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The group's ability to learn and to teach what was learned to others increased massively as did opportunities to think abstractly and to share these abstractions with other members of the group.
In my previous essay, I wrote:
"Abstraction seems to break the grip of emotional impulsivity."
The resultant greater ability for abstraction allowed for still better coordinated, cooperative behavior, leading to yet more net emergence.
Humans of the late Paleolithic era appear to have generally understood that they were a part of the natural world and were dependent upon it. After all, that world surrounded them at nearly all times as they moved through it hunting and gathering.
Then we get to the Neolithic revolution beginning about 10,000 years ago. Agriculture is developed. Villages, then town then cities and ultimately, empires emerge during the next five millennia. Language is not enough to coordinate this level of organized social complexity. Writing is invented: abstract, symbolic speech that is visually recorded. Humans, particularly the powerful ones who determine consensual reality, in this period are often isolated from natural reality because they live in cities. Shared understandings of reality no longer represent humans as living amidst nature, and nature becomes something to be used and exploited to gain material wealth for the elites who determine consensual reality.
In a sense, humanity goes insane at this point - it decouples from natural reality.
This process of resource exploitation could and did cause cities, nations and empires to collapse due to local resource exhaustion. However, the damage that humans could cause was limited due to all available technologies being based upon human and animal muscle power, and within a few centuries the land was usually able to recover.
Finally the Industrial Revolution occurs. Humans flocked to cities, which absorbed their cultural and religious values, and in the process forgot the importance of the natural world. Vast new emergence occurred. But there was a "serpent" in this new industrial Eden. The newly emergent "wealth" was predicated upon ever more rapid consumption of fossil energy resources, but those resources are finite quantities and this expansion was not sustainable. Even so, the population has grown exponentially to a level which cannot be kept alive without fossil energy.
And worse, industrial civilization has so damaged the biosphere and altered the climate, that the planet's future ability to sustain humans will be far less than it was prior to the Industrial Revolution.
But, you ask, surely an intelligent and rational species such as humanity can comprehend the trap into which it has placed itself, and take coordinated and decisive action to avert doom? Alas, the consensual reality which nearly all humans have come to share is one in which the natural world is considered an inexhaustible source of raw materials from which "wealth" can be produced. The power of our ruling class is intimately tied to the perpetuation of this exploitative system. The lesser degrees of wealth and comfort which most of us possess are wholly dependent upon our participation in it-and support of its continuation. Even for the poorest humans, the desire to obtain wealth and security from it is their greatest goal.
And so, as our existential crises intensify, we do not act decisively, simply because we want to get more while keeping what we have. Real change will cause us to lose our "wealth", even though avoiding this change will in a slightly longer term cause us to lose our lives. Rationality is defeated by emotional impulsivity and selfishness - just as was the case for the great apes. Meanwhile utter doom for our species approaches at an accelerating rate...
Or does it? Clearly it must for some, indeed most of the people who are alive now - but not necessarily for all of us.
Recall how homo sapiens effectively became its own successor species by the invention of language. Language facilitated social emergence orders of magnitude greater than could exist without it. This was beneficial to humanity individually and collectively, as health and security were maximized. The new net emergence could be sustained because humans, as subsistence hunter and gatherers, had to exist in relative harmony with the natural world.
It was only when we forgot nature, and our place in it, that this balance was upset. So clearly, we must re-acquire our ancestor's intimate awareness of the natural world, and of our place in it.
However, we need see not just a tribal band, but all of humanity as comprising our group. I don't say this to be altruistic: the larger the group, the greater the degree of net emergence and therefore, the greater our survivability. We need all of our minds working together on this.
