- Although the breakthrough into civilization appears to grant the civilization-creating animal a broad range of freedom to choose its way of life, that freedom is illusory. What appears to be freedom turns out to be a new form of bondage because those societies that prevail in the unchosen struggle for power are not random.
The escape from the niche in which humans evolved makes possible a vast spectrum of conceivable ways of organizing society -- politically, economically, psychologically, technologically, etc. But conceivability does not equate to survivability. The cultural choices along all those dimensions affect a society's power, and thus its survivability in the war of all against all.
Thus the unchosen anarchic nature of the overarching system dictates that, out of all the apparently conceivable forms that a civilized society might take, it is inevitably only those forms that are best at power-maximization that ultimately will survive and spread their ways.
- As the power-maximizing innovations of civilized society can escalate without limit, the selection for the ways of power has no stopping point. The shaping of civilization to meet the demands of power therefore will escalate indefinitely.
Humankind remains trapped in this reign of power so long as humankind has failed to institute overarching controls to stop what Thucydides described as the ways of the world, where "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."
This inevitable driving of civilization's development along the path of power is the social evolutionary force I've called "the parable of the tribes."
The step into civilization is an impressive accomplishment, a step never before taken in the almost four billion-year history of life on earth. (Never before taken because no other species had the intelligence or the creativity to develop culture to the point where it could escape from the natural order and invent its own way of life.) But that step entails a tragic cost.
Like the tragic hero, the civilizing creature must suffer because of its heroic strengths.
Out of the wholeness of the original Eden, comes the creature's Fall into a trap where it is torn between two evolutionary forces. One that shaped the creature's nature by choosing life over death. And one that sifts among all the cultural possibilities and chooses power over weakness.
This second evolutionary process, stemming as it does from disorder (the anarchy of the civilizational system) imparts into the human system that impetus of brokenness that rebounds through all the levels of the human world--from the inter-societal system beset by war, to the civilized society shaped by the demands of power, to the individual human caught between the needs of its nature and the demands of such power-maximizing societies.
While the second of the two evolutionary forces -- selecting for the ways of power-- imparts brokenness into the human world, that brokenness is countered by the inborn human craving for wholeness. (That craving, as was said, is the result of the alignment between wholeness and life and the reward structure of creatures crafted by that biological evolutionary process that continually chooses life over death. That inborn motivation has led civilized humankind to continually strive to create wholeness where possible within the constrains of the demands of power in the anarchic -- dangerously unregulated -- world of civilized societies.
The Need for Something Like "the Parable of the Tribes" Should Have Been ObviousIf we didn't have something like "the parable of the tribes" to explain why the world is as messed up as it is, we would have to find something that does the same job.
Just consider these two fairly incontrovertible points:
1) Given a choice about what kind of world they wanted to live in -- choosing between living in a beautiful world versus and ugly one, a just world versus an unjust one, a world with much love versus one with much hate, a caring community versus a cruel one, a world at peace versus a world at war, etc. -- what would people choose? Would not the overwhelming majority of people choose the more whole world in every case?
2) How good have human beings shown themselves to be, in general, at arranging things to achieve the outcomes they desire? Admittedly, success at this particular task (of creating a more whole world) would never be a slam-dunk for us humans (for reasons of "unintended consequences," among others). But overall, would it not be fair to say that people have shown impressive resourcefulness in accomplishing great things to achieve their desired ends?
So, if almost everyone wants to live in a more whole world, and if people are rather good at creating things to get the outcomes they desire, how are we to explain the fact that the world is now, and has so long been, so broken, so filled with conflict and hate and injustice and ugliness, etc.?
Historically, the world's brokenness has been blamed on human nature. In the religious context (of Christianity), we've had original sin. But even outside that context, one often hears people say, "That's just human nature" -- a statement almost always used to explain our limitations, our badness. It's "just human nature" that we're selfish and greedy and violent and whatever else our flawed nature will not let us rise above.
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