The Chaos Point Part 5

THE CHAOS POINT

THE WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

ERVIN LASZLO

PIATKUS BOOKS               2006

PART V

 

PART ONE: THE TIDES OF TRANSFORMATION

 

Chapter 4: Parameters of a Positive Transformation

The data we have just reviewed tells us that we are approaching a critical condition: Our world has become economically, socially, and ecologically unsustainable. Persisting in the values and practices of the rationalistic, manipulative civilization of the modern world will create deepening rifts between the rich and poor, young and old, informed and marginalized, and could make the biosphere inhospitable for most of humanity. To survive in our planetary home, we must create a world better adapted to the conditions we have ourselves created.

Can we create a more adapted world? This question can be more precisely stated. Can the power- and wealth-oriented civilization of the Industrial Age be effectively and sufficiently transformed to ensure the survival and well-being of the entire human population? Civilizations are not eternal; they are subject to change, even to fundamental transformation. Past civilizations have transformed throughout history; could ours transform as well?

Transformations in History

• Ever since our forebears evolved some form of culture and some form of social order, periodic shifts in the relations to each other and to nature were accompanied by corresponding shifts in their thinking.
• Before looking at the feasibility of a positive transformation of our own civilization we should review the major transformations of civilizations in the past. They may hold important lessons for the transformation we face today.

 

Transformation from Mythos to Theos

• By 11,000 B.C.E. in the Fertile Crescent, the formerly verdant region extending from the Levant to Persia (now Iran), human groups had grown into tribes of several hundred living in fixed settlements.
• In the larger and more complex human groups of this Neolithic Age, additional technologies came into use, including cultivating plants, husbanding animals, and weaving and pottery-making.
• The culture of our forebears underwent a corresponding shift. Their imagination did not stop at the limits of their everyday world; their worldview was embracing in its dimensions and animistic and spiritualistic in its substance.
• Spirit was not separated from matter, nor was the real world from the dream world. The forces of nature were also the forces of the spirits embodied in objects, plants, animals, and people.
• The entire world had a sacred dimension. Forces outside and above humans acted in and on the world, having an impact on nature as well as on human communities.
• People viewed themselves as belonging to a dynamic universe, with seen and unseen forces and entities. Nature and humans did not exist in separation, much less in opposition.
• At the Paleolithic food-gathering and hunting-fishing stage, the male principle dominated, consistent with the survival priorities and needs of the times.
• Subsequently, at the agricultural-based Neolithic stage of food production, the female principle became dominant, reflecting the new relations of the herder and farmer to the soil and the earth.
• Earth-oriented fecundity and fertility, sexual symbolism, and magical-religious rites were remarkably similar among widely separated peoples. They found analogous expression in the Old World in Asia and the Middle East and in the New World of Mesoamerica.
• Neolithic people congregated primarily in major river valleys, where their use of large amounts of water in improved irrigation systems generated massive increments of crops.
• Metals such as copper and bronze came into use, new methods for measuring the boundaries of lands were discovered, and calendars for reckoning time and writing for recording and communicating messages were invented.
• This led to population growth and greater complexity of social organization and placed a greater load on the environment.
• In some regions of the fertile Crescent, such as Sumer, trees were chopped down, soil was overworked, and the climate became arid. Neolithic communities fanned out, working vaster lands and drawing on the resources of a larger environment.
• Many villages grew into towns. Some became empires with extended administrative and power structures. A new elite came to inhabit the urban centers.
• Such were the empires that appeared in Babylonia and in Egypt, China, and India.
• The new structures and orders mirrored, and in turn reinforced, the transformation of people’s values and worldviews. A fresh emphasis was placed on male dominance. The Earth Mother was subordinated.
• Territorial rights came to dominate over traditional kinship ties, reflecting increased concern with individual and communal property and a more complex division of labor.
• In theocratic societies, kings ruling by divine fiat embodied and legitimised the exercise of celestially authorized power. In these societies, the supreme aim was the maintenance of the essential balance of the universe through a social order rooted in cosmic principles.
• They consolidated the centuries-long transformation from the Stone Age of Mythos to a world oriented toward the search for divine order: the world of Theos.

 

Transformation from Theos to Logos

• Even though it was bolstered and underpinned by an elaborate and entrenched culture complete with an enshrined worldview, values, and ethics, the civilization of Theos yielded in time to another civilization, dominated by different beliefs and guided by different values.
• This transformation originated with the introduction of iron technology in theocratic civilizations. In the second millennium B.C.E., Indo-European peoples equipped with iron technology swept out of Central Asia in several directions.
• Some came through the Khyber Pass into India, where they put an end to the already enfeebled Indus civilization. Others moved into what was then Persia, the Black Sea and Eastern Europe, along the Volga, Danube and Rhine.
• Others settled on the northern coast of the Mediterranean, on the Greek and Italian peninsulas, giving rise to the Greek city-states and the Greco-Roman civilization.
• The former extended, under Alexander, to the limits of the then known world, and the latter, under the emperors, stretched from Britain to the Tigris-Euphrates and the Sahara.
• The technologies of these civilizations triggered change in their social structure, and these changes were reflected in corresponding shifts in values and beliefs.
• In classical Hellas, the great nature philosophers developed a new view of the world. They replaced mythical concepts with theories based on observation and elaborated by reasoning.
• The pre-Socratic thinkers evolved the “heroic mind,” present in Homer and the early epics, into the visionary and theoretical mind, in a process that culminated with Socrates in the rational mind that was then epitomized by Plato and Aristotle.
• Logos – a term that originally meant “word” but came to mean rational discourse and even rationality itself – became the central concept, at the heart of philosophy as well as that of religion.
• Together with the concept of quantitative measure, metron, it provided Western civilization with the intellectual foundation on which it was to build for nearly two and a half millennia.
• Logos, as embodied by classical Greco-Roman civilization, was not a purely quantitative worldview, devoid of qualitative elements. Humans, and to some extent all creatures, had special worth or virtue, arete, not accountable for in terms of quantitative properties alone.
• The combination of logos and metron with arete constituted a worldview, an ethic, and a system of values that was altogether different from the Theos-civilization of the archaic empires.
• Man was the measure, and the unfolding of human potentials was the goal.
• This basic notion, with many sophisticated variants, came to flower in the philosophical systems of the Hellenic thinkers and found application in the organization of Greek city-states.
• Many of its elements carried over into Roman civilization, which was endowed with a pragmatic orientation keyed to the powerful maintenance of order through the orderly exercise of power.
• After the fall of the Western Empire and the founding of the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire in the year 476 C.E., a further shift occurred in the ways of life, culture, and organization of European societies.
• The rise of Christianity modified the classical culture of Logos. Christianity added to the traditional concepts a divine source believed to be the world’s creator, prime mover, as well as ultimate judge.
• A further shift occurred in the mindset of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. It built on the rationality of the Greeks, borrowed and elaborated by the Romans.
• It found expression outside medieval monasteries in the creation and use of mechanical devices such as clocks, windmills, water mills, animal-drawn agricultural implements, and horse-drawn carriages.
• In the 17^th century, Europe’s mechanically colored Logos culminated in Galileo’s concept of the world as a giant machine.
• Newton’s mathematical demonstration of the universality of the laws of motion confirmed Galileo’s concept and provided a basis for an embracing worldview that became the decisive feature of the modern world.
• God was a hypothesis for which there was no longer any need.
• At first, there was open conflict between the medieval theistic Logos imposed by the Church and the mechanistic and naturalistic Logos that emerged in lay society. But later, Church and science learned to coexist; an accommodation was reached.
• The Church claimed for itself the domain of “moral philosophy” (which embraced what later came to be called the social sciences and the humanities) and science had the field of “natural philosophy” (which corresponded to the contemporary concept of natural science).
• In 19^th century Europe and America, the scientific worldview became the dominant feature of civilization. Darwin’s theory of evolution completed the mechanistic concept of Newtonian physics; it accounted for the evolution of life from simple origins through the mechanism of random mutations exposed to the test of natural selection.
• The worldview that emerged was “purified” and “objective,” believed to be free of subjective and emotional preconceptions.
• In the influential heritage of French philosopher René Descartes, human consciousness is the sole indubitable reality. In the words of Francis Bacon, we are free to wrest nature’s secrets from her bosom for our benefit.
• The mechanistic-materialistic Logos spread in the 18^th and 19^th centuries from Europe to America, and in the 20^th century from America to the rest of the world.
• What can we learn from these civilizational transformations? We see that each kind of civilization had its own kind of culture and consciousness.
• The age of Mythos was hallmarked by mythical consciousness; the age of Theos by a theistic mindset; and the European Middle Ages by a theistically colored Logos. The modern age, in turn, evolved a mechanistic and manipulative Logos.
• These cultures and mindsets were useful and functional in their time. Indeed, the reason civilization could evolve rather than go under is because better forms of thinking arose from time to time.
• Countless civilizations did fail to survive, victims of changing conditions to which they could not adapt. But the civilizations that did survive had a new mindset.
• Einstein was right: the problems created by the prevalent way of thinking cannot be solved by the same way of thinking. This is a crucial insight. Without renewing our culture and consciousness we will be unable to transform today’s dominant civilization and overcome the problems generated by its shortsighted mechanistic and manipulative thing.

 

The challenge of the next transformation

The road on which we find ourselves is about to divide. In the span of the next few years the evolution of our civilization will take a new direction. Can we be sure that it takes a good direction?

Finding a positive direction for the next transformation of civilization is a challenging but not insuperable task We know that a viable new civilization must evolve a culture and consciousness very different from the mindset that characterized most of the 20^th century. Logos-inspired civilization was materialistic and manipulative, driven by the search for wealth and power. The alternative to it is civilization centered on human development, and the development of the communities and the environments in which humans live their lives.

 

Two kinds of growth

• Unrestrained, purely quantitative growth in energy and materials production and consumption is not possible on a finite planet with a delicately balanced biosphere – ultimately it is bound to turn into growth of a cancerous kind.
• There are two other forms of growth we could aim for. One is “extensive growth” and the other “intensive growth.”
• Extensive growth conquers ever more territories, colonizes ever more people, and imposes the will of the dominant layers on ever more layers of the population.
• Intensive growth centers on the development of individuals, and of communities and ecologies in which they live.
• Extensive growth generates unsustainability and drives the world towards chaos. The paramount end of extensive growth can be encapsulated in the three “C’s”: conquest, colonization, and consumption.
• Intensive growth could produce sustainability. It could drive contemporary societies toward a new mode of functioning – a new civilization. It can be grasped under three other “C’s”: connection, communication, and consciousness.

Communication unfolds on multiple levels. First of all, we need to communicate with ourselves, caring for and developing our consciousness and personality. People who are “in touch with themselves” are more balanced and more able to communicate with the world around them. We also need to be in communication with those who make up the immediate context of our lives – family, community, and coworkers or professional colleagues. Still wider levels of communication are equally necessary: communication with other people, whether near or far, in our own community and in other communities, countries, and cultures.

Communication calls for connection, but on the human plane more enters into play than connection: communication also involves consciousness. The full potential of human communication unfolds when the communicators apprehend the strands of connection through which they communicate. A high level of communication requires a high level of consciousness that enables people to make use of the many, sometimes extremely subtle, strands of connection that bind them to each other and to their environment. Consciousness of these connections lift human thinking from the outdated ego-centered level to the urgently needed community-, ecology-, and planet-centered dimension.

Evolution focused on the growth of connection, communication, and consciousness could create a fundamental shift in the civilization that dominates life on this planet. It could drive the next transformation in a positive direction: from Logos to Holos.

 

Chapter 5: The Image of a New Civilization