Regular readers will recall it is my occasional habit to reprint articles of particular consequence in The Hames Report. In that spirit I recently asked my US-based friend and colleague Dr David Martin if I could print a piece he had just published on his BlogSpot Inverted Alchemy. He did not hesitate.
But then I read this important piece again. And again. I realised that merely reprinting David’s article would not satisfy the insatiable desire I had to elaborate on some of his most critical points. Consequently I am publishing David’s article in italics below and then making some further comments of my own.
Returning from Salt Lake City to Charlottesville via Chicago provided a suboptimal venue to listen to the audio of Ken Wilber’s interview conducted by my friend Todd Goldfarb. It turns out that cheap courtesy headphones from a hotel gym have no sound dampening value to overpower the engines on a CRJ-700. The good news was that the audio quality was so dreadful that I had to concentrate. So, I sat next to the window, focused on the ground passing below and listened to Ken describe the passage of humanity’s transitions. And it was in the observation of the millions of acres of industrial farmland over which I was passing at 38,000 feet that I settled in on the puzzle: Is it possible to perceive human transformation as a first person actor or are evolutions of consciousness only discerned in retrospect?
Let me provide a bit of background. Todd and Ken were discussing the notion that we are on the edge of a new inflection of the human experience. This edge is, in part, defined by previous inflections (from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to modern to post-modern, etc.) and has several particular characteristics that are noteworthy. In his description of the ‘Integral’ transformation, Ken suggested that, in contrast to previous inflections, rather than rejecting past human narratives, a hallmark of this inflection is the explicit inclusion of wisdom and experience from all previous epochs. And, for a moment over Iowa, I found myself trying to reconcile this vision with the reality from which I had just come.
You see, I had just been at a board meeting where I had heard representatives from one of New York's leading investment banks talk about the merits of fixed income investments and had heard them discuss the fact that they were encouraging investments in revenue-based instruments (like water) rather than debt issued by cities and counties. After all, they argued, even unemployed poor people have to drink! The neatly groomed fields below me, the echo of merchants peddling water as a safe investment, and Ken all converged in an unholy trinity between Cedar Rapids and Oxford Junction. I can recall the moment. Ken was in the middle of one of his many “never before in human history” generalizations…
Who do we think we are? We have got a real problem. I have described with effusive affection my respect for Karl Popper on numerous occasions so I will not belabour his criticism of our Occidental hubris again. As I have commented in my recent posts on the Occupy movement, what I find most disturbing about our present consensus delusional state is the intersection of our belief that we access information and our resulting belief that we’re informed.
Has capitalism ‘worked’ when:
1. The largest communist country on earth actually owns a controlling interest in our debt and supplies a considerable amount of our consumables
2. There has never (since the Land Act of 1820 and the Morrill Act of 1862 to our modern military, technology, and service profit-subsidized government procurements of today) been a phase in US history where we actually had open, unsubsidized free markets; and,
3. Our income distribution and growth is at its all time greatest asymmetry?
Has our social conscience evolved when:
1. Ken Wilber describes our evolution past slavery, for example, at a time when there are more humans (per capita) in slavery today than at any recorded period of history
2. When we continue to promote 19th century narratives about wisdom traditions ranging from Egypt to Peru to Mongolia without consideration of the possibility that these civilizations actually may have out-engineered our self proclaimed modern marvels; and,
3. When ‘hope’ and ‘change’ has led to more remote control assassinations than the notorious Bush / Cheney regime?
It would be lovely to imagine a world in which we would hold ourselves to an abiding commitment that ‘evolution’ might actually involve some notion of improvement. Improvement of the means by which we interact with the Earth. Improvement in the manner in which we engage cultures diverse from our own. Improvement in how we assess the qualities of ourselves and our ecosystems. Improvements in how we engage in dialogue and discourse holding genuine respect for alternative points of view.
Alas the evidence shows us that we seem to be more drawn to evolution that involves the selective repression of ever larger numbers of voices – voices who have long memories and have alternative views to our own. Is humanity at a tipping point or are we walking past the masses from whom our ignorance has extracted humanity?
The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.
If one explores below the surface of this highly considered response to an experiential dilemma the implications in David Martin’s cautionary thesis appear to me to be profoundly disturbing. Not only do they call into question the degree to which we are actually sentient individuals (in comparison, say, with herd animals possessing relatively uncouth instincts and unvarying habits) they also point to Occidental “maturity” as a delusion in which many of us are still trapped.
This may be partly to do with the hubris arising from our recent technological prowess and subsequently assumed moral authority – though the latter (if it ever existed) is clearly in a state of rapid collapse today. It may even have something to do with the so-called six “killer apps” (i.e. competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic) identified by the economic historian Niall Ferguson as an explanation for the West’s prominent (now declining) position in the global world-system over the past 300 years or so.
More ominously, I suspect, is an ingrained belief that those of us with an Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage are somehow smarter, wiser and creatively superior than others. This is not just arrogance. It is intensely foolish. Yet if we needed evidence we have only to recall the number of occasions during the past half century where assumed Occidental superiority has led to our military powers trampling over the cradles of our civilisation in Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. As David Martin queries: Who do we think we are?
I am reminded of some research undertaken by professor Robert Sternberg at Yale University who undertook and extensive study of stupidity, which he identified as a lack of applied wisdom rather than the absence of intelligence. Sternberg argued that specific aspects of life as a smart person actually cultivate stupidity. In other words that it sometimes takes a really smart person to do something truly stupid.
Sternberg concluded there are four main tendencies that lead us into this quandary:
1. Egocentrism – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that because we are so smart, the world does and should revolve around us
2. Omniscience – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that part of the reason the world revolves around us is we know much more than we do, or even all we need to know
3. Omnipotence – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe such knowledge makes us invincible. We can do whatever we want and get away with it
4. Invulnerability – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe we can get away with it because our intelligence makes us invulnerable to attack and even to criticism.
We move into a very vulnerable space indeed when we are either too smart (believing we know everything we need to know and that we can get away with any act) or too dumb (to realise we lack the cognitive capacity to recognise and overcome our stupidity). I suspect one of these characteristics are present in the majority of people occupying leadership roles today.
Of course the worst possible scenario would be if the world were led by really stupid people. However the situation gets almost as ludicrous when smart people use their intelligence or influence to quarantine themselves from the very feedback that would appraise them of the reality of a situation. This is commonplace in the corridors of power.
Furthermore, if we have already arrived at a point where we believe other people, or nations, or cultures, or social groupings, are less capable of defining a collective future for humanity and that consequently it is incumbent upon us to re-establish a future in which our failing social, economic, political and commercial systems continue to endure, then our collective stupidity is profoundly entrenched.
Like David Martin I fail to understand how we can imagine our society (i.e. we are implicitly referring to the so-called developed world remember) has reached the zenith of its evolution as a civilised global community, and that we are consequently approaching an inflection point that will enable us to include and transcend all previous experiences and knowledge, when we still reach for the sword before the pen; still fiercely exclude those who hold differing beliefs to us; still feed an industrial war machine that can easily annihilate humanity; are still fearful enough of the unknown as to worship primitive deities; still innately disengaged from the natural environment that sustains all life; still arrogant enough to believe our ways of knowing outweigh alternative epistemologies; and still bound up with our own overwhelming sense of individual pride and self-importance.
The single, most important, feature for enabling intentional evolution is expressed within David’s final paragraph. He says: The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.
Because of our tendency to deliberately exclude others we are not at a global tipping point by any stretch of the imagination. For that we need a critical mass of the world’s citizens to be able to convey new possibilities within a fresh narrative for humanity arising from a higher consciousness and sense of self-awareness. That will be a new human story.
In contrast we are still content to perpetuate ideas, principles, models and values that were outmoded long ago. Can anyone really state that our collective state of being (our empathic consciousness) is more advanced than that which existed fifty years ago?
That is not to deny a palpable feeling of anticipation, articulated by many in words and deeds and expressed in the Occupy Wall Street and other similarly motivated movements, that numbers of concerned people in Western society may be coming out of their hubristic slumber and awakening to the realities of the human condition. They may be challenging the linearly-constrained models that are still in play across our society and that have given rise to astonishing affluence and opportunity on the one hand and ingrained poverty, hunger, injustice and inequity on the other. They may be standing up and shouting “enough is enough” and that we must craft new intentions regarding our relationship to each other and to planet Earth if we are to survive the extinction of our species. But all of this in no way adds up to a universal tipping point.
I grew up in the United Kingdom immediately following World War II. Through my public school education I was inducted into a Western empirical culture that strongly believed in its own superiority and invincibility. As I became more accomplished and comfortable in that social milieu it did not dawn upon me that I was illiterate when it came to alternative cultures. Only later did I begin to comprehend that I existed in a bubble of blissful ignorance.
Vast numbers of people are in a similar state today. In an age of unprecedented travel they do not journey far from home. Their views are parochial. They watch the kind of infotainment on television designed to keep them docile, content and compliant. Inducted into a way of life they do not challenge they have little conception of what poverty or hunger (for example) actually means. Nor do they really appreciate the freedom, democracy or liberty they supposedly have in abundance.
As an Australian living in Asia while working across the Global South I am constantly dismayed and frustrated by the continuing conceit I perceive in the US-Eurocentric view of how things are and how they should be. Occidental traditions are relatively young in comparison with the great Amerindian, Indigenous, Oceanic, Indic and Sinic cultural mindsets. The sooner we are able to embrace these alternative traditions and benefit from their wisdom the sooner we may reach a genuine tipping point for the authentic advancement of humanity. That will be the moment we are able to shift from involuntary to intentional evolution. I hazard a guess that a shift of this nature, entailing a new inflection of the human experience, will not be triggered from those trapped in Western mindsets. In fact you can bet on it!
Comments