PART ONE

MACROSHIFT IN SOCIETY

Chapter 2: Macroshift: The Dynamics

We live in a crucial epoch – an epoch of instability and change. The future is open. We could go down in chaos and catastrophe, or pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to a peaceful and sustainable world. The choice between extinction and evolution is real. We need to understand how it came about and what it entails.

The first thing to understand is that the choice of destiny before us is not accidental: the way the world we live in develops has a logic of its own. This logic is the logic of evolution, in nature as well as in society. Its hallmark is the alternation of periods of relative stability with epochs of increasing, and ultimately critical, instability. When instability reaches the critical point, the system either collapses or shifts to a new state of dynamic stability. These critical “tipping points” constitute Macroshifts, which involve all aspects and segments of society: the rich and the poor, the economic and the political systems, the private as well as the public sector.

We are approaching the threshold not only of a local or national but of a global Macroshift, driven by the cumulative impact of the unreflective use of potent technologies. Shortsighted power- and profit-hunger coupled with powerful technologies has triggered climate change, is producing famine and water scarcity, and is leading to coastal flooding as well as to a host of related and equally threatening processes in the ecology. Within the structures of civil society it is producing growing gaps between rich and poor, with attendant frustration, fundamentalism, and terrorism, triggering crime, violence and war.

The threat of extinction is real, but it is avoidable. At the critical phase of a Macroshift fresh opportunities open, including the opportunity to evolve. In this case the opportunity is not to evolve genetically, for we are not merely a biological species, but to evolve socially and culturally, to a new society and a new culture – to a new civilization.

Evolution, whether in nature or in the human world, is characterized by certain basic features that recur independently of the nature of the things that evolve, and also of their particular time and place. The first of these recurrent features concerns the manner in which evolutionary processes unfold.

The processes of evolution are continuous and unrelenting, but not smooth and even. The way it unfolds is highly nonlinear.
The systems become chaotic. Their trajectory forks off: it bifurcates.
At the threshold of a critical instability, fluctuations that were previously corrected by self-stabilizing negative feedbacks within the system run out of control – they break open the system’s structure.
Its outcome is either disintegration – breakdown – or evolution to a system resistant to the fluctuations – breakthrough.
Attempts to maintain the status quo are condemned to failure and attempts to reach a new level of dynamic equilibrium do not always pan out. Other attempts may be crowned by success.

Evolution through bifurcation

The evolutionary process on Earth produced entire species’ lineages to complex mammalian species.
With the appearance of Homo, it encompassed the sociocultural and sociotechnological systems formed by human tribes and communities.
The family of primates split off from the then existing species of mammals around 40 million years ago.
The first primates were the old world monkeys that populated wide areas of Asia and Africa.
About 9.2 million years ago the primate family split into two groups. One group was the pongids and the other group became terrestrially based bipedalists: the family of hominids.
About 4 million years ago the early hominid Austalopithecines were widely distributed in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Around 2.5 million years ago they split into different branches. One branch led to habilis and erectus, and ultimately to sapiens.

Social evolution through Macroshifts

With sapiens sapiens evolution shifted from the biological to the socio-cultural-technological domain.
In this domain it is not the genetic structure that mutates but the dominant civilization: how people are organized, what ideas and values they entertain, and how they see themselves and the world around them.
Mutations in society are all-encompassing, involving every segment and every aspect.
These Macroshifts drive toward the progressive integration of different peoples, enterprises, economies, societies, and cultures in systems of larger and larger dimensions.
Human beings are not simply the passive subjects of evolution but are active agents that influence its unfolding.
Societies formed by human beings undergo an evolutionary process that is analogous to that which occurs in biological nature.
The evolution of human societies has been driven by the innovation that periodically destabilize the existing systems, rendered possible by sapiens’ capacious cranium, harboring a brain of some 1,350 cm³.
This enabled our forebears to develop an expressive and then a symbolic language, conceptual thinking, advanced tool use, and group behavior based on the cooperative use of progressively more sophisticated technologies.

At first, societal evolution was slow: Paleolithic Stone Age societies were highly enduring, with a low level of innovation and great stability. The first major innovation that rocked these societies was the domestication of plants and animals around 10,000 years before our time: the “Neolithic Revolution.” It transformed nomadic hunter-gathers into settled pastoralists, and then into agriculturists. At that time and afterward, throughout history, bifurcations were triggered by advances in the technologies devised by human groups. Technological innovations included the control of fire, the invention of the wheel, the design of progressively more sophisticated tools, and the invention of more and more powerful devices for extending the power of human muscle and the human brain. Such innovations enabled humans to live in larger and larger communities, with progressively greater social differentiation and divisions of labor.

Subsequent innovations – including the invention of the alphabet and the number system, the means of communication over vaster distances, and the stratification of societies from the tribal circle of elders to the hierarchically organized state – transformed groups of Neolithic pastoral-agrarian communities into the vast archaic empires of Babylonia, Egypt, India, and China.

Less than 4,000 years ago at the rim of the Mediterranean there was another major bifurcation: in classical Greece nature philosophers pioneered a societal mutation that replaced mythical concepts with theories based on observation and elaborated by reasoning. Greco-Roman civilization entered the scene of history. The pre-Socratic philosophers evolved the “heroic mind,” present in Homer and the early epics, into the visionary and the theoretical mind and then the rational mind epitomized by Plato and Aristotle. Logos became the central concept: it was at the heart of philosophy as well as of religion. Together with the valuation of quantitative measurements, it provided Western civilization with the rational foundation upon which it was to build for nearly two and a half thousand years.

After the fall of the Western Empire of Rome and the founding of the Byzantine Empire in 476 CE, a further shift occurred in the development of European societies.
The rise of Christianity modified the classical culture of Greece. The medieval belief system added to the classical concepts a divine source: the world’s creator and prime mover as well as ultimate judge.
Reason came to be embodied in the Holy Trinity and incarnated in man, God’s creation.
This belief system, whose principal elements were elaborated by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, was dominant in European civilization until the advent of the modern age.

A further shift occurred in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Although medieval Europe’s culture was otherworldly and Christian, in everyday practice it was mechanically colored; it embraced the concept elaborated by Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei: the world as a giant machine. This concept, underpinned by new scientific discoveries and wedded with traditional handicrafts, led to a series of technological innovations. These included the harnessing of the power of steam and later oil and the invention of mass production for mass markets. Europe, followed shortly by America, entered the industrial age.

Thanks to an accelerating series of ever more powerful technological innovations sapiens became the dominant species on the planet.
This reign is not assured. In its present form, industrial civilization is not sustainable.
In the opening years of the 21^st century the industrial age is shifting into a post-industrial age, impelled by the “second industrial revolution” – a revolution hallmarked by the advent of the technologies of information and communication.
These technologies are more powerful than the steam- and fossil fuel-based technologies of the first industrial revolution, and the “revolutions” they catalyze are unfolding much faster than the first industrial revolution: in a matter of years instead of decades or centuries.
In the past Macroshifts were local, national, or regional. Today’s Macroshift is global. Humanity’s societal evolution has reached the dimensions of the planet.

Quantum Shift in Global Brain Part 3

PART ONE

Chapter 2: Macroshift: The Dynamics

Evolution through bifurcation

Social evolution through Macroshifts

Phases of a Macroshift

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