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
––––––––––––––––––––
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.
Philosopher Benjamin Cain (2023) thinks we have escaped the
bounds of our natural, Earthly existence and now inhabit a cultural realm of
our own making. We have become “people” in a manner distinguishable from
animals. We are different in that the niche which we have chosen to occupy and
flourish in is not solely the natural environment as is the case with animals.
In a fundamental, non-anatomical physical evolutionary sense we no longer see
ourselves as animals. We think we have evolved not to bond with our natural
environment rather to transcend our animality, to “leap beyond natural
selection” into tragic heroism and alienation from Earth. Following the
thinking of philosopher Leo Strauss, Cain says what is most notable about the
modern crisis of meaning is that, historically, “the elites revealed too many
esoteric secrets of the temple to the lower classes, such as the secrets that
the gods never existed, that meaning in life is subjective, that justice is
political, that our existence is largely accidental, that the cosmic
environment is inhuman in scale.” Concurrently, the intellectual elites deemed
the jobs and folklores of the hoi polloi to be “irrelevant” or
prosaic, when compared with an enlightening overview of our existential
condition. The Scientific Revolution, modern art, and democratic norms,
continues Cain, just popularized that overview, so it was no longer reserved
for the higher-educated, esoteric circles.
It’s fine to emphasize, says Cain, that our knowledge should
be “applied, and that we find our lives to be meaningful when we’re of some use
in pursuing a worthwhile project.” But, he asks, what are the worthwhile
projects if life itself is irrelevant to the wider universe? “What can we find
to be relevant to us when we’ve finally learned that our
families, nations, histories, and species are all irrelevant to
the flow of the cosmic wilderness?” We can, Cain suggests, “enter a flow state
when we ignore that big picture, but nature amounts to an inhuman flow state,
an evolution of star systems that has nothing to do with us.” Cain sums up our
dilemma this way.
There’s a mismatch between what we evolved to do, and what
we discovered by anomalous historical exploits. We evolved to live like
animals, but some tens of thousands of years ago, we became people by acting in
the behaviourally modern way, by focusing not on our narrow life cycle but on
symbols and cultures which took us far beyond our adapted functions. We
developed artificial institutions that are at odds with nature, a mismatch
that’s finally coming to a head with the environmental crisis, after several
thousand years of the imperial expansion of our civilizations. Philosophy,
science, religion, and art are countercultural institutions that came to
emphasize alienation as a downside of personhood. Dysfunctionality, then, is
relative to the stipulation of some function. Given animality, we
ought to immerse ourselves in the natural or social environment…. But
given personhood, that logic no longer applies since our
cognitive role may instead be to live on the edge of appreciating that the
universe is no fit place for life, that the feeling of being at home is always
an illusion.
People don’t think or behave like animals. Animals are
content with establishing homeostasis by limiting their freedom in an
environment. They find a niche in which they can excel, and they adapt to that
set of tasks. By contrast, people excel at the meta-task of mastering all
possible niches. Apparently, that’s our chief trait, the modelling of
environments with language, reason, imagination, autonomy, and ambition. We use
those models to reshape the natural environment, to adapt it to us, rather
than the other way around. We turn the wilderness into an artificial refuge. If
there’s a task that’s fit for people in so far as people are distinct from
animals, it’s that godlike one of transforming nature into an artificial
wonderland. But that task is premised on alienation and horror for the
wilderness. We’re driven to reshape the world because we see further than
animals—too far, in fact, to be content with any project. We’re always looking
for the next adventure, growing jaded with what came before because the end of
progress for people would be the whole universe’s practical (rather than just
imaginary) personalization. – Benjamin Cain, 2023
To put this into perspective consider a comparison of social
change in the United States and China that reveals two contemporary
governmental responses to social change. Members of the Chinese Communist Party
leadership are convinced that a certain amount of coercion is needed to guide
large, complex societies such as theirs. Too much freedom and individualism,
according to the CCP, lead to a lessening in the power structure’s ability to
govern and maintain social stability. They also lead to social fracturing and
splintering, cultural dissonance, and cultural incoherence. This, the CCP
claims, weakens a government-controlled culture’s ability to provide coherence,
meaning, purpose, direction, and consolation to the masses in times of social
and ecological normalcy. In times of existential threat or calamity it imperils
the existence and growth of the nation. See The Washington Post’s China
bureau chief Lily Kuo’s 2021 article for recent actions taken by the CCP to
reassert its control over Chinese society and culture.
In comparison the US responds to social and cultural change
more through the ballot box than from the halls of national governance. That is
to say that US political parties, no less than the CCP, see their primary role
as finding the cultural pulse of a sizable portion of the electorate and riding
that to victory with the help of authoritarian tactics such as gerrymandering,
voter suppression, and race dog-whistling. Historically, both Democrats and
Republicans have been guilty of gerrymandering and race baiting. But in recent
times what the Democrats did in the past pales in comparison to the efforts of
the Republican party from the Nixon Southern Strategy of the late 1960s to the
present. That said, once in office, either party seeks to retain its hold on
power. Autocracies such as China do so by force and consumer placation, and
democracies through bolstering the economic prosperity of consumer capitalism.
In either case, autocracy or democracy, economics is the
breadbasket of society, culture is the blood that feeds the mind and the
emotions. Politicians know this and how to use that knowledge to attain and
hold onto power.
This volume on influencing the future of human social and
cultural evolution is necessary. A book about sociocultural change has no
practical value if it has nothing to say about taking action to address our
individual, social, and ecological problems.
Many social scientists are convinced their sole
responsibility is to investigate, describe, or explain what society and culture
are and how they work. Period. Using their results to recommend, motivate, or
get directly involved in the lives of individuals and groups to address current
problems and influence the future is not seen by these thinkers as part of
their social contract, their duty to their fellows, locally or globally. To
them, taking action to change individual and social life is within the exclusive
domain of individual choice and more broadly the duty of those wielding
political and economic power. Leadership in the public and private sectors,
they say, is best suited to make changes because they possess the power and
means to command technocrats in government to plan and act. Similarly, many
think, it falls to the magnates of venture capital and corporations to use
their wealth to fund private in-house research, via contracting with private
sector research facilities, or through formal agreements with research entities
at universities. The goal for both the public and private sector is to come up
with social interventions, pharmaceuticals, genetic manipulations, computer
software and hardware, military weaponry, and other machinery and methods
useful for influencing the present and future of individuals, groups, nations,
and humankind as whole. The aforementioned academics do not see themselves as
technocrats.
A corollary may be found among many philosophy professors
who see their mandate to only teach philosophy, not necessarily live by any of
the philosophies they profess. Fortunately, there are still intellectual
descendants at the academy who, from the moral and virtue philosophy teachings
of Ancient Greco-Roman philosophies such as Stoicism and Epicureanism, try to
live what they teach.
Social science has a responsibility beyond teaching.
Fortunately, an increasing number of social scientists are taking action to
operationalize or practicalize their findings; or who express themselves
through various forms of public media as public intellectuals. Fortunately,
public philosophy and for-the-public articles, essays, and books by social
scientists, historians, and others are more widespread now than ever.
Though I thought nothing of including an entire volume on
influencing the future of social change, I am still obliged to double-check my
assumptions that: 1) there are solutions that may improve the
human present and future and; 2) anyone might pay attention to my suggestions;
and, finally, 3) my ideas might be used by those in power to improve
humankind’s ability to survive and flourish in the future.
As for the first assumption, yes there are solutions
that have a chance to positively influence the future of sociocultural
evolution. Prehistory and history are full of innovative ideas for living
together and viably, fruitfully interacting with the natural environment. These
ideas put into action nationally or internationally have not been without their
sometimes-disastrous failures. And there is, of course, no guarantee the overall arc
of our species’ efforts leads to surviving and flourishing. This lack of
guaranteed continuance has never stopped us from trying in the past, and it
should not now. Second, the only chance innovative ideas for our future have of
anyone paying attention to them is if they are expressed. Nothing new
expressed, nothing new considered and chosen. Finally, whether those with the
power and wealth to affect social and cultural change will act on my thinking
is beyond anyone’s control but theirs.
The most pressing challenges in the world have foundational
cultural components. Global warming arose from the false illusions of human
separation from nature and the perception of an endless bounty of natural
resources at the beginning of the industrial era. Terrorism is cultivated in
landscapes where people feel deep-seated anxiety and economic desperation -
which arise from particular models of colonial (or post-colonial) exploitation
that have unique cultural histories.
Similarly, the spread of rugged individualism as a cultural
construct treats human beings as if they are separate from their
communities, inherently selfish, and venerable for engaging in psychopathic
behaviors like wealth hoarding. In each case, the real state of power is
culture, and the only viable solutions involve the intentional
management of cultural evolutionary change.
But we cannot even start to think this way if we don’t
recognize how human cultures operate as complex systems. Only by
learning to see that emergent patterns arise through the interactions of
constituent parts will we begin to discern how evolutionary change is taking us
closer to planetary-scale collapse – and that design practices will be
needed that make use of what is now known from cultural evolutionary studies. –
Joe Brewer, Center for Applied Cultural Evolution, 2017b (emphasis mine)
Are there practical, useful ideas within the natural and
social sciences, and prehistory and history? A decision about this must precede
any effort to imagine and take action to influence our future. Either there are
useful ideas for influencing our future, or there are not. If the latter is the
case, that we cannot find wheat within the chaff of our past and present, we
must accept that we lack options for reforming humankind’s current trajectory
and state our intentions and plans for nevertheless surviving the impasse at
which we have arrived.
First, consider that there may be no useful ideas from our
past for charting our future. In a brilliant 2022 essay on German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) view of history, University of Wisconsin
historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen writes:
Nietzsche’s most important insight about the uses and
disadvantages of history for life is by now the most clichéd: namely, that
history is nothing more, but also nothing less, than a human, all-too-human
enterprise. It is not the raw stuff of the past – it is the connection we
strive to make with the past. He helped to show that nothing
in history happens by nature or necessity. And so it is not foreordained that
those who cannot remember the past will be doomed to repeat it. We have no real
reason to believe that there is an angel of history with his face turned toward
the past any more than we have reason to believe he is watching over us. As
much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its
moral arc bends toward justice. The lessons of history are that there are no
timeless lessons waiting for us. Whatever lessons there are, they are the ones
we ourselves must make, again and again, boats against the currents of
chauvinism, ignorance, and indifference. – Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, 2022
In her essay, Ratner-Rosenhagen says she began her study of
history believing that knowledge of history was a “skeleton key for unlocking
secrets to greater peace, justice, and beauty in the world.” Now, in her early
fifties, she has learned to lower her expectations and settled on a belief that
history could “provide widened horizons of connection and possibility, helping
us get out of the narrow perspective of our now.” And she has come to doubt any
“‘use’ of history in the sense of thinking about it instrumentally.”
Ratner-Rosenhagen now recommends history to her students as an “intellectual
orientation, a daily practice, but not something they should try to ‘use’ to
achieve a goal.” The US culture wars, or “history wars” of the 1990s and the
associated book-banning and “mainstream endorsement of ‘alternative facts’”
have, she concludes, led to a failure to arrive at a national consensus. That
the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol was purportedly either “a
violent insurrection or a legitimate expression of First Amendment rights.”
This and other late 20th early 21st Century
abuses of history and truth, R-R says, have led her to turn to Nietzsche,
especially his 1874 essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,”
to help “diagnose our current predicaments and navigate a way out of them.” R-R
says Nietzsche viewed historical knowledge as not serving the present and
future because it drained them of their vibrancy and vitality.
This “oversaturation of an age with history,” this piety of
“instruction without invigoration” [wrote Nietzsche], was both cause and
effect. The fetishization of the past was the result of moderns’ “weakened
personality,” which caused them to look backward in time for inspiration,
guidance, and meaning, rather than deep inside themselves. Their obsession with
history was also an effect of their cultural impotence. For Nietzsche,
there was use for a historical consciousness, but never in
excess: that is, when use slides into abuse, and the past becomes a
“gravedigger” that buries the present alive. … “We need history, certainly,
Nietzsche maintains, “but…for the sake of life and action…. We want to serve
history only to the extent that history serves life.”
But what of Nietzsche’s views when applied to the present
time of alternative truths and cherry-picked history, and the gutting of
objectivity with the false equivalence of subjectivity? For Ratner-Rosenhagen
there is a “ur-foundation,” an uncontestable foundational
history of the US, “barely noticed in mainstream discourse.” This, she says,
“suggests that a deeply ingrained historical ignorance, not a pesky dominance
of historical consciousness, is our problem.”
I cannot accept Nietzsche’s view of the past as an
obsession, a fabrication and self-absorbed portrayal with little use for the
present and future. Anthropology shows us there are patterns of cultures,
past and present, as discussed in the first chapter of Volume I. These patterns
are far from arbitrary and based on a limited number of basic human
sociocultural potentials at work in the context of Earth’s biosphere as Julian
Steward and other cultural ecologists have described. In these cultural
patterns and ecological strategies and their resultant social organizations
there are recurring trends, themes, and generally repeated outcomes. These
trends and themes are detectable in a multitude of social and cultural changes
in a wide variety of societies over the 300,000 years of humankind’s existence.
Based on these facts alone there must be more practical usefulness in history
and prehistory than Nietzsche claims. Later, in the ideas of novelist Daniel
Quinn and others presented in Chapter 16, there are unequivocal lessons from
biology and anthropology that may usefully guide humankind’s future.
In 2020, the editors of Full Stop Quarterly published
ideas about our current time of reckoning and whether there are viable options
for the human future. In their introduction to their Winter 2020 issue, they
claim humankind is troubled by time, the unknown events that might occur now
and in the future. That this uncertainty about both our present and future is
intolerable and may have catastrophic consequences.
They claim that the things we need for greater peace of mind
and human flourishing come too slowly. Justice, for example, never spreads
evenly or fully on a meaningful human-wide scale. The 2020 US presidential
election could not come fast enough. And even with its passing and the voting
out of an autocrat, so much still hangs in the balance for the US and humankind
– faith in science, human-caused climate change, stock and financial markets
detached from reality, police brutality, increasing violence along the cultural
divide. In the FSQ editors’ view our ability to remember and
learn from the mistakes of our collective past is equally disheartening. They
ask: “Is time itself, a monster?”
We are, FSQ says, increasingly barely able
to remember the past much less imagine a future. They cite Italian Marxist
theorist Antonio Gramsci’s (1891-1937) notion of “the crisis” where “the old is
dying and the new cannot be born.” That in this liminal period “a great variety
of morbid symptoms appear.” This is the monster that is time the editors are
referring to.
The FSQ Winter 2020 issue is devoted to
examining a variety of crisis-bred monsters, transitions in history when unique
circumstances have converged to create monstrous conditions: “widespread
anxiety, paranoia, and the destabilization of political, social, and economic
infrastructure.” The FSQ editors also present alternative
frameworks for such crises from literature and little-remembered works from
philosophy, anthropology, the humanities, and politics. Their goal is to help
“incorporate these anomalous discontinuities of time within coherent, usable
narratives.” Elsewhere in the magazine issue “such bridging narratives are
rejected as impossible and even undesirable.” In closing, the editors tell
us:
We may like to think of history as a line or as a circle, in
either case, a continuity. But as in the interregna that preceded our present
one, there is something complicated and obscure that is disrupting our
experience of time and history – or revealing just how disjointed are time and
history, really. And these writers contend with this “out of joint”-ness, in
Shakespeare’s terms, that hangs behind any desperate attempt to stitch up
events in a coherent narrative. – Editors, Full Stop Quarterly,
2020
With such a lack of reassurance, we can only hope that as we
examine key ideas from the nine essays in this FSQ issue in
the concluding part of this volume, we might come to better understand that
“something complicated and obscure that is disturbing our experience of time
and history.” That something that is exposing just how truly “disjointed are
time and history.” That in achieving such an understanding we might free
ourselves from the spell of this “out of joint” specter that haunts humankind
and impedes our best efforts to create an understandable and useful narrative
for our species’ and Earth’s future.
It is telling that the FSQ editors give
their Winter 2020 issue final word to Russian philosopher Julie Reshe.[i] In
her anchor leg essay “Talking in the Void” Reshe concludes that:
After the present stage of paranoiac noise, as the world is
spinning out of our control, forcing us to invent endless interpretations that
only trigger and maintain the panic, the next stage is collective depression,
and resignation to a dreary uncertainty. This might be followed by the stage of
recovery and generation of new, more convincing illusions of understanding.
Until the next crisis. – Julie Reshe, 2020
In this book’s last chapter, we must decide if Reshe is
justified in foreseeing our resignation to such an uncertainty, and if she is
correct that such a perilous state of collective insecurity might be followed
by more convincing and sustaining yet still illusionary stories about ourselves
and our time on Earth.
Canadian archaeologist Bruce Trigger (1998) more
pragmatically says that if history shows that the course of human affairs lies
beyond our control, then all we can do is “try to understand these forces and
accommodate to their operations, as the physiocrats advocated in the eighteenth
century.” But, Trigger continues, “if the complexity of the forces that bring
about sociocultural change makes it unlikely that the course of human history
is predetermined, then decision-making has a more positive role to play, and
knowledge and moral responsibility have major selective value.” There is good
reason, he says, to believe that “choice plays a significant role not only in
our daily lives but in shaping long-range trends in human history.” As long as
we “remain uncertain about precisely how important a role choice plays in human
affairs, it is in our interest to behave as if it plays a significant one.”
I agree with Trigger and Boyd and Richerson, (1985) that
natural selection has worked on human beings such that we have become best
adapted for making “self-interested and short-term decisions.” For the vast
majority of human existence these decisions have been suited to the needs of
individuals and small groups. Yet with the beginning of the Neolithic
Revolution (collective agriculture, urbanism, social stratification, and
statism) we have shown we have the ability to adapt our decision-making skills
to somewhat successfully managing the affairs of larger, more complex
societies. This, continues Trigger, “has required individuals and groups to
co-operate and organize activities on a larger scale and to address problems
that require more complex management over longer periods of time.” Therefore,
he says, the “best use that can be made of an understanding of the past is to
suggest the direction in which current processes are moving and what the
outcomes of strategies for dealing with analogous problems have been in the
past.” I agree. But I am not alone in believing there are also profound,
perhaps lifesaving, notions of how to make decisions and what priorities to
use, to be found in our pre-Neolithic past and biological principles concerning
ecologically sustainable individual and group conduct.
In Volume I, I surveyed the various meanings and aspects of
culture and how they change and evolve, and attempted formulating a new theory
of cultural evolution. In Volume II, I present how I think efforts at coming up
with such a theory can make a positive contribution to the future of humankind.
Central to my effort is Stoicism, an ancient Greco-Roman
philosophy and way of life. In influencing social and cultural change, it is
best to focus on a way of life that addresses the fundamental needs of human
beings. Though Stoicism may be limited as a guide to the human need to obtain
sustenance from the physical environment and protection from its dangers, my
emphasis in this volume is on Stoicism’s take on the human needs to live
sustainably with oneself and others.
Built upon humankind’s biological inheritance of instinctive
behaviors – mammalian sociality, fight or flight response, a brain configured
to learn and use complex symbolic language – is a cultural capacity to use
ideas, beliefs, values, and learned behaviors to survive and potentially
flourish as individuals and groups. The entire 300,000-year arc of human
cultural evolution has seen millions of cultures and subcultures not only
emerge and change through time, but also across widely varying environments that
have also evolved over time.
Every culture has major components that influence social
organization: economic behavior, the need for shelter and safety/health,
kinship, cosmology and morality. All of these motivate individual and social
activities. Cosmologies provide definitions and explanations of the matter and
processes of the physical world. Moral and ethical systems go beyond the
teachings of what the cosmos is and how it works. They tell us what personal
and collective ideas and behaviors are acceptable.
Among the multitude of societies and cultures humankind has
created and lived by are ways of being human that can be placed on a
four-strand multi-dimensional continuum. On the social organization strand are
cultures that range from small hunter-gatherer bands to complex industrial
societies. On the economic strand is gathering plants, scavenging, and hunting
animals at one end, and complex mechanized agri-business and domestic animal
raising at the other. In terms of shelter, safety and health humankind’s efforts
have ranged from temporary wooden stick shelters, caves and herbal remedies to
high rise urban dwellings and medical science and technology. Cosmologically,
the continuum has stretched from total human inclusion in nature, to humans
divinely created and privileged, to secular humanism.
Between the extreme ends of each strand there have been
varying expressions of politics, economics, sheltering and health, and
cosmology and morality. Some have been more successful than others in terms of
allowing human survival, wellbeing, and flourishing.
Any worthwhile theory of cultural evolution that recommends
a future direction and mode for human survival, wellbeing, and possible
flourishing must account for the failures of past and present cultures; and
justify its selections from within various successful past and present
cultures. One must also present evidence and argumentation supporting any new
or significantly innovative cultural modes or elements one might offer.
Making the notion of “We,” introduced in Volume I, work
requires a viable and sustainable cosmology and moral system. However,
humankind cannot by force of will or legislation come up with and implement a
sustainable new cosmology and morality.
Each generation likes to feel that it’s invented its own
rebel culture, and they’re mostly correct. The essential countercultural spirit
perpetually reinvents itself in unpredictable ways, outrageous styles, and
novel forms. Nevertheless, many twenty-first century youth counterculturalists
could benefit from learning the history of their late-twentieth-century
antecedents, and we could all benefit from learning about countercultural
movements from the depths of time. – Ken Goffman and Dan Joy, 2004
One could argue against my insistence that directing the
evolution of humankind’s future must first begin by setting out a new cosmology
and moral system before giving attention to the practicalities of politics,
economics, shelter, and safety. That attempting such would be in defiance of
Marvin Harris and others’ largely accepted arguments that techno-economic
reality drives and determines the content of cosmologies and the values of
moral systems.
I have accepted techno-economic determinism, also known as
cultural materialism, as a valid observation and explanation for a large part
of the content of cosmologies and morals, especially in the modern period
beginning around the year 1500. But I do not accept cultural materialism as
necessary and sufficient for explaining the entirety of human
existence. Even Harris eventually softened his strong stance on the
predominance of technology and economics over the form and substance of human
ideas. Also, primatologist Franz de Waal has shown that morality, if not also
cosmology in the narrowest earthly sense of that term, have origins in our
mammalian evolution, especially within the proto-moral social evolution of the
primates, particularly the apes. Nevertheless, it must be accepted that
biological survival and food gathering activity (economics) has had an impact
on the thinking and social lives of all the various primate species; and tool
making and use have contributed to the wellbeing of some primate groups.
Equally important, especially among humans, a persuasive argument persists that
stone technology was a key innovation that contributed to a greater consumption
of animal protein. This, in turn, was likely a primary factor in changes in the
brain that facilitated the emergence of complex symbol-based language in
humans.
I give priority to first changing cosmologies and moral
systems because they, especially primate proto-morality, came into being
concurrent with the economics of food getting but before tool
use and tool making. Also, the inculcation of knowledge about the physical and
social worlds, and the teaching of acceptable behavior begin during infancy,
long before the influence of technology comes into play. Granted, economics
(food providing) is paramount from the beginning of an individual’s life but it
must go hand in hand with tactile and emotional nurturing. So, with sociality
and enculturation having the longest evolutionary standing relative to tool use
and making, and being a co-first with food intake and protection for the
rearing of individuals into adulthood over considerations of technology and
politics, I think starting with cosmology and morality is likely to be the most
productive means of improving individual wellbeing and sociality, and best for
influencing the future of human cultural evolution. This volume is based on
this premise.
Returning to Stoicism and its modern practice as a
foundation for a new understanding of cultural evolution and a means of
directing the course of humankind’s cultural evolution, it is helpful to refer
again to philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci. Stoicism, he says,
rejects prescriptions allegedly derivable from cultural universals and notions
such as avoidance of harm and pursuit of wellbeing favored by Sam Harris and
Michael Shermer to guide sociocultural evolution. For a Stoic, he continues, pain
and pleasure are, respectively, “dispreferred and preferred indifferents,
meaning that one may reasonably seek to avoid pain and to experience pleasure,”
yet neither pain nor pleasure have the inherent capacity or power to inform
morality. Therefore, using the absence of pain and the presence of pain as
absolute measures for living better in the future may not be reasonable and
therefore humankind’s best way going forward. One can easily imagine that new
ideas and behaviors needed for a better future – in areas such as environmental
protection, freedom, justice, and equality – will not always avoid harm and
give pleasure.
Stoicism derives its ethics in a naturalistic way, not on
the basis of (alleged) universal “oughts”. We try to live “in accordance with
nature,” meaning the nature of a human being. By that we mean that we ought to
use reason – a distinctive human faculty – to improve social living,
because Homo sapiens is a naturally prosocial animal. If we
ceased, as a species, to produce offspring, there wouldn’t be any way for us to
exercise virtue. And a virtuous life is the only meaningful life for a human
being. – Massimo Pigliucci, 2021a
Finally, at the end of this volume we will determine if We,
an idea about cultural evolution I proposed at the conclusion of Volume I,
offers a viable, sustainable means of thinking and behaving better in the
future. Are the guiding and governing principles of We more humane and
ecologically viable than the current economic and political maneuvering and
manipulation we appear reluctant to abandon? To embark upon a new way of
thinking about culture and social relations based on We, to divert humankind’s culture
content and the course of societal and global cultural evolution in that
direction, might be humankind’s only hope. That is, our only hope of releasing
ourselves from the grip of a devil’s bargain of our own making, which we call
civilization and modernity.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead
[i]
Julie Reshe is a philosopher and a negative psychoanalyst of Ukrainian Gypsy
(Roma?) origin. She is a professor at the School of Advanced Studies (SAS) at
the University of Tyumen in Siberia, and director of the Institute of
Psychoanalysis at the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS).
