New Horizons of Possibility
A great deal of modern Western culture—the culture that doubtless has shaped you and me and everyone else who reads this—developed around ideas of human nature rooted in the early sciences of the Enlightenment. Later science subsequently superseded and in some ways outright refutes these ideas based on earlier science; but our culture at large, entrenched and unwieldy, hasn’t caught up.
It’s important that, as a society, we do catch up to what we know, however—at least more than we have to date. The new understandings of human nature that we have now open up possibilities that we desperately need to explore, and to actualize.
Why do I say that? As I write this in early September, 2017, much of western North America is smothered in smoke from unprecedented wildfires. The worst fires on record in the mainland blanketed even the skies of Vancouver Island, off the southern coast of British Columbia where I live, for the first time anyone remembers. Meanwhile two powerful category 4-5 Hurricanes, Irma and Jose, tear through the Caribbean, with Irma sweeping right toward Florida. They follow hard on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston just a couple of weeks ago in late August.
The future we’re making now, and for growing number of us already living, is frightening.
As we think, so we act. We do need new ways of thinking, and wider horizons of human possibility….
In the Beginning
There are many possible points of beginning. We have a whole world-view, a whole cosmos, to reshape. One big-picture overview might start with how we got here, and what sets us apart from other beings with whom we share the planet.
Archeologists and evolutionary physical anthropologists don’t know—or perhaps I should say don’t always agree—precisely when or where the evolutionary line that led to humans became human. Most of the science focuses of the physical aspects of human evolution. When did the line that led to modern humans diverge from the other great apes? When did our ancestors begin walking upright? When did they begin to develop the large brains that distinguish our species?
The story of human evolution that emerges from paleontological and archeological finds, genetics, molecular biology and other specialties, often focuses on such questions. The culture we have tends to favour that focus on reductionistic physical traits. Pieced together largely from bones and stones, the story of humankind spans millions of years and is quite complex, with many “ifs,” “buts,” and “maybes,” as you would expect. But we do have other different angles to approach it from as well, and some good answers.
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What Really Makes Humans Human?
What Really Makes Humans Human? The answer depends on what criteria of humanness you emphasise. Humankind, like every other life form, has distinctive physical features: upright posture and gait, relatively large brain, flat face, opposable thumbs, and so on. Similarly, each species has characteristic ways of behaving and communicating.
What I think really sets humans apart from all other Earthly life, however, is not anything on the physical plane. Nor is it anything necessarily numinous or mystical. It rather is how we think. It is how we feel, the depth and range of our emotional lives, our capacity to have and to play with ideas—in short, the whole sphere of human cultural life.
The best and perhaps only way to tell when the evolutionary line that led to humans finally actually became human—that is, developed language, art, reflective self-awareness, in short culture, and many would say soul—is the first appearance in the archeological record of ceremonial burials and art. Of course, the emergence of culture was related—doubtless in quite complex ways—to the evolution of our upright posture, large brain, opposable thumbs, and so on. But regardless, it is still culture itself that marks the truly new beginning.
Those first few scattered material remains of human culture that have been found, that survived the ages, indicate the emergence on the Earth of a fundamentally new phenomenon. Such evidence shows up only about forty or fifty thousand years ago, at the very tip-end of the tens of millions of years of hominid evolution (which itself is only the tip-end of the 3 to possibly 4.3 billion years of life on Earth).
But just what is it that makes human culture so different from anything that came before, in all the billions of years that preceded us and in some (not necessarily teleological) sense led to us?
A new kind of system.
Human culture is a new kind of system that organizes itself on the basis of information carried in symbolic forms like spoken words or marks on clay tablets or paper, rather than on the basis of some material force like gravity, electrical charge, or chemical interactions. Interactions organized by symbols differ also from the kinds of genetically programmed or instinctual interactions that organize, say, ant societies or wolf packs. In other words, human culture works on the basis of a fundamentally new principle of organization.
In human cultures symbolic systems organize material things. In this way, in only the relatively short time since its emergence, human culture has changed the dynamics of the Earth as a living system.
This—the power of mind over matter—is not mysterious or mystical. It is possible precisely because the organizing principle of human culture, symbols, goes beyond the organizing principles (what are often called the “laws”) of physical causality. Any symbol can refer to any thing, and we combine symbols in new and creative ways without being bound by the rigid limitations of physical matter and causal laws.
But then, with the creativity, imagination, and ideas our symbolic activity makes possible, we act and interact in material ways with the material world. There are real-world limits, of course; but with symbol use we humans gain many more degrees of freedom than any other known life-form has to move within, manipulate, and use the material world we are in. This is both a blessing and a curse: It gives us greater freedom, but also puts incredible power into our hands and makes us more responsible for what we do with it.
And so, with the late advent of culture only some 50,000 years ago humans began to act on and change the Earth’s living systems. Actually, the story is even more dramatic, because our impact on the Earth as a living system really began to make itself felt not 50,000 years ago after human culture emerged, but only a mere 5,000 years ago with the rise of civilizations.
With civilization, concentrating population as well as wealth and power in cities, came a whole complex of cultural developments. These include literacy, what we know as the state (which concentrates legitimate power within a central governing body), and ever-enlarging expansionary cycles of growth, conquest, and decline.
And even then, the kinds of serious human impact on natural environments that we’re dealing with today occurred in relatively localized or minor ways until the almost simultaneous inventions, only about 500 years ago in the West, of science, capitalism as a way to organize society, machine technology, and the kinds of bureaucratic/governmental forms that made it possible for Euroamerican nation-states to colonize the rest of the world and carry those elements of our culture into the farthest reaches of our planetary home.
A New Perspective, A New Light
Knowing even that much about human evolution can help put things in perspective—can help us see things in a new light. The big problems we’re dealing with today are not the inevitable outcome of human nature—despite what so many of our cultural messages, implicit as well as explicit, tell us. They’re quite recent in the big scheme of things, and particular to our own culture and time. They are not problems of nature but of culture.
Our forebears conceived of society and economics in reductionistic, machine-like terms. They created social, political, and economic institutions that embodied those ideas. We today may feel helplessly caught up in that machinery. But seen more clearly from the outside, in light of the full sweep of human evolution and cultural variability, we’re not so helplessly hopeless after all. Culture is tremendously flexible and variable. Culture is what we humans make, even as it makes us.
Know that—grasp the evolutionary truth that we make the culture that makes us—and the horizons of human possibility become endless.