The Inner Limits of Mankind Part 5

THE INNER LIMITS OF MANKIND

HERETICAL REFLECTIONS ON TODAY’S VALUES, CULTURE AND POLITICS

ERVIN LASZLO

One World Publications                   1989

PART V

 

Chapter 6: Beyond Today’s Limits. The Evolutionary Prospect

• Scientists were wrong to insist that acceptable evidence must be ultimately reducible to what we can directly observe – to what is called ‘sense data’.
• The new theory proved to be an interdisciplinary product, emerging from the workshops of scientists in diverse fields of natural and social science. It is revolutionizing our accepted ideas of fundamental social change, of what it means to ‘progress’ in the course of history.
• Today, the average person has a linear concept of progress. The conditions of life will improve year after year, and with it also the quality of life – and possibly the quality of the living as well.
• It took a series of shocks, such as the development of the atomic bomb, the occurrence of major technological catastrophes such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and major negative impacts on the environment, such as acid rain, oil spills, and the thinning of the ozone layer, to weaken dominance of this concept.
• Because of such events, we now also have a reverse image of linear regress, a limits-to-growth inspired technological pessimism: we shall deplete the environment, overcrowd our cities, fail to halt the arms race, until one or another major catastrophe befalls us.
• The concept of historical progress now emerging in the sciences is less naïve and more realistic than the linear progress (or regress) concept dominant in public consciousness.
• Although the scientific concept has been discovered only recently, remarkably enough, its main outlines have been anticipated in the 19^th century by a Persian prophet whose influence is only now beginning to be felt in the modern world.
• Over one  hundred years ago, Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í Faith, proclaimed that the oneness of mankind will be achieved in evolutionary stages replete with strife, chaos and confusion.
• Historical development begins with the birth of the family, the advent of tribal society, and continues in turn with the constitution of the city-state and other political units. In recent times these units have expanded into independent sovereign nations.
• The next stage in this social evolution, Bahá’u’lláh taught, is the organization of human society as a planetary civilization which will be characterized by the emergence of a world community, the consciousness of world citizenship and the founding of a world civilization and culture which would allow for an infinite diversity in the characteristics of its components.
• The world state, the consummation of human evolution, will come about through periods of upheaval. The different stages in mankind’s development are regarded as similar to the stages in the life of an individual: the present chaotic times are compared to the stage of turbulent adolescence which precedes full maturity.
• Writing in lifelong confinement in the Ottoman prison colony of Acre towards the end of the 19^th century, Bahá’u’lláh noted that ‘winds of despair’ are blowing from every direction. The strife that divides and afflicts the human race is increasing; the signs of impending convulsions can be discerned.
• A hundred years later his followers, members of the now rapidly growing Bahá’í world community, recognize this non-linear evolutionary trend and are committed to acting in accordance with it.
• The branches of the contemporary natural and social sciences that deal with the evolution of complex systems became collectively known as ‘systems sciences’.
• The relevant finding of scientists is that all things that evolve in the real world, be they physical, chemical, biological, ecological, or even social systems, are dynamic open entities that continually interchange energy, matter and information with their environment.
• Our complex open systems have definite upper limits of stability which, when reached and transgressed, produce a breakdown in their internal structure.
• Order is replaced by chaos, but chaos does not mean randomness and a total absence of order.
• Chaos is often (though not in every case) the waystation to a new form of order, arising through a sudden phase-change known as ‘bifurcation’. The new variety of order is often better adapted to the surroundings in which the system finds itself than the previous variety.
• Human societies, no less than biological species and ecologies, are complex open systems. They evolve in the course of history through multiple bifurcations.
• We can see the general outlines of these trends if we compare Stone Age societies with modern industrial and post-industrial states.
• Although Stone Age tribes took on structure and complexity some 26,000 years ago, they were significantly less structured and complex than modern societies.
• Modern societies are organized on many more levels of coordination and decision than the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic. More people live in more dynamic and complex structures today than ever before in history.
• This historical development was not smooth and linear. In some periods there was no noticeable movement in the general evolutionary direction, in others the movement was rapid, and in some cases it was in a contrary direction.
• Governments fall, systems of law and order are challenged, new movements and ideas surface and may gain decisive momentum.
• Regress is often merely the prelude to progress – to the basic transformation that, in society as in nature, signifies the occurrence of an evolutionary bifurcation.
• Chaos is not an enduring feature of any complex system, not even of society. In the long term their structures and functions remain  ordered.

 

The Global society

• The new scientific insight suggests that, if the historical process continues to unfold without major catastrophes, it will bring about a globally integrated social, cultural, and technological system.
• This system will operate on multiple levels of organization, ranging from the grass-roots level of villages, farming communities and urban neighbourhoods, through the level of townships, districts, provinces, national and federated states encompassing subcontinents or entire continents, all the way to the global level.
• Each level will be coordinated with all the others, with information flowing among the units horizontally, as well as vertically between different levels. The flows of information, as those of energy, material and people, will span the globe.
• The global flows will be controlled by matching-level institutions and organizations, operating in close coordination with each other and with lower-level institutions and organizations in their own geographic and functional area.
• More will be done with less; the technologies will grow more refined and not just bigger. Boundaries will be permeable rather than absolute, both between the social units – there will no longer be frontiers under the direct control of a single government – and between spheres of economic and social activity.
• Differentiation with integration would be the hallmark of future society. This would produce unity with diversity in all areas and on all levels.
• Tendencies toward centralization and homogenisation, prevalent in the present historical period, would transform into decentralization with coordination, and mutual solidarity with respect for differences.

 

A caveat

• An important caveat needs to be added to this description of humanity’s evolutionary prospect. This forecast of the future offers no guarantees of its own realization.
• Although a global age is the next stage in humanity’s evolution, its advent is not guaranteed. We cannot be assured that it will come about in the short term, or even in the long.
• The short-term future may be beset by reversals, deviations, fluctuations of all sorts; the historical process always manifests a high degree of randomness and chance in its unfolding.
• Environmental degradation would lead to great reductions in the human population, perhaps even to a new Dark Age of semi-isolated warring communities.
• If degradation was not permanent, the surviving communities would in time become more prosperous as well as more populous, and again set out on the path towards a global age through multiple processes of differentiation and integration.
• But permanent damage to vital processes in the life-sustaining environment would prevent any such process from occurring. The globe would become uninhabitable, or inhabitable only at low energy levels and low population densities.
• Some 99% of all the species that at one time inhabited this planet have now become extinct; and a large proportion of the culturally specific human groups and societies that arose in the history of humanity have likewise vanished.
• The evolutionary prospect comes ‘on line’ if, but only if, we transcend our inner limits – the limits that chain us to today’s world, with its obsolete modes of thinking or acting.
• Attaining the next stage in the historical evolution of humanity requires bifurcation and innovation: a leap beyond the Modern, into the Global Age.
• These limits must now be overcome: upon the success of that endeavour depends the continuation of one of nature’s most remarkable adventures: the survival and evolution of Homo, who styles himself sapiens.

 

Appendix: A Long Way to Grow. A Bird’s-eye View of the Current Goals of the World’s Peoples