The Next Copernican rEvolution - Chapter 6 - Evolution on the Inside (Consciousness)
Towards Global Empathy
“The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.” Jeremy Rifkin1
Hopefully, you noticed in the previous chapters that there are completely different ways of seeing the world among the different individuals and cultures we’ve been exploring. Whether we are talking about how the native Americans saw the world, or Christopher Columbus, or religious figures, or even historians and anthropologists such as Howard Zinn or David Graeber. They all had different perspectives and values and types of awareness. In other words, the things they felt were important in life, and how they chose to live life, were completely different from each other. We might go as far as saying that they all had different types of consciousness. While the concept of “consciousness” can be difficult to define and the subject has filled reams of books, from many different angles, in this book I will be referring generally to consciousness as an awareness, perception and perspective through which individuals and cultures see the world. So we might just as well call it a worldview, or a set of values that are important in our lives. So this consciousness, or worldview, is a lens through which people, and even cultures, see the world and make meaning of it. We know now, through various social sciences, that there is a general pattern in the way this consciousness has changed, or developed, throughout history. Various researchers or philosophers have called these developmental changes many different things, such as waves or stages or levels or eras of consciousness. In this particular exploration, I will generally refer to them as stages or waves of consciousness, or in short worldviews. And this is not necessarily to say that some stages of consciousness are better or worse than others. Each stage or wave of consciousness can be said to be appropriate for its particular time in history. Much like we can say that a child’s consciousness isn’t worse than an adult’s consciousness; it is simply age appropriate. We think nothing of “grading” and holding accountable school kids for achieving better test scores and advancing through the grades from elementary school to high school until they get their diploma. And we wouldn’t chastise a student for being in elementary school versus being a high school sophomore. Therefore, it is important to think similarly about consciousness. However, we can still say that some stages of consciousness can handle more complexity than others, can hold wider perspectives than others, and are better adapted to a particular timeline in human history. And then there comes a time when the consciousness of individuals and cultures must change and adapt to new life circumstances in order to survive. In other words, consciousness must evolve, and indeed we can see that it has throughout history.
It is at this point that some people get concerned about making personal judgements or stereotyping others, or simply lumping unique individuals into certain categories of consciousness. So then perhaps we erect a “goodness” hierarchy whereby we place some people as better, or more “conscious”, than others. This is certainly a valid concern and not my intention. While it is true that we can have broad pattern recognitions of general types of “thinking”, without conducting in-depth psychological testing, it is very difficult, and morally wrong, to pigeonhole people into categories, and conclude that some people are better, or more conscious, than others. So while we shouldn’t make value judgements based upon various stages of consciousness, we do need to recognize that some worldviews are simply better suited to the challenges and life conditions of a particular time and place in history than others.
While many so-called absolute truths are relative to the individuals and cultures who experience them, we must recognize what could be called a “natural hierarchy” of truth, where we can clearly see that some truths are more true than others. To extend this further, different stages of consciousness have different moral values, which we will discuss later. But in short, some moral beliefs are more life-affirming than others, and more life-affirming to larger groups of people, which makes them more moral. So in concluding this section we must not paint blanket characterizations of people or cultures at different stages of consciousness as being “better” or “worse”, but we can and should acknowledge that some stages are more life-affirming to the continuation of our species, and better suited to addressing, and hopefully solving, the complex and challenging life conditions of our world today. I’m reminded of the quote from Dr. Clare W. Graves, who was an American psychologist and originator of a theory of adult human development, “Damn it all, a person has a right to be. A person has a right to be what he is.” 2
With that being said, it will be important as we go forward in this book to carry with us an understanding that evolution doesn’t just happen with external things, it also happens on the inside, or internally, in both individuals and cultures. While there are many traditional folks who don’t believe in evolution at all, there are a great many people who acknowledge that evolution is a real thing, yet still think that it occurs only in the external physical realms. In other words, they think it occurs biologically in genes and DNA and the physical makeup of plants and animals, and also with things like our systems and institutions, and perhaps most notably with our technologies. Many well-meaning people think that Darwinian evolution only applies to the exterior realms of species, either behaviorally as in “survival of the fittest”, or biologically within genetic “natural selection”. Or they think of the exterior realm of technological evolution from hoes to horse-drawn plows, to tractors, to combine farming, to vertical farming. Or the external evolution of our energy sources from slave power to horsepower, to burning whale blubber, to wood burning, to steam engines, to fossil fuels, to renewable energies like wind and solar and geothermal. Or the external evolution in our collective living arrangements from clans, to tribes, to villages, to city-states, to nation-states. While all this evolutionary change did indeed happen, it was only partial. There’s a whole other realm of evolution that’s occurring in the internal world of people and cultures.
There are different studies and models that recognize this “evolution on the inside”. So this is evolutionary patterns of change in our values, our worldviews, our culture, our thoughts, our beliefs, our spirituality — in short, our consciousness. Of course, the external realms can be seen or measured or studied from an objective level, by observing things like behaviors, biological processes, genetics, technology, systems, physics, etc. But the internal realms, which are more subjective and can’t be as easily observed or measured, are nonetheless just as real, such as our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, morals, religious beliefs, worldviews, etc. Keep in mind that both the internal and external realms exist on both the individual level and the collective level. In other words, we as individuals have thoughts and feelings and beliefs and values and worldviews, and so does our collective cultures at large. On an external level, we each as individuals have biological and behavioral processes, and so this manifests in the culture at large in terms of societal systems and institutions and behaviors. The point is this, there are changes going on internally (subjectively) and externally (objectively) for both individuals and societies.3
The inadvertent failure to recognize the internal evolution of humanity often results in an inaccurate and persistent fallacy that human nature is inherently self-interested, competitive and violent. In fact, it was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who, in the late 17th century, described human existence as being in a constant state of “…continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [as] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”4 Despite studies showing that humans are fundamentally altruistic5 and cooperative6, and the fact that evolution seems to favor cooperation just as much as competition7, this false notion of human nature carries forth still today. It forms the justification for, and perpetuates, the very concept of the invisible hand of the free-market capitalistic market economy that is destroying our species. And don’t we need to consider that much of our “brutish” behavior could be a result of environmental factors? Are we not products of our environment, which for so much of our history (but not necessarily our pre-history) has been based upon conditions of scarcity? So how much of our abhorrent behaviors are caused by our competitive and corrupt and scarcity-based systems, rather than any so-called inherent human nature? The fact is that humans and their consciousness have changed and evolved over time in many internal ways. Just one of those ways is in our empathy, the ability to understand and be aware of the feelings and emotions of other people. Jeremy Rifkin, an American economic and social theorist, has written a book called The Empathic Civilization8, The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, which explains, contrary to popular belief, that humans are empathic by nature and we are evolving into ever more empathic beings. He writes,“Social scientists, in turn, are discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggests that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains.” He describes how technological advances in communication systems [an external change] and more complex energy regimes [also external] create new economic eras [external] that have actually created “pivotal turning points in human consciousness” [an internal change] in the process. He explains how humans have evolved from forager/hunter societies with a “mythological consciousness”, to agricultural civilizations with a “theological consciousness”, to the first industrial revolution in the 19th century that brought about an“ideological consciousness”, to the second industrial revolution in the 20th century based on electronic communications that ushered in “psychological consciousness”. So we have evolved our empathy to include ever increasing spans: from tribal blood ties to religious affiliation, to nationalism, to like-minded individuals beyond borders. He writes, “Today, we are in the early stages of another historic convergence of energy and communication — a third industrial revolution — that could extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere itself and all of life on Earth.” So, the external advances with things such as the distributed energy production, open-source information sharing, the “internet of things”, and collaborative economics will once again foster an evolution in our internal realm, our consciousness. He says,“The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history…What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness.” Humanity is being required, Rifkin believes, to evolve into a new human species, homo-empathicus, with global empathy.
But alas, it may not be such a smooth evolution. There is a great divide all around the world right now which is making this leap to a global empathic consciousness a long, deep and dangerous one. An American social entrepreneur Robb Smith wrote a timely article entitled, The Great Divide — Globalization, Populism and Stumbling Towards a Post- Scarcity World 9, which sums up two colliding forces that are surfacing right now.
According to Smith,
“1) Our technology, economics, culture and politics have globalized, becoming interdependent, world-centric and multicultural at the same time that
2) People are divided into two huge but different stages of psychological development–tribalists and globalists–which represents a “Great Divide” in values, viewpoint and capacities, and which react very differently to globalization,
(Smith explains the worldviews of the tribalists and globalists: “On the left side of the Great Divide are the stages of development I’m collectively calling Tribalists. Tribalists tend to hold their values, viewpoint and identity in a pre-global, ethnocentric stage of development…for our purposes there is a single dividing line near the middle of the spectrum that I believe bears most heavily on the reaction to globalization: right near the middle of the stages is a “Great Divide” that marks the transition into the values, viewpoint and identity of a global, world-centric mental operating system.”)
3) Globalization is no longer producing sufficient rewards to motivate tribalists to continue playing the globalist game, threatening the universal values and modern liberalism upon which modern democracies are based.”
Smith writes, “From stalled global growth and massive wealth inequality, to the declining availability of good jobs and the “terror” of immigration, we’re seeing a kind of convulsion within economic and political systems stuck in the late 20th century, leaving too many people with a sense of despair…But the real problem, as we’ll soon see, is not that complexity is growing or that the Great Divide exists. It is that the rewards that globalization used to promise are slipping away, removing the single most powerful developmental tailwind of the modern era, which for more than half a century has fueled people towards globalist values. These rewards used to mask the Great Divide because the promise of a good job, of meaningful work that also created a sense of prosperity and an ability to get ahead in life, was more valuable than the parochial bonds of the tribe.”
So it appears that at the root of this Great Divide is fear, economic fear, which manifests in all sorts of concerning ways. According to Smith, “fear of losing oneself expresses itself as nativism, xenophobia, nationalism and isolationism: an attempt to continue progress by forcing regress to a simpler and earlier form of social organization that is smaller, more independent and more homogenous with one’s self and tribal identification.” And if we go a little deeper, the root of this economic fear is our faltering jobs-based socio-economic system. Smith writes, “a lack of good jobs is the lifeblood of populism. In Gallup’s global survey, Clifton writes that a good job is the single most important thing on people’s minds around the world, transcending religion, race, credo and national interests. Let me reinforce that: people–tribalists and globalists alike–would be content to play the globalization game, even beyond any “tribal” preferences, if they could attain a well-paying modern good job. They would play it if they feel they can win. Unfortunately, they know the game is stacked against them.
Let that sink in: well over half of all industries could see almost a third of their jobs get eliminated through automation in the next ten years.”
So it is jobs, or more precisely, the money that those jobs bring in for meeting people’s basic needs, that is at the crux of the matter. Yet we are entering, as Smith postulates, a post- scarcity, post-work era where not as many jobs are needed. And with aging populations and ever increasing productivity growth from automation and robotics, the very lifeblood of capitalism — jobs, scarcity and population growth — are slowing or being eliminated altogether. Globalization has been, according to Smith, “the single most powerful developmental tailwind of the modern era”, and has been “the greatest force that drives global evolution towards interdependence, universal values, and expanded mindsets”. So what’s a globally connected humanity to do? We can see the great divide before us, which is becoming an epic tug of war between the tribalists and the globalists. How will we get to the global empathic consciousness when our entire competitive, infinite-growth-based, scarcity-based socio-economic system is no longer functioning and meeting the basic needs of its citizens?
I agree with Smith when he states, “If we care about supporting a globalized world of more universal values, and an integrated world of greater interdependence, than we need to consider the dynamics that our civilization faces at this unique moment and be willing to update any of the outdated ideologies of the past.”
So, is it time to consider that it is our entire money system itself that is standing in the way of us reaching the global empathic consciousness that is required for our survival? If we should be saying, as Dr. Clare Graves did in the quote earlier, that “A person has a right to be what he is” in terms of his individual consciousness, then can we also say that a person has a right to not live in fear of her needs not being met, which as we already stated has an enormous impact on whether we become mired in tribal consciousness or evolve to a more global perspective. Is it conceivable that our empathy and global consciousness can float to the top like a bobber in water in the absence of economic fear that pulls us down? Is it possible to evolve to a new tribalism, but this time at a higher global level, to a new global tribalism, where we start to think and behave as the one human tribe we really are? Indeed, it is not only possible it is what’s next for humanity, given our trajectory.
And no discussion of empathy would be complete without also talking about the heart. We are collectively moving from a many millennia-long era of masculine-dominated, mind-centered, self-centered socio-economic systems based on power, to integrated and balanced social systems that are more heart-centered, more community-centered and based more on love. The American author Anodea Judith, in her book “The Global Heart Awakens”, documents how we are moving from the love of power to the power of love. She writes, “The human drama is nearing its denouement. The great unveiling is approaching, a time when the power structures of the world begin to crumble and people of the heart sing out a new truth. Many voices are joining the chorus, many feet are walking the path, many minds are dreaming possibilities. For beneath the crises that are looming at every level of civilization, the global heart is awakening, beating out the rhythm of a new and glorious dance.”10
As we continue our exploration of human evolution on the inside, that’s what we will look at next, not just how our empathy and our hearts have expanded, but indeed our values and our whole worldview has gotten large enough to encompass and embrace the entire planet and all its beings. Therein lies what comes next for humanity, a “Geotribal” worldview.
»Next Chapter - Chapter 7: Evolution on the Inside (Consciousness) — Seeing Through Our Worldviews
Chapter Index
Jeremy Rifkin - RSA Animate Video - Animation of The Empathic Civilization
Dr. Clare W. Graves - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_W._Graves
Thomas Hobbes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic? - http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/08/is-human-nature-fundamentally-selfish-or-altruistic/
Are People Naturally Inclined to Cooperate or Be Selfish? - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-people-naturally-inclined-to-cooperate-or-be-selfish/
Lessons From Ants to Grasp Humanity - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/books/edward-o-wilsons-new-book-social-conquest-of-earth.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization - An Address Before the British Royal Society for the Arts - http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/cwe/EmpathcCIV_EN.pdf
Robb Smith: The Great Divide - http://www.robbsmith.com/archive
The Global Heart Awakens--Evolving from the Love of Power to the Power of Love, Anodea Judith - http://globalheartawakens.com