Volume II, Influencing Sociocultural Evolution, answers the question: What does
the study of culture and cultural evolution offer in practical terms for
positively influencing the future of humankind and Earth? Vol. II is also
available on Amazon in hardback and paperback. Click here.
An e-book version is available here.
An Amazon Kindle version is not available.
Excerpt
Cultural
Evolution: Caught in the Devil’s Bargain
Volume II:
Influencing Sociocultural Evolution
James E. Lassiter
Introduction to
Volume II
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Philosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is
to change it.
– Karl Marx, 1845
Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500BCE) was
one of the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition to put in writing his
thinking about the processes of change. For Heraclitus change is eternal. All
things have one thing in common, they change. Everything is continually
becoming something else. It is Heraclitus who has been credited with having
said: “It is not possible to step into the same river twice.”
In addition to change being a constant, Heraclitus argued
that change is manifest as a tension between elements that brings them into
opposition. In this tension neither competitor wins permanently. For him, the
world we see around us is a continuous struggle: animal against animal; man
against woman; religion against religion; ideas against ideas; social classes
and nation-states against each other. This process, he believed, forces
everything on Earth and throughout the universe to act or strive to become
better, and ultimately a general improvement comes about in every sphere.
Without struggle and striving, he thought individuals, societies, and humankind
could not become complete.
Beyond this, continued Heraclitus, all elements, great,
small, simple, and complex, are linked. There is a natural order everywhere in
the universe. Historian Will Durant sees Heraclitus’ ideas having a deep legacy
in the thinking of the West. He says they influenced Greco-Roman Stoic
philosophy as well as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution.
Beyond his views about change, what he called universal
flux, and the unity of opposites where opposites coincide, Heraclitus believed
that fire was the first cause of everything and that there was a reason for
every occurrence. Regarding fire, Heraclitus’ views extended far beyond the
chemical reaction. He conflated fire with the human soul and God. All things,
he thought, are just manifestations of fire. Fire is eternal in that it
consumes fuel continually and it is inseparable from God. Heraclitus considered
fire the ultimate reality.
Did Heraclitus have it right, is change the only universal
process? Over the two and a-half millennia since Heraclitus wrote, what have
we, through philosophy, science, and the discoveries of anthropology, learned
about change, especially social and cultural transformation?
A range of economic, technological, political, and social
changes over the past 6,000-8,000 years, especially since the advent of
permanently settled large-scale agriculture, have influenced humankind’s
evolution. These processes, with varying degrees of impact, have resulted in
changes in the direction, tone, and meaning of being human. The drivers of
these processes include technological and economic innovations, infrastructural
and social urbanization, social stratification and bureaucratization, continued
and often increased inter-group conflict, and an ever-increasing formal, autocratic exercise
of political and legal power over human beliefs, values, and norms. Changes in
the tone and meaning of being human have included psychological and affective
changes, and what we think of others and how we treat each other.
Cultural evolution is the transformation of particular societies and regional cultural traditions or civilizations over extended periods of time. These changes in the way we live have been influenced by dominant societies and taken directions in response to the adaptivity of culture. A critical amount of the direction and tone of cultural evolution, within societies and globally, has not been questioned or has been obfuscated. These muddying and misleading notions include progress, human exceptionalism, nationalism, a transfer of allegiance from religion to science and technology, and a biological deterministic and Social Darwinian understanding of human nature. The influence of these ways of thinking has led to a multiplex human and planetary existential crises.
