes possible a science of human behavior and insights regarding action. This “inward turn,” an aspect of human nature apparently as old as homo sapiens, became a particularly broad and profound social phenomenon during the historical period from roughly 800 to 200 BCE that the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” when the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions were established: in China, Confucius and Lao-Tse and their followers; in India, Mahavira, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, and the Upanishads; in Persia, Zoroaster; in Palestine, the great Hebrew prophets; in Greece, the great flowering of poetry, philosophy, and science from Homer and the pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Herodotus and Thucydides, Pythagoras and Archimedes. Historians attribute this extraordinary flowering of reflexive thinking, this reflection on reflection, to various conditions: the beginnings of imperial consolidation after a period of civil wars; the invention of coinage and the development of foreign trade; the establishment of a clerical or intellectual class. Whatever the causes, the Axial Age produced systems of thought and reflection on what the theologian Paul Tillich called the “ultimate concerns” of mankind. Codified in written texts and traditions of ritual and practice, the moral, spiritual, and intellectual legacy of the Axial Age remains the foundation on which the great civilizations of the human world still stand.

A particularly noteworthy aspect of the intellectual productions of the Axial Age is that they were achieved independently of one another, before the later period of extensive cultural contact. The societies and cultures of China, India, the Middle East, and ancient Greece all evolved separately, in different environments and with different sets of premises. This fact implies that the human race as a whole has more-or-less evolved as a whole; that despite geographical separation and minimal cross-cultural contact, the separate human societies nonetheless responded to certain general existential conditions that have affected and continue to affect all of them in similar ways.

Another particularly noteworthy aspect of these intellectual productions is that, despite the independent provenance of each, they are, with regard to the objects of their “ultimate concerns,” essentially in agreement with one another. This fact implies that the human race as a whole, responding to certain existential conditions that apply to all human beings regardless of the particular conditions of their respective environments, has undergone a set of certain common experiences with a set of common processing means. That is, the essential agreement over time of all human cultures on matters of “ultimate concern” implies the existence of a common “human condition” and a common human nature that has produced a common human wisdom. This common human wisdom has come to be called the philosophia perennis, or “the perennial philosophy.”

The main premise of the forgoing discussion has been that the basic motive and goal of all living things, including human beings, has been and remains the “ultimate concern” of survival and prosperity, where “prosperity” refers to a security in the prospects for continued survival, a security that promotes healthy reproduction of the species and, at least in the case of humans, what we have called happiness, or a fulfillment and affirmation of being. Using “happiness,” then, as a shorthand term to refer to the unifying goal of all human activity, we can examine what the Perennial Philosophy says about that goal and how to achieve it. In this examination we must bear in mind what is at stake concerning Teilhard’s claim about the evolutionary process: that the human capacity for reflexive consciousness that created the emergence of Mind has led the evolutionary process to become aware of itself and therefore responsible for itself; that, in short, the evolutionary process, with humankind as its agent, is now not only free to direct itself to its next stage, but, because of the choices human beings have collectively made, is obliged to do so.

Humankind has no choice over whether or not to be responsible for directing the evolutionary process. Both freedom and knowledge entail responsibility. Indeed, as we concluded from an analysis and interpretation of the myth of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, an awareness of choices entails choosing; because that choosing is unconstrained, it is free; and because it is free, it entails responsibility. Before the Serpent suggests the possibility of disobeying God, and especially the possibility that such disobedience would be in their interest, Adam and Eve are unaware, unconsciousness, unknowledgeable of the fact that they had been “created in the image of God,” which is to say, that they are in fact free agents, at least potentially. Once they acquire the “knowledge of good and evil,” they cannot go on living in innocent ignorance of their true condition. God had given them the responsibility for maintaining the Garden and for naming and having dominion over the other animals, a responsibility they could not carry out without a knowledge of good and evil, of choices that would lead to the “good” ends of survival and prosperity; but now that they are self-conscious, aware of themselves and aware of their awareness, they have no choice but to be responsible for themselves as well as the rest of the world.



VI. GUIDING THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS, PART THREE: THE PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS

According to Aldous Huxley, whose anthology with commentary, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), presents for the modern reader a convenient handbook of human wisdom, the philosophia perennis is

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being . . . .

Huxley’s concise formulation of the fundamental general claim of the world’s wisdom traditions can be restated or paraphrased in the terms of our discussion. The emergence of Mind out of the litho/biosphere has enabled humans, as the agents of Mind, to recognize categories of being that belong exclusively to Mind itself, the “noosphere.” The principle that governs or defines the noosphere from the rational philosophical viewpoint would be Reason, and from the emotional religious viewpoint would be what the ancient Greeks called to theion, “the Divine,” variously called in other traditions Brahman, Dharma, the Tao (or “way”), and God. (Interestingly, the early Christians called themselves followers of “the Way” [e hodos]). What Huxley calls “divine Reality” would be the noosphere that surrounds (the “transcendent Ground”) and permeates (the “immanent Ground”) all that is. The “soul” would be Mind as instantiated in humans as individuals, analogous to how the general genetic code (DNA) of homo sapiens is present not only in all human beings, but in each cell of each individual human being. The “soul,” or the individual mind, would thus be “similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality,” or Mind. The “final end” or goal of all human activity would then be an “ethic” of action that aims at the “knowledge” of this divine Reality, which is to say the unification of Subject and Object.
The distilled essence of this wisdom, articulated in various ways by all the world’s wisdom traditions, is the Hindu-Sanskrit maxim, “Thou art that” (tat tuam asi). This mystical, paradoxical, gnomic utterance, requiring for full understanding according to its adepts lifelong training and discipline, is consistent with our discussion of Mind and its distinguishing feature of reflexive consciousness. We noted that paradox, whether verbal or situational, avoids nonsense or logical absurdity because it involves only an apparent contradiction. The contradiction of “You must lose your life in order to gain it” is resolved by noting that “life” has a double reference, the living physical body accessible by sense perception, and the “spirit” (Greek, pneuma) or the “soul” (Greek, psyche) that “animates” it (from Latin, anima, soul); that is, the body and what “leaves” the body upon death (Latin, spiritus, breath). The double reference invokes two planes of being, the physical and the spiritual, so what is “lost” on one plane is “found” in another. The effect of speaking in paradoxes is to require the audience to seek understanding by shifting its point of view, the awareness of which is just what brought about the emergence of Mind. Human beings are the animals that became self-conscious by regarding the environment of their perception as an object or set of objects, thus making themselves subjects, thus making possible the perception of themselves as objects. “Thou art that” can be paraphrased: “The subject is the object.” Only a self-conscious being (humans or gods) can be a “subject”; that is, as the concept of “good” is meaningless without the corresponding concept of “bad” or “evil” (or “hot” without “cold,” or “up” without “down”), so the concept of “subject” is meaningless without the corresponding concept of “object.” The categories of “subject” and “object” in effect form a single category relating to the animal faculty of perception. All animals are capable of perceiving or experiencing the data of their respective environments, and all animals process that data to the end of survival and prosperity. Human beings are uniquely those animals that, becoming aware of this capacity for sense experience, simultaneously become aware of themselves as part of the environment of their perception. Had they no capacity for sense experience, no capacity to be aware of their environment, they would be like the constituents of the lithosphere, like rocks. Or, like plants, they would be aware of their environment only in a very primitive sense, as expressed in the lines from the poet Holderlin, fondly quoted by the modern philosopher of Being, Martin Heidegger:
And they remain unknown to one another
As long as they stand–
The neighboring trees.
Animals, or particularly the social animals such as ants and bees and most mammals, are in addition to being aware of their environments also aware of each other as parts of their environment; but only humans are aware that their perception of their environment is from a limited point of view, and that that point of view can be expanded through imagination and the acquisition of knowledge. Indeed, awareness of point of view makes knowledge possible because it enables transcendence, a mental perspective as well as a sensory perspective. Thus, thou (the perceiving subject) and that (the objects of perception) are, on a mental plane (Mind, the noosphere), essentially identical.
The subject-object duality, like the good-evil (or -bad) duality, is a category of knowledge. In terms of our discussion, the process of acquiring and applying knowledge is the primary activity of Mind, and it is this process that creates the technosphere, the artificial environment that constitutes the “home” desired by human beings to enhance their prospects for survival and happiness. These duality-categories come into being with Mind, and are part of the noosphere. Knowledge, then, is a transcendent property that abstracts and formalizes the matter and energy of the universe; it “translates” the matter-energy continuum into a coherent set of symbolic notations that can be stored and communicated from mind to mind (from atman to atman), with the ultimate aim of creating a full and complete and accurate “translation” of the entire world of Nature and the technosphere into the noosphere. This notion is articulated at the beginning of the modern scientific era by Sir Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605): “For it is expressed in the Scriptures touching the government of God, that this globe, which seemeth to us a dark and shady body, is in the view of God as crystal. In substance, because it is the perfect law of inquiry of truth, that nothing be in the globe of matter which shall not be likewise in the globe of crystal or form.” By analogy with linguistic reference, a concrete noun is a translation or abstraction from the medium of sense impression of the concrete thing to the symbolic medium of self-consciousness, or Mind. In like manner, the object of consciousness and the subjective mental concept of that object are equivalent: “Thou art that.”
Tat tuam asi is usually translated as “Thou art that,” where the archaic form of the second person singular (“thou”) is used, along with the corresponding archaic verb form “art.” The archaic form suggests antiquity, of course, but more importantly it denotes familiarity, as do the modern French tu and the modern German du. Familiarity implies an established relationship, which in turn implies a certain level of trust, which allows and promotes a purer type of communication than one has with strangers, who may have mixed or ulterior motives in what and how they communicate. The idea is that in order to fully realize and understand tat tuam asi, the knowing subject must remove all egoistic distractions and allow all the sense organs—not just the eyes but the ears, the nose, the skin, the tongue—to function in harmony together. If this state of pure receptivity occurs, say the mystics who claim to have experienced it, the mental distance between “subject” and “object” falls away, and the unified identity of all being is realized. As William Blake famously said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite.”

INTERLUDE II: POINT OF VIEW AND THE “DOUBLE VISION”

Another way to understand and resolve the paradoxical and “mystical” language of the wisdom traditions is to examine more closely the notion of “point of view.” Any perception is a subjective processual event isolable at a particular time and in a particular space. Although the experience of perception can involve all five senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting), the sense of sight is “privileged” or emphasized in our pursuit of knowledge. Seeing involves the operation of two sense organs, the eyes, positioned laterally apart from one another on the facial plane and parallel to the ground. Such “binocularity” frames the objects of perception in what Aristotle called “the oval of vision,” whereby what is perceived is a “field” the contour of which is determined by a point of focus. Since that focal point is directed by the will and interest of the perceiver, whatever is perceived is “colored” or qualified by that subjective interest. Such a process led Nietzsche to the skeptical conclusion: “There are no facts, only interpretations”; and so “deconstructionist” theorists claim that “objectivity”—or a depersonalized assessment of “what is,” of a “truth” independent of perception–is an illusion. Such extreme skepticism thus questions the validity of the whole enterprise of science and, indeed, any claims of universality. An analysis of the insights and the deep flaws of such thinking is outside the scope of this discussion, but a consideration of the Nietzschean position (dare we say “perspective”?) helps us to appreciate what is at stake.
Blake’s “doors of perception” comment was appropriated by Huxley for the title of his book (1954) on how psychoactive substances can cause changes in the chemistry of the brain such that normal sensations and perceptions are altered, allowing for an awareness or consciousness of a “spiritual” dimension, or at least a simulated one. Huxley’s book generated much comment and controversy, and was one of several books that stimulated experimentation with psychoactive drugs by the youth culture of the 1960s. What is most relevant for our discussion is how the topic of psychoactive drugs relates to Blake’s comment. “Doors of perception” is Blake’s metaphor for eyes. He doesn’t say that they need to be “opened,” but rather to be “cleansed.” This figure implies that the doors are transparent, like glass, but “dirty,” and thus incapable of clear perception. The same figure is used by St. Paul in I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (KJV—my emphasis). Cleansing these glass doors would thus enable both sight and, as it were, insight. Elsewhere, Blake wrote,
For double the vision my Eyes do see
And a double vision is always with me
With my inward Eye ‘tis an old Man grey
With my outward a Thistle across my way.
This verse, part of a letter to one of Blake’s patrons, ends with the lines,
May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep.
Blake’s “Single vision & Newton’s sleep” refers to a consequence of the predominantly rational-empirical viewpoint of Western philosophy and science. What that viewpoint excludes from human experience—what indeed it must exclude for it to do its work of acquiring verifiable knowledge (Greek, episteme; Latin, scientia)—is emotion; and emotional responses to experience are precisely what distinguishes the insights of religion from the insights of philosophy and science. As a physiological response to stimuli—whether external through perception or internal through imagination—an emotion is laden with value, and value is laden with meaning. Very generally, as we have argued, a positive value is one that enhances the prospects for survival and happiness, and a negative value is one that threatens survival and happiness. Emotion, therefore, has quite as much to do with survival and happiness as does rationality, and probably more. Since animals express emotion—at least of the fright-fight-or-flight kind—emotion is more primitive than and prior to rationality, which appears only with the emergence of the reflexive consciousness of Mind. Whatever its status and however it is defined, emotion influences our conscious experience, and it has led to that apprehension of experience called spirituality, which is institutionalized as religion.
Understanding our experience exclusively through the rational-empirical “lens” of “Single vision” is, according to Blake and the Perennial Philosophy, a distortion. The “facts” derived from such a vision are indeed but Nietzschean “interpretations” whose “objectivity” is specious because incomplete. The objects of perception, as Kant explained, are not noumena, or “things-in-themselves,” but rather phenomena, or things-as-they-appear. Apprehension of phenomena involves cognition, but it also involves valuation, as in, “How does this phenomenon relate to me?” Blake’s perception of the “Thistle,” combined with Blake’s particular emotional attunement at the time, associates the plant with “an old Man grey.” The “Thistle” is thus the “vehicle” of a metaphor of which the “tenor” or referent—normally implicit but here explicit–is “an old Man grey.” The grey hair and beard of an old man would imply that the thistle is also grey, thus implying that the thistle is beheld in late fall or winter, when it is a dead husk, dry and grey, a prefiguring of the approaching death of the old man. The subject, then, is, let us say, Blake himself. He is old and grey, anticipating death. He is not necessarily preoccupied with death; he may be concerned about satisfying his patron, or reflecting on the implications of Newtonian physics, or what he plans to have for dinner. As he walks he passes by a vacant lot, and, it being winter, he sees dry, brown and grey weeds, bent but still standing where they had grown. His attention is drawn to a thistle, the object, perhaps because it stands out from the other weeds around it, and it interests his aesthetic sense. As he focuses on the thistle, he makes a mental connection between certain of its aspects and analogous aspects of himself, and in doing so he experiences a complex emotion, a mixture of dread, melancholy, resignation, and resolve. The thistle comes to represent himself, and at the same time it manifests their mutual participation in the ongoing process of birth-growth-maturity-death experienced by all living things. Blake’s experience, involving later perhaps a “powerful emotion recollected in tranquility,” as Wordsworth said he experienced when writing a poem, thus involves a “double vision.” The thistle is itself, a dead and dry plant eventually to become compost and a medium for the germination of new plants; but it is also seen as, to speak grandly, a sacramental emblem of the noumenon, the wonder and precious mystery of Being: not just what something is, or what it may represent, but that it is as it is; and, finally, simply, that it is.
The identification of the man and the plant is the way metaphor works—an implicit comparison-by-identification of unlike things by emphasizing those few characteristics that they share. In effect, metaphor is an identification of subject with object, a linguistic instance of tat tuam asi. As number is the language of science and concept is the language of philosophy, so metaphor is the language of imagination, poetry, myth, and religion. The literalism of science is a “Single vision,” as would be the figuration of myth if used exclusively—as is done by schizophrenics–in the apprehension of reality. What Blake insists on is the fundamental importance of having a double vision: the ability to behold, as it were, a spiritual, atemporal, or timeless dimension of experience simultaneously with the three dimensions of experience in space and the fourth dimension of time. Actually, Blake mentions in the same text a “fourfold vision,” referring to something like Dante’s four levels of the interpretation of poetic or sacred texts: the “literal,” or what happens; the “allegorical,” or what you believe about what happens; the “moral,” or how you should act in response to your belief; and the “anagogic,” or the ultimate consequences of a proposed action. The point is that human experience is highly complex and involves layers of reference, meaning, and “truth.” The notion of “point of view,” if only because it privileges sight at the expense of the other four senses, can limit to the point of crippling our understanding of the wisdom and validity of the Perennial Philosophy’s “double vision.”

VII. THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
How, then, does this ancient insight of tat tuam asi, this bedrock foundation of human wisdom upon which all the great religions and philosophies are based, serve to guide the agents of Mind in their unavoidable responsibility for the next step in the evolutionary process of Being?
If the ultimate goal of humankind is “the unitive knowledge of God,” and if by “God” we also refer to the Absolute, or the Divine, or Brahman, or the Way, or even Being, we are adopting the teleological premise of the idea of the noosphere; that is, that the evolutionary process has an end, and that that end is what we would call “spiritual.” This end (Greek, telos), which denotes a purpose or goal, is not to be confused with the myth of “the end of the world” associated with such eschatological or “end-times” narratives as the biblical Apocalypse of St. John the Divine or the Ragnarok or Gotterdammerung of Scandinavian/Germanic myth, which typically involve cataclysmic destruction. By calling the end or goal of the noosphere “the Omega Point,” Teilhard was adopting the ethic of the philosophia perennis as the basic principle of purposive human action, or “the meaning of life.” It is the moral goal of each individual human being, and the common goal of humankind as a species. It must be emphasized that this is not an historical goal, but a moral goal; for if it were an historical goal, the means of achieving it would be understood politically, and such an understanding would lead, as it has led so often in the past, as Huxley said, “to all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion” (PP, 243). The source of these follies and iniquities is “turning to God without turning from self,” for self-denial, or the ablation of the ego, is the sine qua non of enlightenment or salvation in the Perennial Philosophy. The Way or Tao is not an historical or political goal but rather part of an evolutionary process; that is, through a myriad of means—genetic, cultural, personal, political, technological, and more—a higher stage of integration of the Many and the One gradually evolves. It emerges, as Mind emerged from life, as life emerged from inert matter, except that the emergence of this higher integration is in some sense willed by the self-conscious agents of Mind.
An example in history of one aspect of this spiritual evolution would be the gradual abolition of the institution of slavery, which was practiced throughout the human social world for centuries and has come to be generally regarded today as morally abhorrent. This repudiation of a long-standing institution is derived from many sources, but the main source seems to be a general recognition of the Perennial Philosophy principle that says, in the words of the founding Quaker George Fox, “there is that of God in every man.” This belief is behind the Hindu gesture of greeting: the extended palms of both hands are pressed together and raised to chest height, and the upper torso is bent slightly towards the other, indicating by so doing the belief that the other—friend or stranger—is to some degree divine, and therefore worthy of respect and trust. It also indicates that performing the gesture is a way of expressing or indicating the belief that the divine is within the one gesturing, and that the one gesturing will try to act in accordance with that divinity, or one’s “best self” (i.e., one’s atman in communion with the Brahman). Enslaving any human being denies the inherent “divinity” of another, and thus morally violates the natural order; for what distinguishes the human species is its possession of the property of Mind that emerged in the natural evolutionary process. Mind, itself transcendent and the source of transcendence for human beings, recognizes the Divine without because it has the Divine within, and to deny “human divinity” (so to speak!) is to deny human essence—at least, according to the Perennial Philosophy. The abolition of slavery is then clearly moral progress and consistent with the Perennial Philosophy; that is, it is one step towards a general moral end that affirms the essential oneness of the human race, as opposed to the belief that the defeated victims of war may be denied through enslavement their full humanity, or that the different human races and different human cultures imply a hierarchy of essential value, that some races and cultures are in some sense “superior” to others.
Another example of spiritual evolution is the general repudiation of racism—the belief that the different races or “subspecies” of homo sapiens can be arranged hierarchically according to the degree to which they possess and exhibit the property of Mind. This belief reached its apotheosis in the disastrous ideology of German National Socialism during World War II. Since then the belief has been discredited and officially repudiated throughout the human community, although of course a few diehards continue to view the belief in species equality as the main source of all their troubles. The fact of cultural differences, on the other hand, presents a far more difficult moral problem, for a particular culture represents and expresses a set of collective free choices of a particular human society. Those free choices, institutionalized and transmitted from generation to generation, create a way of living that addresses and seeks to satisfy a particular society’s primary and ultimate concerns of survival and prosperity. Because a culture is the result of a society’s free choices, that society can and should be held responsible for its culture and its degree of success in addressing its concerns. And in terms of the global human society, a hard question is the degree to which positive cultural elements of one society can be transferred with positive results to another. Left to itself, each human society and the culture it creates can be judged “successful” if it continues to survive and prosper—that is, if it creates the conditions necessary for the happiness of its people. Thus, even a society without a written language can be as “successful” as one with the ability to travel in interstellar space. But, increasingly in the past five hundred years or so, the various human societies of the world have found it difficult if not impossible to be left to themselves. Today, owing to the ubiquity of modern technologies of travel and communications and the global reach of powerful governments and economies, no human society can exist in isolation; and therefore, the “success” of every society and its culture is utterly contingent upon its ability to adjust to this new “artificial” environment.

The natural environment has always presented challenges to human ingenuity and adaptability, but the social environment—the proximate presence of other human societies—is capable of changing far more rapidly, and thus allows any given society less time to build an effective cultural response. The evolutionary growth of the technosphere has been so implacable as to become environmentally dominant, or at least equal in importance to the natural environment, especially in its effects. Those societies that have most thoroughly developed science-based technology have the power to alter their social environment—i.e., human society in general—to suit the desires of their concerns, with the result that all other human societies face assimilation and integration or extinction. The analysis of this situation has led to two main interpretive ideas: Francis Fukuyama’s hypothesis of the emergence of essentially one civilization comprising many different cultures; and Samuel Huntington’s hypothesis of three-to-eight civilizations—each with distinguishing characteristics incompatible with and unassimilable by the other civilizations–competing for global dominance. In light of the Teilhard-McLuhan argument presented herein, the Huntington hypothesis would appear to hold perhaps for the short run, for its validity comes from political premises; but the Fukuyama hypothesis, while focused on political and economic premises, has more credibility for the long run because, in addition to its Hegelian world-historical perspective, it includes consideration of the hegemonic dominance of the science-based technology of Western civilization. Because of the unavoidable ubiquity of the technosphere and its effects, every human society must adapt to it or perish. But in addition to adapting, every human society must accept responsibility for the ongoing construction and modification of the technospheric environment, for it exists as a free human choice. Of course, the primary responsibility for the management of the technosphere belongs to those who created it, but since that distinction has extended from the cultures of the West to include the human species as a whole, it is now a human responsibility. Since the whole point of the technosphere is to create a “home” designed for enhancing human survival and happiness, any aspect of that “home” that inadvertently detracts from that end should be eliminated. Such detractions are legion, but fortunately modification for improvement provides an opportunity for every human culture to contribute, for while the skill (techne) to create the modern technosphere may require the resources of Western natural science, the wisdom (sophia) to discern good from evil (what enhances life vs. what threatens life) and to choose an action (praxis) to achieve the good (plus the courage [thumos] needed to perform that action!) is not only available to all cultures and all humans, but the insights of the wisdom tradition of any particular culture may very well be what is necessary to correct the inevitable blind spots and limitations of other cultures. In the areas of scientific knowledge, technology, and political and economic power, the various human cultures can indeed be validly “ranked,” and higher ranking implies greater responsibility for humanity’s weal or woe. They can even be ranked morally, using the Perennial Philosophy as a universal standard. Thus, for example, cultures that systematically practice or condone male violence against women contradict the principle of “human divinity” and the corollary principle of charity (from caritas, the Latin translation of the Greek agape, which means “unconditional love” and is similar to the Confucian principle of ren, the virtue that recognizes the human essence not in individual autonomy but in mutually respectful and caring social relationships). But there is no ranking of wisdom, whether of an individual person or of a cultural tradition. The wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy is human wisdom, and we must take it where we find it.
In continuing to question how the Perennial Philosophy may guide us in managing the technosphere we have created, we must remember the scope of how the term has been used in this discussion. “Technology” normally refers to “the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization.” This discussion, however, began with the observation that everything that exists can be divided into two categories: whatever comes into being by natural processes, or NATURE; and whatever comes into being through human activity, or HUMAN ARTIFICE. The words “artifice,” “artificial,” and “artifact” come from Latin roots meaning “made by skill” (arte, ablative form of ars; factum, thing made); and ars is the Latin translation of techne, the Greek word for “skill.” We must recognize, therefore, that to all the various objects of material culture we must add all the various objects of non-material culture as well, for such entities have come into being exclusively through human activity. Thus, the “world of human artifice,” besides tools and furniture and buildings, etc., also includes beliefs, values, rules, norms, morals, language, designs, organizations, institutions, and so on. This part of the world of our experience we have called in this discussion the “technosphere,” and we have attributed the existence of this world to the emergence of Mind (nous) into the biosphere through the agency of homo sapiens. Finally, we have noted that this technosphere is not merely another word for the “world of Mind” that Teilhard called the noosphere, but is rather a manifestation of that world. We may understand this distinction by analogy with the theological distinction of “God” and “Nature,” in which the latter is a manifestation of God’s activity, but not God himself. The standard conception of God in the monotheistic traditions is that the Divine is at once transcendent and immanent, both outside of and within the world of our experience. Recall that a paradox involves only an apparent contradiction because it operates on two planes of reference (in language) or two planes of being (in experience). One plane of reference, then, would be the world available to sense perception, and another plane of reference would be the world available to thought. The circular disk of the sun perceived by the sense of sight is not the geometric circle conceived by thought, defined as “a closed plane curve consisting of all points at a given distance from a point within it called the center.” Such a “thing” exists not in Nature nor by Nature but only in and by Mind. If we then consider that the Divine exists—or perhaps it would be clearer to say has being, or simply, is—not in Nature nor in Mind but in another category altogether that at present we have no words for so we call it the ineffable or the unnamable, then we might have a better sense of what it might mean to evolve within the noosphere towards what Teilhard called the “Omega Point” and what Hegel called the Absolute and what others call Dharma, the Tao, Brahman, God.
Huxley lists some twenty-seven categories of insight that together form the wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy. Another analysis of the world’s wisdom traditions would no doubt yield a different number of categories, and Huxley’s division is hardly definitive. What is most significant, however, is his identification of the core of this common wisdom: a Divine reality that permeates all that is; the capacity of human beings to access this reality; the imperative for humans to access this reality and to live in harmony with it. This core is expressed most concisely in Huxley’s first category, the tat tuam asi of Hindu wisdom. This core unifies all the categories however they are listed or identified, and each category is simply one facet or implication of the core. An examination of two categories may suffice to illustrate this point.

Under “Time and Eternity” comes the paradoxical assertion, “At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time.” Recalling how paradox works, the apparent nonsense of such a claim is resolved by recognizing the different ontic statuses of what we call body (soma), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma). The body is obviously in time and subject to it; the spirit is atemporal, something like the “life force” or whatever it is that forms or underlies the principle of the biosphere; and the soul is what makes possible the connection between the body and the spirit. In the terms of Teilhard’s argument, Mind makes the experience of time possible through memory and anticipation. The “present” exists only as a concept, for consciousness undergoes a continuum of experience that is constantly receding into the “past” while constantly anticipating the “future.” In its reflexive mode, however, consciousness becomes aware of the temporal continuum; it becomes aware that time is a mental construction; it becomes aware, on reflection, of the atemporal or eternal. Indeed, in reflection, in thought, in the process of thinking, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Life of the Mind, Volume I: Thinking (1971), we are “nowhere” and outside the “flow of time,” which amounts merely to the “everlasting change” of Heraclitus; and on reflection, we realize this. Thinking, as it were, stops time. Thus Socrates, according to Alcibiades’ account in Plato’s Symposium, was “lost in thought” while standing without moving for a full twenty-four hours. At sunrise, he came to, offered a prayer to the Sun, and walked away. During this trance, Socrates’ body is in time and perceived by others, but his soul is elsewhere and elsewhen, in thought, in Mind. We all experience such a suspension of time when asleep and dreaming. The yogi, the brujo, the philosopher, the artist making art, the musician making music, the dancer dancing, and even, pathologically, the schizophrenic—these experience in their waking consciousness a suspension of time while in time.

Such a suspension of time, such an immersion in the timeless, is also experienced in aesthetic contemplation. As expressed in the lines by Yeats,

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The dancer is a human being; the onlooker is a human being; and each is in space and time. As the music is heard, the dancer proceeds to “carve out” in a sequence of motions a pattern in space that reflects the pattern in time established by the music. Each motion of the dancer incrementally creates this pattern, and the onlooker begins to anticipate the pattern’s development. The onlooker’s anticipation is satisfied by the emergence of a completion or resolution of the pattern, which is either repeated in circular fashion, or added to, as in a spiral or gyre. In contemplation of this process of pattern formation, by which the onlooker undergoes alternating emotional states of surprise and satisfaction, the dancer (object) and the onlooker (subject) become, in a sense, unified in the dance. The dancer becomes at one with the dance; the onlooker becomes at one with the dance; and for a transcendent moment, the dance itself becomes the primary reality. By virtue of the Mind’s capacity for “double vision,” Tat tuam asi.

Aesthetic contemplation is one of the chief means of suspending time and entering the timelessness characteristic of spiritual experience. Such moments have a wide range and are experienced by everyone: a slick double-play in baseball, the expanding concentric rings of ripples on the surface of a pond after a stone is thrown in; the glowing coals of a campfire; any piece of music. To be “absorbed” by the contemplation of these events-in-time is to “lose oneself” in the event and become at one with it. A particularly useful explanation of this kind of contemplation can be found in the way the philosopher Eliseo Vivas defines the aesthetic experience:

An aesthetic experience is an experience of rapt attention which involves the intransitive apprehension of an object’s immanent meanings and values in their full presentational immediacy.

The key word in this definition is “intransitive,” a grammatical term that refers to a verb that expresses a complete action without requiring a direct object. As Vivas explains, “attention is so controlled that the object specifies concretely and immediately through reflexive cross-references its meanings and objective characters.” The aesthetic object (or event), in other words, achieves its “meaning” not by reference to anything outside the object or event but “immanently,” in and through it. One’s attention is so total that everything else falls away and the aesthetic event is, for a moment, all that is. All human beings experience such moments from time to time, and usually only briefly. Perhaps saints and sages–a St. Francis, a Ramakrishna—can experience this transcendence for as long as twenty-four hours straight; and perhaps the most fully enlightened—Socrates, the Buddha, Lao-Tse, Jesus, Mohammad—experience it all the time. Presumably, the source of such transcendence for such enlightened beings is not only aesthetic (the Beautiful) but epistemological (the True) and moral (the Good), the Platonic three-in-one trinity. A meaningful goal for all human beings, both as individuals and, through public policy, as societies, is to increase opportunities for transcendence and thus spiritual awareness.

Another of Huxley’s categories is “Silence.” The insight here is famously expressed in the Tao Te Ching by the verse:

He who knows does not speak;
He who speaks does not know.

Language is a human invention, part of the technosphere, and the main vehicle we have for expressing and communicating thought and information with one another. It is preeminently a product of Mind. Yet language can become what Francis Bacon called an “idol of the marketplace,” a phrase referring to that verbal intercourse in which words become substitutes instead of vehicles for thoughts. Mincing no words, Huxley growls, “Unrestrained and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous.” Idle words spewed out automatically are to Mind what casual lust is to Love, a thoughtless and mechanical subjection of the soul to carnal impulses, insatiable because without participation in spirit. In silence alone can we think, contemplate, meditate, and commune with that “divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.” It is interesting—indeed, it is of great importance—to note that the German word for “mind,” used by Hegel in his Phaenomenologie des Geistes (1807), is Geist (from which the English word “ghost” is derived). Geist can also be translated into English as “spirit” because, in German, it refers to both, and thus is a linguistic corroboration of the connection in the Perennial Philosophy between atman and Brahman, or between an individual mind and the noosphere, or between the soul and the Divine. Reflections of this kind on language are a way of participating in the noosphere, as in the present instance, for they are silently written and silently read. Indeed, reading and writing, used properly, can be a form of meditation, whether in the expression of thought in a discursive essay, or as an object for contemplation in a lyric poem. Finally, we must understand “silence” as a metaphor. Its opposite is “noise,” the cacaphonic din that increasingly fills the spaces of the human environment with disorder and confusion and against which Mind as Spirit struggles to make its home. Ordered sound, the perfection of which is music, is, like any fine work of art, in “harmony” with Spirit; it is a type of mental activity marrying Thou with That, or Subject with Object. And in marriage, two become one. Recall the deaf Beethoven conducting his 9th Symphony, “hearing” his composition in his imagination, that faculty of Mind that, in Kant’s words, “makes present what is absent.” When finished, he could not hear the rapturous applause behind him, so he was urged by the first violinist to turn towards his audience so that he could see by their gestures and expressions what he could not hear.


The wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy is the wisdom of the human race, not just of a particular society or culture. Its various insights and prescriptions are derived from the long experience of homo sapiens in the struggle for survival and the pursuit of happiness. The tenets of this philosophy have been tested and validated again and again, generation after generation, from culture to culture, in all conditions and situations. It is fair to say that its long-standing pervasiveness constitutes an empirical verification of its claims. Let us then accept the Perennial Philosophy as a major premise, the solid and certain foundation on which to stand as we try to chart a course for the future.

So resolved, one of the first things we must realize is the very general focus of this fundamental human wisdom. Our final end may very well be to achieve “unitive knowledge of the Divine,” but how that insight might help us achieve our immediate or even intermediate ends as a species is far from clear. The essence of wisdom, as Kant explained, is the mental faculty of judgment, the function of which is to “subsume the particular under its universal.” Thus, a hammer (particular) should be subsumed under the (universal) category, “tools.” A claw hammer would be subsumed under the universal category, “tools for fastening,” whereas a ball-peen hammer would be subsumed under the universal category, “tools for shaping metal.” Intelligence, or the capacity to learn, is a prerequisite for good judgment, but equally essential is extensive experience, through which one learns by trial and error how to subsume certain particulars under the universals that yield practical value—that is, that enable one to achieve the end one desires. The skill (techne) of a carpenter, then, involves a refinement of judgment acquired through experience over time concerning the art (again, techne!) of creating objects with wood, whereby the carpenter determines what particular hammer (its size, shape, weight, “feel,” etc.) would be most effective for the particular project involved. As Socrates understood, if you want someone to build a ship, you find an experienced shipwright, for such a person would have “ship-building wisdom.” But a more general concern, say, whether a state should invest more of its resources for defense in its navy rather than its army, involves judgment of a different order; and a yet different order of question altogether, perhaps the most complex and compelling of all, would be, “How ought I, or we, or humankind, to live?” This was the question that Socrates devoted his life to answering.

The question of this essay, however, is not quite as general as Socrates’ question, a question that he shares with Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Lao-Tse, Siddhartha, Mohammad, and all the other great contributors to the Perennial Philosophy. Our more limited question focuses on a topic formed by combining Teilhard’s thesis on the evolutionary process with McLuhan’s perspective on media, a combination that leads to the notion that the emergence of Mind entailed the creation, through human agency, of the “world of human artifice,” which we are calling the technosphere, which itself is a manifestation of the “world of Mind,” which Teilhard has named the noosphere. This “technosphere” constitutes a “medium” in McLuhan’s sense of environment, an artificial environment overlaid and based on the natural environment. The environment of Nature and its “laws” through a complex process of cause and effect determined all events and all things up to the emergence of Mind, the point at which, through human agency, consciousness became reflexive. This development initiated a new stage of the evolutionary process, the noosphere, after which some events are no longer exclusively “fated” by impersonal processes. With the advent of Mind came not only the ability of the human species to manipulate its immediate natural environment to the ends of survival, but to create by this manipulation an artificial environment that served not only the end of survival but the end of happiness, a state of being wherein survival is secured and something like fulfillment becomes possible. This fulfillment or “happiness” is radically different from the “contentment” of animals when their survival is unthreatened and they have what they need to live and reproduce in harmony with their environment. The end of happiness implies a fulfillment within and by means of the noosphere, the world of Mind, a world available only to human beings.



INTERLUDE III: FATE, FREE WILL, AND DESTINY

Before proceeding in the argument to an examination of what practical steps may be taken to promote and direct the evolution of the noosphere, thus exercising the human responsibility for the next stage in the evolutionary process, it would be worthwhile to clarify certain key concepts that have been used so far, namely: fate and freedom.

FATE is conventionally understood as “the universal principle or ultimate agency by which the order of things is presumably prescribed.” The belief that all events are “prescribed” or “predetermined” or “inevitable” is called fatalism. Two related terms are determinism and necessity. Determinism is “the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws” (SEP, “Arguments for Incompatibilism”); necessity is “the quality of following inevitably from logical, physical, or moral laws.” Natural science proceeds on the premise that all events in Nature are effects of antecedent causes, and that therefore all natural events are determined. Such a premise is behind the scientific principles of verification through predictability and the replicability of demonstration. This procedure is regularly validated again and again by the scientific community, thus proving that the Natural World is a world of causal necessity. The only exception to this rule is the Human World, the World of Human Artifice, the World of Mind, the noosphere. With the emergence through reflexive consciousness of Mind, out of the Natural World came, as we have argued throughout, choice, free will, freedom, and responsibility. The Natural World is determined; the Human World is free.

The philosopher David Hume referred to “the question of liberty and necessity” as “the most contentious question of metaphysics” (EU 8.23/95). [The Latinate word “liberty” (from libertas) is the denotative equivalent, a perfect synonym, of the Germanic word “freedom” (Freiheit).] Put simply, the big question is whether human beings are subject in all their behavior and actions to the same causal necessity that governs events in Nature. Hume presented the “compatibilist” position that moral behavior not only presupposes free will but requires it, or at the very least it requires the “feeling,” the “sense,” of free agency. “Incompatibilists,” on the contrary, argue that if determinism is true, then freedom is an illusion. The present argument, of course, is fully aligned with the compatibilists: Nature is determined, Humans are free, and therefore responsible. Humans are free because, through reflexive consciousness, they are, paradoxically, aware of how their behavior is determined, as the behavior of all animals is determined. By becoming aware of what they share with all other animals, humans can regard, as subjects, other animals and the World of Nature generally as objects and, in addition, humans can regard themselves as objects. This reflexive awareness is the source of their freedom. Such is the great insight of the great 19th century thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who demonstrated how much we are motivated by unconscious impulses. If our behavior is largely determined by motives of which we are unaware, then our conscious, rational motives are constantly undermined, and we delude ourselves through rationalization or are frustrated by outcomes contrary to our conscious desires. The path to actualized freedom and psychic or spiritual health lies in becoming aware of the dynamics of the unconscious, thus making its impulses part of consciousness, and thus allowing us to get control over those impulses. “Where id was,” Freud said, “there shall ego be.” Karl Marx likewise argued that human behavior is largely determined by historical forces set in motion by the economic system a society uses to meet the requirements of its survival. A society’s economic system forms the foundation or “substructure” (Unterbau) that supports and informs the totality of its culture or “superstructure” (Oberbau), including its dominant values and beliefs. Since all societies have a kind of class structure, each class develops a “class consciousness” that informs its existential identity. The small minority of people that form the governing class are the ones who control the economic system, and thus control the cultural system as well, and because of this control are free agents, and as free agents are able to pursue happiness rather than settle for mere sub-rational contentment. The rest of society, the vast majority, tend to believe that the social system in which they live is “natural,” the “way things are,” when in fact any social system is totally artificial, a construction made by the will of the governing class for its own benefit. To become free agents, to give themselves an opportunity for happiness, the deluded majority must become aware not just that they are oppressed, but how and why they are oppressed. Becoming conscious of how class consciousness works, they can become free. The basic idea is simple: once you become aware of the various forces that “determine” your life, you are no longer determined by them.

With the above thoughts in mind, let us identify those forces and factors that influence our lives, but over which we have no control, and refer to all these forces and factors by the term FATE. Let us then identify all those aspects of our lives over which we do have control, and therefore are subject to the choices of our conscious will, and refer to these aspects as FREEDOM.

What are the factors that influence our lives but over which we have no control? We can start a list:

1. The date, the place, the social circumstances into which we are born.
We are, as Heidegger said, “thrown” (geworfen) into the world at our birth. We do not chose when (13th century, 20th century, whenever) nor where (Somalia, Germany, Tibet, wherever), nor what particular society or culture (agrarian, urban, tribal, whatever). Our beliefs, values, and sense of reality—the “world” of our daily experience, all of it—is the result of our “socialization,” the process theorists call “the social construction of reality” by which every society, through a myriad of means, inculcates into each of its members the rules, regulations, and even the “facts” of life in that particular society. We are molded, shaped, and determined by this process, and we have no control over it . . . until and unless, through a combination of chance and will, we become conscious of this socializing process and how it works.

2. The parents to whom we are born.

Our genotype, or the genetic inheritance from our parents, determines our phenotype, or the physical manifestations of that genetic inheritance. While behavior and appearance are certainly influenced by our interaction with our natural and social environment (see #1, above), our particular genotype is determinative of much. How much depends on, of course, the degree to which we become conscious of what in our genotype is malleable and open to choice, and what is not.

3. Chance, “luck,” “fortune,” accidents, happenstance . . .

We have no control over what happens to us as a result of chance or luck. One is struck by a car and is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life; another picks up from the sidewalk a discarded lottery ticket that proves to be a winner. Such accidents have consequences for good or ill but are undeserved, unconnected with will or intent. They have causes, but those causes are arbitrary, unless the object of chance has narrowed the odds by augmenting the instrumentality of an accident such as driving a car too fast for the conditions or purchasing scores of lottery tickets. The degree to which a person “pushes his luck” determines the degree to which he is free, and therefore responsible, for what befalls him.

Note that each of these three general categories of what we are calling fate, or all the factors of our individual and social lives over which we have no control, harbors an escape clause. What saves human beings from the “fate” of everything else in the universe, the fate of being utterly determined by causal necessity, is the reflexive consciousness of Mind. Because we can become aware of the operant causality of Nature, we are no longer subject to it. Our will to live and survive and reproduce and nurture the next generation is one we share with all the other animals; but our will to be fulfilled, to be happy, is a function of our freedom. Our will is free because, paradoxically, we know how it is determined!

Freedom, then, refers to that aspect of the human condition that is not subject to the causal necessity of Nature, the world of scientific investigation. It is the result of our exercise of free will, that awareness of the conditions of our natural and artificial environment that enables us to see or imagine alternatives to instinctual or Mind-less behavior, to choose from among those alternatives the ones that seem most favorable to promote our survival and happiness, to act on those choices, and to take responsibility for those actions.

It should be understood at this point that actual, as opposed to potential, freedom cannot be given or inherited but only earned, and only with great effort. It involves at least three components: an epistemological component—awareness or knowledge of the conditions for action, including alternative choices; a moral component—the ability to choose the best alternative, the one that promotes our desire for survival and happiness (the good) and not its opposite (the bad, or evil), and to take responsibility for that choice; and a psychological component—namely, the courage to act on our choice, even if such action entails suffering, even death. If anything is counter-instinctual, it would seem to be the willingness to negate the will-to-live, even one’s own survival, for the sake of someone or something else. Yet as has been amply demonstrated by recent evolutionary biological theory, “altruism” (from Latin, alteri, other) is a genetically transmitted trait throughout the biosphere, whereby the individual is sacrificed for the group, the group is sacrificed for the species, and even the species is sometimes sacrificed for another species. This altruistic behavior is indeed instinctive in animals, and to some degree in humans. The virtue of courage, however, is needed for such sacrifice when it is not unreflectively automatic but when the agent is aware that it is a sacrifice, and thus an alternative, a choice. The worker bee is simply unaware that defending its hive by stinging an intruder will cause the stinger to be ripped out of its abdomen, thus entailing its own death; but a human mother rushing into a burning house to save her baby is well aware that her action puts her own life at great risk. Her first impulse may indeed be instinctive, for she is an animal after all, and subject to her “selfish genes,” or for that matter the moral imperatives of a “shame culture” or a “guilt culture.” But her second or third impulse is to recognize that her death is nigh, and that she can prevent her immolation or risk it for the sake of her child. It is a choice, a free choice; she will live or die with the consequences of her choice; and she knows it.
Freedom, then, is a burden. “Man is condemned to be free.” But it is a burden we willingly take on because not only does it give us the “dignity” of not being slaves to fate, to the causal necessity of Nature, but it makes possible our “pursuit of happiness,” that state of being in which we can affirm that life is “good,” and that our experience of being “thrown” into Being, of existing, is better than nothingness, the negation of being. We also recognize that while being human means we have the capacity for freedom because of the emergence of reflexive consciousness in our ancestors over a million years ago, that capacity must be repeatedly and constantly exercised and disciplined in order for freedom to prevail. The epistemological component involves not just personal knowledge but the growing knowledge and awareness of the human species. The moral component involves not just personal morality but the evolving moral knowledge of the human species. The psychological component involves not just individual psychology but group psychology, the psychic health and will of an enlightened and courageous species. Such a project is immense, and immensely difficult, but really, and paradoxically, we have no choice–if we wish to survive as a species, and to prevail.

Finally, to conclude this “interlude,” I offer a simple formula to express the main purport of the foregoing discussion:

FATE + FREE WILL = DESTINY.

Dictionaries tend to see the words “fate” and “destiny” as synonymous. “Fate” derives from a Latin word, fatum, or something “spoken by the gods.” After the invention of writing, the word tended to be understood as something written by the gods: “It is fated” and “It is written” were equivalent. Yet Homeric myth of the 8th century BCE presents fate as something beyond even the control of the gods. According to the Iliad, to determine (the word is pointedly chosen) the fates of Achilles and Hector, the rival heroes of Greece and Troy, the father of the gods, Zeus, places their respective “fates” (obscurely reified) on the two sides of a golden scale. Hector’s goes down, Achilles’s goes up, and the matter is decided. The gods, who have divided themselves into two camps, partisans of the Greeks or the Trojans, have no say. The force that pushed Hector’s “fate” into the realm of Hades, god of death and the underworld, is utterly unknown, impersonal, and implacable. The Greeks called that force Moira and imagined it as three female personages–the moirai named Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis—who are engaged in the woman-dominated activity of spinning and weaving. One spins the thread of a person’s life; another measures the thread; and the last cuts the thread. Such a female image may be the inverse of birth: a fetus conceived in the womb (the spun tread), nurtured there (the measured thread), and then born, the severed umbilical cord (the cut thread) initiating a person’s independent life. Whatever its symbolic depth, the image, and the concept behind the image, implies that impersonal forces alone shape our lives. Freedom (Greek, eleutheria) was a concept that the ancient Greeks wrestled with, but finally, despite their inventions of speculative philosophy, democracy, and natural science, one they could not—with perhaps the notable exception of Socrates–quite grasp.

Rather than regard “fate” and “destiny” as synonymous, let us make a distinction and say that “destiny” refers to the life we make for ourselves, whether individually or socially, out of the combined forces of fate and the actions of our free will. In doing so we acknowledge the huge role that fate plays in our lives. We speak a certain language, follow a certain religion, have certain beliefs, attitudes, and values, have certain talents and not others, and so on, all due to factors we must assign to fate. Yet our free will has the capacity to affect our lives for good or ill, especially to the degree that we acknowledge it, cultivate it, and discipline it. Perhaps 90% of our individual lives are “fated”; yet the 10% that is fully under our control, our will working in concert with our reason, may be all that is needed to accept our responsibility for what in the end counts most, which for want of another word we call our soul. To use the familiar metaphor of a card game, the life we make with the hand that fate deals us, is our destiny. The word is apt, for it is related to “destination,” a word that implies, at least in modern usage, a chosen end. Fate + Freedom = Destiny.

VIII. PRACTICAL WISDOM AND THE TECHNOSPHERE


The main question that lies behind the activity of the greatest of humankind’s teachers is, then, “How ought we to live?” The question of this essay is more limited. It accepts as a premise Tielhard’s speculative argument that the course of natural evolution has led from the lithosphere (the world of inorganic matter) to the biosphere (the world of living matter) to what he calls the noosphere (the world of Mind). With the emergence of Mind, the evolutionary process becomes conscious of itself, and, since such self-consciousness liberates Mind from being wholly determined by the forces that create and sustain the evolution of matter, Mind, through its human agents, is now capable of directing the evolutionary process. Not only is it capable of doing so, but, since knowledge and freedom both imply responsibility, the human agents of Mind have been in fact directing the evolutionary process all along. Evidence and proof of this is the existence of the technosphere, the world of human artifice that began with a thigh bone used as a club and has progressed to space stations and readily available pocket-sized digital electronic devices that can access immediately whole encyclopedias of information and communicate instantaneously with one other across the globe. The technosphere, which also includes all aspects of non-material culture such as legal, political, and religious institutions as well as material culture, is world-wide and cross-cultural, and is wholly a product of Mind. The technosphere is to Mind as Nature is to the Divine, whether the Divine is imagined or understood as God, Brahman, the Tao, or Ultimate Reality.

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” So wrote Stewart Brand in the first Whole Earth Catalogue in 1968. Brand acknowledges that he borrowed the notion from anthropologist Edmund Leach, whose book A Runaway World (1968) argued that modern science has given mankind enormous power for good or ill, and if through diffidence we become merely passive observers of scientific activity and the technology it fosters, then whatever good that comes of such activity shall be merely a matter of chance. Since we have the power, it would be irresponsible not to learn how to use it well. Our first step, then, is to realize that humans, or the “agents of Mind,’ have the power to shape not only their own destiny but at least to some degree the destiny of their planet—their environment, both natural and “artificial.” Indeed, we must realize that not only do we have that power, but that we are now and always have been using that power, which over the millennia has been increasing dramatically. We now have the power to destroy the planet and all life on it, a scenario that has been lately much imagined by our poets and storytellers. Since survival and happiness are the basic and universal goals of all human beings, then, the pressing question we must now ask is:

“How ought we, as the agents of Mind, direct the evolutionary process so that our continued survival and happiness may be secured?”

This question recognizes that our first priority is our continued survival and happiness. Our mere survival is at risk. We know that millions of life forms have come and gone, made extinct by natural processes, and that humans are as subject to natural processes as all other life forms. It is always possible for a giant asteroid to slam into the earth as one did at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, leading to the extinction of three-quarters of all life forms. But our question implies urgency, because we now know that the products of human agency present a much more immediate and likely risk. Thermonuclear warfare is perhaps the most spectacular threat, but long-range pollution of the natural environment is just as real. From the era of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century and increasingly since then, toxic waste by-products of human activity have been deposited into the air, water, and earth with insufficient regard for their degradation of the natural environment. The tendency to adopt a short-range view—looking ahead no further than the next generation—is perhaps a “natural” attitude, but for an agent of Mind, fully aware of stewardship responsibilities at least for the human race if not for the life of the planet, an exclusively short-range view is grossly irresponsible. “Enlightened self-interest” alone should recognize the imperative of taking a long-range view.

Secondly, by identifying humans as “the agents of Mind,” the question emphasizes human freedom—that we are not simply “determined” by natural forces in all our behavior as are the rest of material beings, but capable of transcending the natural order by reflexive consciousness. That freedom makes knowledge possible, both of the world of our experience and of ourselves. Since we are free, we are responsible for what we do. Indeed, both freedom and knowledge entail responsibility. We cannot escape responsibility, and, given the power of the technosphere that we have created, we have become responsible for the life of our planet and, to quote a phrase, “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Thirdly, our question implies that such ends are not simply selfish or “anthropocentric,” but are at the very least instrumental in furthering the vast evolutionary process of which mankind is a crucial part. It acknowledges our role of stewardship, our responsibility for the health and well-being of our planet and all the living beings that call it home.

Finally, if we accept the wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy as the fundamental premise upon which we are to ground our actions, then all that we do to promote our well-being must be understood as not merely aimed at survival and prosperity, but in addition at attaining the “unitive knowledge of God.” The spiritual dimension of our lives is rooted in our status as “agents of Mind,” and Mind is, as the German word Geist has it, at once intellectual and spiritual. Mind (Greek, nous) is the noosphere, the third level of Being that emerged in the evolutionary process with homo sapiens after living matter had emerged from inorganic matter. “God” is the apex of the noosphere, what Teilhard called “the Omega Point.” If we are looking for a “purpose,” for a “meaning of life,” then it is hard to imagine a grander role for ourselves than to promote actions that lead to “the unitive knowledge of God,” however “God” is understood. This role is open and available to all humans. Great intellect, profound wisdom, heroic courage are formidable and praiseworthy qualities, of course, but the most needful virtue of all is love. Whether that virtue is called caritas or agape, Confucian ren or Hindu bhakti or Buddhist maitri and karuna or Islamic al-Hubb, it is the sine qua non of a fully spiritual life.

“The Perennial Philosophy” is so named because it describes not only the basic beliefs shared by all the various wisdom traditions of humankind, but because these basic beliefs have been restated or rediscovered generation after generation for the past two and a half millennia. Despite having a wide variation of time, place, language, religion, and culture, it establishes a recurrent consensus that amounts to a verification or validation of its claims. Certainly it would be the height of folly to disregard or dismiss the accumulated wisdom of the human race.

Let us accept, then, the tenets of the Perennial Philosophy as a set of premises that, according to Huxley’s presentation, are unified by its primary insight, “Thou art that” (tat tuam asi). Let us further accept the idea, discussed earlier, that tat tuam asi is the fundamental human insight derived from reflecting on the phenomenon of the emergence of Mind out of the biosphere, whereby consciousness—a characteristic in some form, however primitive, of all living things, including plants—becomes reflexive. As argued previously, when creatures of the genus homo became conscious of their consciousness, or self-conscious, they could then regard the contents of their consciousness as objects and themselves as subjects with a point-of-view. As subjects, they, as we do now, could see themselves as objects; and with this awareness, the world of our perception and the world of our introspection interpenetrate: what is outside the subjective Mind is perceived, reproduced, and reprocessed symbolically inside subjective Mind in the form of knowledge; and what is inside subjective Mind is reproduced and reprocessed by the various mental faculties (imagination, reason, judgment, etc.) and projected outside subjective Mind in the form of “technology,” or everything that exists by virtue of human skill (techne); that is, all of human culture, both material and immaterial. Thus, what is outside is reproduced inside (as by a mirror), and what is inside is projected outside (as by a lamp): “Thou art that.”

What follows is a series of suggestions on how to apply the various but related insights of the Perennial Philosophy. They are offered in a spirit of modest awareness of the limitations of any point of view, and in the hopes that others will reflect on these insights and how best to apply them. As argued earlier, we really have no choice but to take responsibility—to acknowledge our responsibility—not only for the “world of skill” we have made but for the Natural World as well. Since the Industrial Revolution, human activity has profoundly altered the earth’s geosphere, hydrosphere, and surrounding atmosphere to the point of threatening the continuation of its biosphere. The current metaphor of “raping the planet” implies raging male lust violating a helpless and innocent female victim. Such a metaphor is extreme but perhaps necessary to bring attention to the severity of our situation. In its instinctual drive to survive and to prosper, homo sapiens has sought security by so “overbuilding” its artificial environment that it has begun, to use another metaphor, to dismantle its home’s foundations (Nature) to get more materials for adding extensions to the superstructure (the technosphere). The rape metaphor implies a deliberate impulse to dominate through violation, and since planet Earth is regularly imagined symbolically as not only female but as mother (“Gaia”), the rape is incestuous as well—and incest, along with parricide, is the paradigmatic universal taboo. Freud’s “death instinct” (thanatos) notwithstanding, however, perhaps the rape metaphor and its moral implications is less useful than another metaphor. Our behavior is less expressive of criminality than of folly and ignorance in our collective pursuit of a secure survival and happiness. Failing to recognize the value of the collective human wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy is simply foolish, like the Biblical Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.

The following three aspects of the Perennial Philosophy are taken from Huxley’s anthology, which provides exemplary quotations from various sources and explanatory commentary. Here they are very briefly defined so that suggested practical applications of their principles may be better understood.

1. THE NATURE OF THE GROUND

Definition: The “Ground” is the spiritual Absolute, “immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal,” ineffable but accessible under certain conditions by Mind.

Application: Merely to acknowledge the reality of the Ground is to behold the Earth, Nature, and the universe with a “double vision.” We have what Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” relationship with the phenomenal world because of its attendant noumenal world. As a lover relates to his or her beloved not mechanically or instrumentally but spiritually, as one center of consciousness to another center of consciousness, so must the human species relate to the Natural World from which it has emerged. The secularity that increasingly developed in reaction to the excessively “other-worldly” premises established during the Axial Age must be balanced with a reaffirmation of the sacred. Pursuit of common ground among all sacred and religious traditions should be encouraged and emphasized. Such councils as the Parliament of the World’s Religions (Chicago, 1993) and all such efforts towards interfaith ecumenism must seek to reinterpret the beliefs and practices of the various religions of the world in the light of what we now know as a species about ourselves and our world. Pope Francis I, in his recent (2015) visit to the United States, did much in his public comments to address how the doctrines of the Catholic Church can be practically applied to the solution of such pressing concerns as the degradation of the natural environment, the grossly extreme misdistribution of global wealth, the plight of refugees from failed states, and the desecration of human life. More such “dialogue” (a favorite word of this Pope) between faiths and between religious and secular institutions is essential.

2. GOD IN THE WORLD

Definition: “God” is a term used by theists to refer to the “Ground” in a more personal way. That is, the Absolute is understood anthropomorphically, as if It were a person, which is to say, a self-conscious, rational being. To say that “God is in the world” is to emphasize the immanence of this spiritual being, that this being, as a spiritual essence, is not only transcendent, or “Wholly Other,” in another category of being altogether, but is also somehow infused in all that is.

Application: This aspect of the Perennial Philosophy deserves an extended investigation. It is particularly important to reconcile the apparently contradictory notions of the Absolute held by theistic religions (such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism) and non-theistic religions (such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism).

We can begin by examining two passages quoted by Huxley in his section on “God in the World.” The first is from Huang Po, a Zen master of the 9th century Tang Dynasty:

The Mind is no other than the Buddha, and Buddha is no other than sentient being. When Mind assumes the form of sentient being, it has suffered no decrease; when it has become a Buddha, it has added nothing to itself.

Another translation of this passage, by John Blofeld (1958), reads:

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings.

Huang Po’s statement serves to express a non-Western, non-theistic way of referring to the Absolute, a term philosophers use to refer to “the terminus or ultimate referent of thought” (Runes, DP), and which theists call “God.” “Buddha” is not the name of a person or a god but rather a title conferred upon a human being who has achieved enlightenment, who has “cleansed the doors of perception” so as to behold all that is as it is. The Buddha, that is, beholds phenomena as noumena, things as they are, not just things as they seem. The Buddha is able to behold Reality, What Is, by virtue of Mind. “The Mind is no other than the Buddha”; “All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind.” That is to say, in terms of our previous discussion of the emergence of Mind in the evolutionary process, all living things, plants and animals alike, are “sentient” in the sense that they are aware of their environment. Human beings, as agents of Mind, are not only aware of their environment, but aware that they are aware (i.e., they are “self-conscious”). This self-consciousness, or reflexive consciousness, is the source of human freedom, or the capacity to choose a course of action rather than merely follow a prescribed behavior determined by natural law. The Buddha is a human being who has used this freedom to transcend utterly the determinations of natural law by achieving a purified consciousness that allows perception not just with the senses but with Mind. In other words, the Buddha has learned through reflexive consciousness how to inhabit, to dwell in always, the next level of Being beyond the biosphere, the noosphere, the world of Mind. A theist would say that the Buddha is a kind of saint, one who, while alive and incarnate, dwells in “heaven” with God. A Buddhist would simply say that the Buddha is one who has achieved bodhi or satori: enlightenment.

Another passage from Huxley’s anthology is from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the 12th-century French abbot and Doctor of the Church:

God who, in his simple substance, is all everywhere equally, nevertheless, in efficacy, is in rational creatures in another way than in irrational, and in good rational creatures in another way than in the bad. He is in irrational creatures in such a way as not to be comprehended by them; by all rational ones, however, he can be comprehended through knowledge; but only by the good is he to be comprehended also through love.

In this passage Bernard emphasizes the capacity of Mind (“rational creatures”) to know God. We need only substitute “Reality,” or “What is,” or “The Way (Tao)” for “God” (recalling that the God of the Torah identifies himself as “I AM”) and the way is clear to merge East and West, the Asian Way and the European Way, into the Human Way, the Way of Mind. As discussed previously, Mind has many aspects, many faculties, and along with the rational and imaginative faculties are the non-rational faculties such as emotion, feeling, and desire. Bernard states that rational creatures can comprehend God through knowledge, “but only by the good is he to be comprehended also by love.” The implication here, made more explicit elsewhere in his writings, is that “love” is required for the kind of deep understanding of the Absolute that a Buddha achieves. The noosphere cannot be entered by Reason alone. Reason must be accompanied by the one and only subject for which Socrates claimed expert knowledge, namely, ta erotica, matters pertaining to love.

3. CHARITY

Definition: “Charity” is the English version of caritas, the Latin word that translates the Greek agape of the Christian Scriptures, normally translated into English as “love.” A complex term with several referents, “love,” as agape, refers to unconditional care and concern for another’s well-being, and in Christianity refers to the ideal reciprocal relationship of care and concern between humans and God. It is the distilled essence of the teaching of Jesus, who, when asked what is “the greatest commandment in the law,” responded: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt., 22: 37-40).

Other Greek terms for love include philia, storge, and eros. These terms all characterize types of personal relationships, although they can be used in other ways. Their difference from agape lies in their conditionality. Philia refers to the mutual care, concern, and affection between friends; storge refers to the “natural affection” of parents for children and children for parents; eros refers to the desire or passion to be intimate or united with someone else or even with some thing. “Charity” as agape or unconditional love is, as Huxley explains, “disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good.” Secondly, “it is not an emotion. It begins as an act of the will and is consummated as a purely spiritual awareness, a unitive love-knowledge of the essence of its object.” Thirdly, charity is self-denying and humble. It constitutes an attitude, a way of orienting oneself to the natural and social world that understands that the weaknesses and follies of one’s fellow humans are shared by oneself, and that all have “the same capacity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself.”

Application: Love, then, involves relationship. In Buddhism love is a positive human field of influence emanating from those who have accessed their Buddha-nature. Love as maitri helps to bring happiness to others; love as karuna helps to remove suffering from others. In Hinduism, the four Greek aspects of love are combined in the concept of bhakti, the attitude of attunement that resolves all discord into concord, all cacophony into harmony. This aspect of love is emphasized in the ethical system of Confucian societies. The Confucian concept of ren, variously translated as “benevolence” or “humanness,” is expressed in writing by combining the ideograms for “man” and “two.” This implies the emphasis that pervades Confucian thinking: that the essence of humanity, of “the human phenomenon,” is plurality. To be human means to be in relationship with other humans. The ethical goal for each individual is to be in “right relationship” with others, and the ethical goal of a society, community, or state is to establish the social conditions that promote and support right relationships. To be human is to be a member of a community; and for Confucius, the community, not the individual, is the primary human reality.

In Western civilization, the emphasis in the concept of humanity tends to fall on the individual rather than the community. This emphasis seems to be based on the high Western value of freedom or liberty (the two are synonymous, with “freedom” derived from the German Freiheit and “liberty” derived from the Latin libertas), whereas the counterpart high value in Confucian (or “Sinic”) civilization is social harmony. The rights of the individual, the liberty of the individual, are so deeply valued in the West that the individual person tends to be understood as being normally in conflict with “society,” or “everybody else outside my family.” Such extreme devotion to individual liberty is expressed in the words of the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously said in 1987, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Obviously this is an exaggeration to make a point about self-reliance and individual responsibility, but the words are telling. They indicate the gulf that separates the Western understanding of humanity not just from that of Confucian societies but from all others. If “the family of man” is to have a chance at living together in some kind of harmony despite all cultural differences—which it must if it is to survive—these two radically different concepts of humanity must somehow be reconciled.


IX. THE CONCEPT OF HUMANITY


Humans are both social beings and political beings. This fact alone suffices to give rise to radically different and even opposed concepts of humanity, for because humans are social, they must live in structured cooperative groups, and because they are political, they are free to decide on what basis those groupings are structured. Two fundamental political structuring principles—the “individualistic” and the “collectivistic”–have emerged based on two differing concepts of humanity: (1) that the primary political essence of humanity is the individual; (2) that the primary political essence of humanity is the group. The former is associated with Western civilization, although Indian civilization, with its Hindu and Buddhist traditions, also tends to emphasize the individual. The latter is associated with Asia, especially China and Confucian civilization, although a similar emphasis is characteristic of Islamic civilization and, in a much less sophisticated way, among the non-literate tribal cultures of the past and present.

To be human in Western civilization is to be a unique individual who lives with others on the basis of a “social contract,” whereby the individual agrees to give up some specified aspects of his power of self-determination to an impersonal organization structured and constrained by law called the “state.” The ideal is to achieve as much autonomy as possible without limiting the autonomy of others. Human reality is the individual consciousness and will. This conception of humanity leads to a highly dynamic, creative, competitive, and constantly changing society in which “originality” and “self-realization” are valued. The main weakness of such a conception is its potentiality for social confusion and disorder.

To be human in Confucian civilization is to be a member of a group and to occupy a defined social role with certain duties and expectations, whereby each individual member is understood to be in a particular kind of relationship with other members of society. The ideal is to achieve and maintain right relationships to the end of achieving a socially harmonious group functioning as an “organic” unit. This conception of humanity leads to a relatively stable and cooperative society wherein each individual, in conforming to group norms, feels secure and valued by others. The main weakness of such a conception is its potentiality for social and spiritual sclerosis.

Of course all human societies involve both individualistic and collectivistic elements. As social animals, humans could not survive if each individual were completely autonomous and independent; and yet because they are agents of Mind and therefore self-conscious beings, they have an innate desire for autonomy and independence. The essence of Mind, as argued earlier, is freedom, especially freedom from deterministic Natural Law and the ability to transcend it. The noosphere, which emerged into Being when animal consciousness became aware of itself, is constantly in the process of evolving in a way analogous to the evolution of the biosphere. To continue to evolve—indeed, even to continue as a separate realm of Being—it must not be constrained in any way. Freedom is its essential fuel, its sine qua non. If a human society were to become completely collectivist in the totalitarian sense (whereby the “total” life of its members—including thoughts, beliefs, and feelings—is ruled by an elite), the noosphere would die. Dystopian fictions such as 1984 and Brave New World, philosophic jeremiads such as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), and even the current popular fashion of “zombie apocalypse” give imaginative and conceptual form to the fundamental fear that all agents of Mind reflexively feel of being drowned in a sea of collectivism. On the other hand, the specter of a society completely given over to egoistic self-serving individuals is the Hobbesian horror of “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes called this condition “the state of nature,” a useful hypothetical that emphasizes the importance of Mind in establishing the cooperative if not collectivist social conditions for human survival and prosperity.

It’s obvious, then, that a civilized and secure society must contain elements of both the individualistic and collectivistic views of human social nature. The question is one of emphasis and degree. Western societies emphasize individualism, Confucian societies emphasize collectivism. Is it possible that a third way, a kind of synthesis, is in the process of evolving? Is a latent concept of humanity emerging, one that comprehends and embraces all the various cultures of “the family of man”?

Confucius lived during that time in Chinese history known as the “Period of the Warring States,” in which the stability of the great Chou dynasty had broken down as a result of the rise of the spirit of individualism. Whereas genetically-inscribed instinct is what holds together the societies of ants and bees, the human capacity to transcend genetic determinacy requires that social cohesion be achieved by tradition and custom, social mechanisms passed on from one generation to the next in the socialization process. Habits of behavior in all areas of social contact are inculcated from birth to death such that social cooperation becomes unconscious and automatic. When, however, such habits are examined by the rational mind—when an individual comes to reflect on habitual behavior—it becomes clear that such behavior is not instinctive and thus “natural” but rather artificial, a “social construction.” As such, any social arrangement can be otherwise than it is. The first response to such a revelation is the spirit of individualism, and this spirit quickly erodes the social bond. This consequence is well illustrated by the character of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). Obsessed with the historical figure of Napoleon–who, in ravaging all of Europe and bearing responsibility for the death of millions, was nonetheless regarded as a hero–Raskolnikov cannot but regard law and morality as meretricious fictions designed by the weak to dominate the strong (a Nietzschean notion that, interestingly, is the reverse of Marx’s analysis), and conscience as but a ghost in the mind to be dispelled by the individual will. He plans and commits the murder of an old pawnbroker for no other reason than to prove to himself that “natural law” is a fiction, and that the “positive law” proscribing murder is merely the mechanism by which the weak masses protect themselves against their strong leaders. In the “Epilogue” following his confession under great duress, he is a prisoner in Siberia. Despite his confession, he cannot accept the judgment that he is guilty of violating a deep and essential moral law; he can only see his “crime” as the violation of a rule designed to constrain the behavior of the mentally and spiritually superior, among whom he counts himself. In this mood of resentment and angry denial he comes to have a dream, a nightmare, in which he imagines the equivalent of Kant’s moral imperative of willing one’s action to become a universal. He beholds the unfolding of his idea spreading to the point where everyone comes to think of himself as a “superior” individual, as an exception to the rule of the weak masses, with the result of a Hobbesian war of all against all, and Europe becomes a sea of blood. This disturbing dream sets in motion within him a gradual revelation of the moral truth of the human condition, a revelation completed when he realizes how much he loves a woman who has steadfastly loved him. When, after a long illness, she visits him in the prison yard, he falls to the ground and embraces her knees, his tortured mind relieved of its terrible burden.

Confronting the Hobbesian anarchy of China’s “Warring States” period (c. 475-221 BCE), Confucius and his followers proposed a “Middle Way” between the brute force of the “Realists” and the moral force of the “Mohists” (after their leader, Mo Ti). The Realists favored strict laws governing every aspect of social life and severe penalties for infractions; the Mohists favored regarding all members of society with a spirit of chien ai (“mutual concern,” or love). Confucius saw that the Realist way failed to get at the root of the problem and the Mohist way lacked practicality. What his society needed, taught Confucius, was a concerted and systematic effort to identify the ends served by the traditions and customs of the great Chou dynasty and then deliberately to fashion and institutionalize social mechanisms to achieve those ends. As Huston Smith put it, “he was effecting a momentous reorientation by shifting tradition from an unconscious to a conscious foundation.” In other words, in order to preserve the life-sustaining traditions and customs that evolved “naturally” and were thus followed unconsciously, the artificiality of these traditions needed to be acknowledged and then deliberately institutionalized. The core of this social system is the bedrock belief that, in Smith’s words, “apart from human relationships there is no self. The self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.” The central set of relationships is the extended family, each member of which has one of some one hundred and fifteen titles, each relationship implying a certain attitude of deference and responsibility. In turn, the attitude of deference and responsibility extends in homologous structures from family to immediate community, from community to nation, and from nation to all humanity. The individual self is not obliterated but rather expanded, for each individual is exhorted to achieve the character of a fully civilized human being who realizes his essential nature as a rational and social creature.

The Confucian notion of the self—“a center of relationships [ . . . ] defined by the sum of its social roles”—is the opposite of the individualistic notion of the self as developed in the West first in ancient Greece, then later and independently with the rise of Christianity, then reviving during the Renaissance, and then achieving its apotheosis in the Romantic period. Athenian democracy was based on the belief that each citizen’s rational mind and experience of living had enough value to be consulted in determining how to govern the greater society. Christianity, especially in its Protestant form, later emphasized that, while the koinonia or communion of the faithful gives to Christians their social identity, the path to salvation is an individual, even private affair between each person and God. In the Italian Renaissance, the separation of and even antagonism between Church (“God”) and State (“Caesar”) led a “Renaissance Man” such as Dante to declare, “My country is the whole world,” thus implying that his individual identity was not limited by his social identity. And the Romantic period, initiated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sealed ever after the Western notion of the irreducible uniqueness of the individual: “I am made unlike any one I have ever met,” Rousseau began his influential Confessions. “I will even venture to say that I am like no one else in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”

Given such radically different premises concerning the nature of the self, and by extension the nature of humanity, it would seem that an accommodation between the two views would be insuperably difficult. And yet an accommodation, a synthesis of sorts, may be possible by recognizing the presence of a hidden assumption they both share, namely, that they both assume androcentricity (or male dominance), if not patriarchy. The realm of politics, of governance, of social power, is assumed by both European and Asian societies to be almost exclusively the domain of men. The domain of women, with very few exceptions throughout human history and in almost every society and culture, has been oikonomia, or “household management,” with a special focus on childrearing. Confucian social doctrine, in emphasizing the centrality of the family, could thus be regarded as having a feminine, or yin, bias; whereas Western social doctrine, in emphasizing the relative autonomy of the individual person, tends to have a masculine, or yang, bias. The West’s masculine bias comes from focusing attention on those adults who are not tied by their anatomy to the gestation, birth, care, and feeding of the next generation. Adult males, free from such a role, were thus free to engage in other activities, from politics to war to philosophical speculation and scientific investigations. They naturally came to the conclusion that the development of full humanity, whether through the vita activa or the vita contemplativa, was open to such persons alone; and such persons, in the ancient economy, were men. The synthesis of these two premises, then, is already figured in the yin/yang symbol of Taoism, a symbol that expresses the power (Te) of the Way (Tao) as grounded in the dialectical movement of opposites.

Feminism, the rise of female consciousness, of women’s self-consciousness, has been one of the great social movements of our time. The male prejudice–the pre-judgment, the assumption, the premise accepted without argument and enforced automatically when questioned—is and has been throughout human history regardless of time, place, or culture that the female of the human species is determined, fated by her biological role in the reproduction of the species to be limited to and by that role in the human social economy. The increasingly successful challenge to this prejudice, initiated within European civilization and spreading globally, is bringing about a redefinition of the concept of humanity. The notion that women are mentally and spiritually inferior to men is increasingly regarded to be as harmfully false as the notion that some people are “by nature” slaves, or that the various human races can be hierarchically ranked. That men and women are physiologically different, that their anatomies entail radically different roles in the reproduction of the species, goes without saying as a truism. How far their different anatomies and sexual functions determine the rest of their behavior, status, and social role is open to investigation and debate. Certainly the extreme positions on either end—those who believe that “anatomy is destiny” vs. those who believe that gender (sexual differences regarded socially) is completely a “social construction”—are overstatements. Within the scientific community, the fields of evolutionary biology and sociobiology investigate the implications of the relation of biological and social factors and what E. O. Wilson calls “gene-culture co-evolution,” and much remains to be discussed. What can no longer be denied, however, is the essential equality of men and women in terms of intellectual and spiritual capacity.

Unless and until we arrive at the dystopian society of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), in which humans are not born from mothers but “decanted” from an assembly line of test tubes, the anatomical differences between males and females will continue to determine the mechanics of human reproduction. Men can only barely imagine the profound experiences of pregnancy, birth, and nursing that women undergo; and such experiences are naturally bound to have psychological effects on women that influence attitude and behavior. Notwithstanding these factors, however, the economies of ancient human societies have long been superseded by economies that have little dependence on the old dispensation of sex-based social roles. The only question is how to rebalance the social fabric towards gender political equality without violating the “natural” male-female relationship, whatever that is.

Interestingly enough, the Western notion of the self as an autonomous, independent entity vs. the Confucian notion of the self as a center of relationships mirrors almost exactly the description of the difference between the male sense of self and the female sense of self as presented in Carol Gilligan’s seminal book of 1982, In A Different Voice. Men, Gilligan argues, are socialized in Western society to aspire to dominance and autonomy, to be alone at the top of a ladder, looking down at their rivals and surveying their demesne from on high. They tend to have a combative, warrior psychology. Women, by contrast, are socialized to aspire to be not alone at the top but rather at the center of a network of relationships. It is a cooperative, consultative psychology. Gilligan’s work was followed by an equally seminal study by Riane Eisler in 1987, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, which demonstrates that the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete was based on a “partnership model,” which recognizes the spiritual equality of men and women, rather than the model that, at a “critical bifurcation point” in social evolution, eventually came to prevail, the “domination model,” which divides not only the sexes within groups but pits social groups against each other, each vying to dominate the other. Eisler argues that today’s society, still enmeshed in the conflict-ridden social chaos that has characterized the global modern age, desperately needs and is ready for another social transformation, this time from the domination model back to some form of the partnership model.


“Rebalancing” sounds like a project for what political conservatives derisively call “social engineering,” and their disdain for such “top-down” direction is appropriate. Social engineering projects as practiced by such extreme Marxist societies as the former Soviet Union or the present “Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea” (North Korea) were and are disastrous failures, and for the good reason that human beings cannot be treated as if they were products on an assembly line. Besides, such imposed social change is just another venture of the “domination model,” which has proven its inadequacy to secure survival and prosperity except for a privileged and selfish minority. If the “rebalancing” is to be effective and to enhance rather than diminish the prospects for human survival and prosperity, it must come through a gradual “raising of consciousness” from the ground up. That such a movement has been ongoing since the 18th century European Enlightenment and is now spreading globally is grounds for hope. Of course this challenge to the legitimacy of androcentricity and patriarchy has been and will continue to be met with fierce resistance from those with vested interests in the old dispensation. On a global scale, for example, the agonies of those societies in Africa and the Middle East dominated by radical Islam (“Islamism”) are, at least in part, occasioned by this challenge. Similarly, the world-wide disparity in the distribution of wealth, according to Oxfam International, whereby fully half of the world’s wealth is in the hands of only 1% of the world’s population, is another example of the domination model at work. If, as Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” he might have added that the pursuit of profit and the spirit of unregulated capitalism is the continuation of war by other means.

In regard to refining the concept of “humanity” so as fully to include women in that definition, it is worth examining how male and female identity is presented in the first two chapters of the Biblical Genesis, discussed earlier with a different focus. Scholars are in general agreement that Chapter 2 was written before Chapter 1, and that Chapter 1 is in a strong sense an attempt to mitigate and qualify the implications of Chapter 2. The narrative of the so-called “J Writer” (or “Yahwist”) of Chapter 2 has God creating first a man, and then, so that the man may have “an help meet” (KJV) or “helper” in his task of cultivating the Garden given him, fashions a woman out of the man’s rib. Later, in Chapter 3, after the woman leads the man to perform an act in disobedience to God, she is punished by having to endure the pangs of childbirth and, most fatefully, to be subordinate to a man: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (3:16). Chapter 1, on the other hand, written later by the so-called “P Writer” (or “Priestly”), presents the creation of human beings in a radically different way. After God creates the earth, then vegetation, then “lights in the firmament,” and then animal life, God creates “man in our image” to have “dominion” over all the animals. While the plural “our” is usually taken to imply a pre-monotheistic plural Divinity (the “heavenly host”), the next verse implies that “our” may refer to something else: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (1:27). This version of the creation of humanity clearly implies two major qualifications of the account in Chapter 2: (1) that because male humans and female humans are created at the same time, they have equal value; (2) that the “image” of God is both male and female. When God here gives humans the authority and responsibility to “have dominion” over all other creatures, he addresses both the man and the woman without differentiating. In this account, the woman is the moral, intellectual, and spiritual equal of the man. It is testament to the integrity of the final redactors (editors) of the Biblical Scriptures that they included both versions of the Creation, even though these versions are contradictory. In some important sense, the redactors must have concluded, both versions are true. Most readers overcome the contradiction by reading Chapter 1 as a kind of general overview and Chapter 2 as a more poetic and concrete presentation of the same event. Yet the differences between the two accounts are profound; and the implications of female subordination in Chapter 2, perhaps because its narrative is so vividly “poetic,” have held sway in Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture ever since. It is time for the cultures based on Abrahamic mythology to re-examine the implications of Genesis 1.



X. SOCIAL STABILITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Despite the strong human desire for stability, for some assurance that the environment in which we live today will be tomorrow’s environment as well, the fact is that the environment is constantly changing. The environment of Nature, of course, changes very slowly. Three hundred million years ago, the entire land mass of Earth was concentrated in the southern hemisphere and formed the “supercontinent” called Pangaea; 125 million years later it began to break up to form the various continents that we know today. On the other hand, the weather changes rapidly from day to day, even hour to hour, sometimes only slightly, sometimes dramatically, but regarded with modern meteorological techniques, predictably. Natural patterns that are cyclical, such as those determined by the path of the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth, are repeated endlessly and are thus predictable long in advance. Natural geospheric change thus happens very slowly, and in linear fashion; natural seasonal and lunar change happens constantly and in predictably cyclical fashion; and the natural atmospheric change we experience as weather is determined by several variables and without regular patterns. The cultural environment, by contrast, the environment we have been calling the technosphere, which consists of everything that exists through human agency, including human institutions and cultural practices as well as all the products of material technology, undergoes change that has been and in Western civilization increasingly continues to be, rapid, linear, and constant; and because of the long dominance of Western civilization in the global economy, this cultural environment has been extended to the entire human race.

The changes in the material technosphere (or material culture) have been and continue to be especially rapid, linear, and constant. These changes are a result of the continued progress of scientific investigations in discovering knowledge of the way Nature works and applying that knowledge in creating new technologies. These applications in turn result in forming the particularly dynamic artificial environment, or medium, in which humans live. As survival requires our adjustment to accommodate these changes in the material technosphere, complementary changes must be made in the non-material technosphere, a task made more difficult by the degradation of the natural environment most particularly through the polluting effects of the carbon-based generation of energy needed to sustain the material technosphere. The instability of this dynamic process additionally leads to tensions and conflicts within the global social environment, for while the difficulty that the institutions of non-material culture have in keeping pace with the changes of the material culture is great, the difficulty is even greater for those societies that passively must accept these changes generated beyond their borders and outside their traditional cultures. The social change required for the generating societies is incremental, but the type of social change required of the non-generating societies is radical and fundamental. Violent conflict and aggression born of impotent rage and frustration is all but inevitable.

Stopping or even slowing down the rate of change to the material technosphere is almost impossible. The pursuit of knowledge and truth, not only by natural scientists but by social scientists and humanists, is a fundamental characteristic of all human cultures, with the exception of those primitive cultures that continue to live as their ancestors did centuries ago. It is a patronizing mistake to call such cultures “pre-literate,” as if they were intellectually slow to invent written language. They lack writing because in the course of their existence they never needed writing. Their natural environments are stable, and, more importantly, their social environments, because they live in relatively isolated areas, are stable as well. Had they been regularly challenged in ages past by hostile societies eager to appropriate their means of survival, they would have had no choice but to invent ever more sophisticated techniques of defense. Eventually, if those challenges continued, they would have invented writing and some kind of science that would enable them to compete with other societies more successfully. Their technosphere today is as simple and uncluttered as it was ages past because, with a stable natural and social environment, they have been able to meet their desire to survive and prosper without literacy and without “science” as we know it. As Claude Levi-Strauss demonstrated in The Savage Mind (1962), the “primitive” understanding of nature and social relations is as analytically sophisticated as any other society. The great difference between literate and non-literate societies is, as explained by Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), their respective senses of time. Literate cultures live in historical time; non-literate cultures live in cosmic time. That is, to live in history requires literacy so as to record the past as a series of discrete events, each building upon the other, that all together form a linear sequence normally understood as in some sense progressive. Knowledge (scientia) increases incrementally; each discovered fact is added to all the recorded facts discovered in the past; and from time to time the accumulation of facts requires a new theory (from Greek, theoria, a looking at; contemplation) to order those facts into a meaningful and explanatory pattern. To live in cosmic time is, by contrast, to live according to the cyclical rhythms of Nature. The present is understood as a repetition of the past, as will the future be. Human existence is coordinated with the annual solar cycle and the monthly lunar cycle; events are thus cyclical repetitions, and there is literally “nothing new under the sun.”

If we cannot stop or even slow down the pursuit of knowledge and the consequent use of that knowledge to continue the construction of an ever more sophisticated material technosphere, the least we can do is to be mindful of the consequences of indiscriminate growth. The foundation of our technosphere is, after all, the natural environment, and the waste by-products of our construction threaten the integrity of that foundation. Our disinclination to be so mindful is a function of our dedication to and passion for freedom as well as knowledge; we dislike and resist any constraints on either. In the process, what we forget, to our later chagrin and shame, is that both freedom and knowledge entail responsibility. If we cannot act, we are not responsible. If we do not know, we are not responsible. But if we can act and if we do know, then we are responsible. To paraphrase slightly Stewart Brand’s aphorism: We are as gods, and we damn well had better get good at it. The geosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere are finite, and as such have not an infinite capacity to absorb abuse. Degradation of our natural environment undermines the foundation of the artificial superstructure we have built upon it, and if we do not check our mania for freedom, the whole home we have built to enhance our chances for survival and prosperity will come crashing down upon our foolish heads.

So, how do we get control of this runaway train?

The answer is the adjudicating function of law. Law, which legislates through reason and free discourse, is the regularization and codification of the way people wish to live. Over time, over generations, people realize what works and what doesn’t. What works becomes custom (Greek, nomos), and law turns customs into enforceable rules (Latin, regula). Law is one aspect of Logos, the Greek word for “word,” “law,” “reason,” “language,” and as used in the Gospel of John, “the Holy Spirit.” Logos is the preeminent product of Mind. If the individualist societies and the collectivist societies are to cooperate in the human venture so that all may survive and prosper, they must do so through mutually accepted international laws. The United Nations, for all its weaknesses and problems, with 193 member states each with its own pressing agenda, is the intergovernmental organization set up to establish and enforce such laws. Its weaknesses are those of any democratic body; and especially because of its multicultural constituencies, with their varying and oppositional premises and values, the challenges of reaching consensus on almost any issue are great. Yet the effort to continue the democratic process through dialogue and debate, through listening and being listened to, through the power of Logos, must not diminish. Already in its short history it has achieved victories with the International Court of Justice, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and UNICEF. There is general agreement that, in many respects, the world is what McLuhan called a “global village”; or, in another metaphor, from systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, the world is “spaceship Earth” in need of an “operating manual.” Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, believed that the human world today comprises many cultures but basically one civilization. In this he agreed with the “end of history” thesis of Francis Fukuyama, who has argued that all possible political arrangements have been tried and found wanting but one, the political-economic system of a market-based liberal democracy. Whether or not this is true, it cannot be denied that today the material technosphere is universal; that market economics has displaced command economies of central planning; and that political legitimacy is found only in the consent of the governed.

The world population is now estimated to comprise over seven billion souls. Effective and humane governance of so many people of heterogeneous cultures would seem impossible without the use of force, or at least the “soft totalitarianism” of either a left- or right-wing regime whereby control is achieved by more insidious methods: cyber-spying, demagoguery, domination of mass media by a few mega-corporations, control of government by plutocrats, and the like. Some form of oligarchy has always been the rule of empires as of nation-states. Even absolute monarchies, dictatorships, and tyrannies must have a small group of privileged and loyal supporters to carry out policy and give legitimacy, however spurious, to the ruling regime. Direct democracy is only possible in very small societies, such as a Quaker Meeting, which arrives at decisions affecting the whole group not through simple majority vote (which would alienate the minority) but through consensus. Given the freedom and uniqueness of every individual, even a small Meeting must often exercise great patience and resolve to achieve closure.

Some form of representative democracy, then, would seem to be the best bet for all groupings except for the very small. The great challenge shall be, as it has always been, to check the tendency in large and complex societies to concentrate power among a de facto elite, especially one that is extra-governmental, that is, independent of the will of the citizenry and their elected representatives. Such an elite has now become an international phenomenon of the global economy, operating both within and across nation-states. Plutocracy in a relatively unregulated free-market system is all but inevitable, given the ability of the wealthy through manipulative abuse of the legal and political systems to construct instruments favorable to their interests. Nietzsche’s belief– that the ultimate motive in all human behavior (or at least, as a feminist would argue, all male behavior) is the pursuit and exercise of power—applies here. Generally, power in its social form is the ability to influence if not control the lives and destinies of others; the more power, the more influence over others. This motive is rooted in what has been established in the foregoing argument as the fundamental end of all living beings: to survive and to prosper. Wealth is a crude but tangible and quantifiable manifestation of power. It enables the bearer to survive and prosper and provides a kind of insurance for self and family, but the real motive is the exercise of power itself, for it is an end in itself.

Social power is manifested in two basic ways: physically, through compulsion or coercion; and mentally, through persuasion. The former method uses force to get others to behave in a prescribed manner; the latter uses symbols that appeal either to the rational, conscious mind; or, intentionally bypassing rational consciousness, to basic desires and appetites. Compulsive force is of course the means employed in all wars between different societies whose conflicting aims and goals cannot be resolved by diplomacy or persuasion. It is also the means used by public (e.g., governmental) and private (e.g., corporate) authorities to constrain behavior deemed detrimental to the welfare of the group for which the authorities are responsible. The means of persuasion, on the other hand, are directed to what motivates others to behave in certain ways; and those motivations are either rational choices (“reason”) or irrational inclinations (“passion”), or, what is likely most often the case, a combination of reason and passion. The wealthy members of a democratic society are limited in the use of force to achieve their ends, so they use their wealth to buy the services not only of venal politicians, which is bad enough, but of psychologists, sociologists, advertising and public relations specialists, and especially the corporate communications media to saturate their society with symbolic messages that bypass the rational consciousness and address instead the passions and appetites that, indulged, will tend to produce behavior that serves their interests. A fair and typical example of such manipulative “hidden persuaders” is the tobacco corporations’ success in convincing the public for decades that, despite strong evidence to the contrary and even common sense, smoking posed no hazards to health. The famous 1950s advertisement proclaiming “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” for example, implies that smoking a cigarette, which is bad for health, is not only compatible with physical exercise, which is good for health, but even promotes such exercise. Thus, the rational desire for health is undercut by linking that desire to the irrational appetite for, among other things, oral gratification. Common sense, the simple reasoning capacity enabling one to deduce that regularly filling the lungs with pollutants would degrade the lung’s capacity to do its work, is thus bypassed by symbolic redirection. Other examples yet to be exposed as viciously self-serving as the pro-smoking campaign of corporate tobacco are the corporate interests in restricting legislation regarding firearms and the degradation of the natural environment. Of the latter, the present investment in coal, natural gas, and especially petroleum as sources of energy is so massive that, even if corporate efforts to deny the calamitous effects of climate change resulting from carbon pollution were discontinued, the sheer inertia of the global carbon-based energy system would continue indefinitely.

Ultimately, the greatest power is not physical but mental and spiritual. The great philosophers and scientists have unlocked the potentialities of Mind in the pursuit and discovery of the Knowledge that has made possible the creation of the social and material technosphere. They, along with the great spiritual leaders of humankind—Socrates, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Zoroaster, Siddartha Gautama, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad—have had more influence on the lives and destinies of the peoples of the world than any other. Meaningfully, the principle aim of these leaders was not to acquire and exercise power over others through subverting the rational mind but by appealing to it in order to show the Way to survival, prosperity, and happiness. The power of what Ghandi called satyagraha, or “truth force,” is based on aligning Mind with the Way, the Tao. The early followers of Jesus, before they were called Christians, called themselves “followers of the Way” (e Hodos). When Jesus said “I am the Way,” he was indicating that his words are consistent with his actions, and his actions are consistent with what best promotes survival and happiness for all. That his words and actions led to his arrest and execution is an indication that his primary concern was not for himself but for others, and believers see his life as a sacrifice. His attitude towards wealth is that possession of riches is not in itself evil, but rather the single-minded passion to acquire wealth to the exclusion of love of God and neighbor that is evil. Greed is to benevolence as lust is to love. Greed is easily rationalized and justified by the egoist in any number of ways, but it always comes down to the pursuit of power for its own sake, rather than for the sake of one’s community or society. It is a perversion of the principle of individuation, of individual liberty, of the need of Mind to be unconstrained. In economics, the profit motive driving the behavior of private individuals and corporations has proved an effective engine of generating wealth throughout a society, but unbalanced by social legislation designed reasonably to distribute that wealth to “promote the general welfare,” it can degenerate into a greed that leads those who are possessed by it to disdain the very community that supports them and the system they exploit.

When, as reported by Oxfam International, 1% of the world’s population in 2014 privately owned almost 50% of the world’s wealth, the human community is in serious trouble. Of course the highly stratified structure of civilized societies (as opposed to the egalitarian societies of non-literate peoples) has always been shaped like a pyramid, with a few at the top having the lion’s share of wealth and power and the many at the bottom providing the labor and those with special skills constituting a kind of middle class. But since the European Age of Enlightenment, political and social power—the ability to influence or control the behavior of people—has increasingly been a function of wealth, and increasingly private wealth. The thesis of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) is that the rate of return on capital has greatly outpaced the rate of economic growth, resulting in the grossly unequal distribution noted by Oxfam; and that this inequality leads to social and economic instability, the very instability that threatens the fundamental human desire for survival and (generally shared) prosperity. Piketty’s solution to the problem is the obvious one of a global progressive marginal tax whereby those who most benefit by the free-market capitalist system, if that system is to be maintained, must give over through taxation to society as a whole a proportion of their revenues that increases as their wealth increases. Of course the wealthy tend to oppose this solution, and because their wealth buys them power, their opposition is formidable.

What neither the wealthy nor their sycophantic apologists seem to understand is that their wealth and power is less a function of their virtue than it is of their exploitation of an economic system that provides the aggressively selfish with an opportunity to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others. The profit motive is doubtless a powerful source of psychic energy that well converts to a dynamic economy. Even the arch anti-capitalist Karl Marx admitted as much in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The bourgeoisie [the social class at the head of the capitalist system] during its rule of scarce one hundred years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?” The capacity of capitalism to generate wealth is not in dispute. The problem this system fails adequately to address is rather the question of wealth distribution. The assumption that the wealth of a society essentially belongs in private hands rather to the society as a whole is a logical consequence of the prior assumption, discussed earlier, that the fundamental unit of humanity is the individual rather than the family or group. These twin assumptions make the personal vice of selfishness and the social injustice of gross inequality an inevitability. No individual achieves success, however that success is measured, by his or her unaided efforts. As discussed earlier, one’s “destiny” is only partly due to one’s free will. The forces of “fate,” or all those influencing factors over which one has no control, include sheer luck or chance. One’s talents and personality traits and one’s immediate social environment are given, not achieved, and talents rewarded by one society may be ignored or disdained in another society. This is particularly true of private wealth. Despite the Horatio Alger myth, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the rate of social and economic mobility in the U.S. is much lower than in in comparable European states, which have tended to acknowledge the social limitations of the individualist outlook. Most Americans born to families in the financial upper fifth remain there as adults, and the same is true of those born in the lower fifth. It is not that the poor lack the talent or the will to acquire wealth; they simply lack the resources.

The solution to this virtual institutionalization of vice (or, from another perspective, sin) is not the abolition of freedom and individualism and private property, as Marx advocated. The injustices of capitalist economics linked to liberal democratic politics have been more than matched by the injustices of autocratic state socialism, as has been amply demonstrated over the past century. The solution is rather more nuanced. As Keynesian economics rescued the capitalist system from its excesses that led to the global Great Depression of the 1930s, so governmental action in the form of financial and economic adjustments on behalf of society as a whole is again the most obvious way to address the ongoing consequences of the global Great Recession of 2007. If the “realist” if not cynical explanation of the lifting of the Depression was less Keynes’ theories and Roosevelt’s New Deal policies than it was the energizing effects of World War II, when investment in the public sector soared, acceptance of this explanation should not encourage warmongering. As the evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has made clear, and hardly to mention all the “proxy” wars and “wars of choice” since, war as “politics by other means” is no longer an acceptable policy, nor even a sustainable one.

The “conservative” value of social stability is often contrasted with the “liberal” value of social progress, as if these two values were contradictory. If regarded as extremes using the logic of either/or, then of course they are contradictory. Such binary logic, so important in Mind’s creation of order, is a necessarily reductive simplification. The reality is that the technosphere, both concrete and abstract, is an ongoing project, a dynamic dialectic of stability and change in which a new synthesis at once annuls and preserves. This is the logic of both/and: both stability and progress. To conserve what promotes survival and prosperity and to modify or eliminate what enervates and destroys is what we desire and need; and since our concrete technosphere is always changing, whether or not we want it to, we must make complementary changes in our abstract technosphere. To do this well and successfully requires wisdom. And this brings us back to our consideration of the philosophia perennis, to the importance of rational discourse and the institutions that promote it, to the importance of balancing the claims of the individual and the claims of the community. We must be both conservative and liberal; both individualists and collectivists; both nationalists and internationalists; both scientists devoted to the pursuit of demonstrable facts and knowledge and humanists devoted to the pursuit of human meaning and value. We are as gods, for, as the monotheistic scriptures say, we are created in the image of the Divine. We must get good at it. This is the evolutionary imperative.

jrh
4/15-11/15