Jay Earley

Have you even wondered about the strange contradictions of our times? We are making unprecedented technological advances in computers, biotechnology, and others areas, yet at the same time we are cut off from an intimate, life-enhancing connection with the natural world, and we are undermining our biological support systems at an alarming rate. We have a burgeoning global economy, producing unparalleled material affluence, and at the same time there is an appalling exploitation of disenfranchised peoples, reminiscent of the worst early days of capitalism. We enjoy a proliferation of wondrous, easily affordable consumer products, while many of us are isolated from the joys of community and family, living empty lives of striving and alienation. We continue to produce great intellectual and scientific advances while at the same time most people’s lives are bereft of meaning, creativity, spirituality and other qualities that make life worth living.

What are we to make of this situation? Looked at from a historical perspective, what does this say about humanity’s progress? Are we improving over the centuries? If so, why are we in such a crisis now? On the other hand, maybe we have fallen from grace. Did we once live in a golden age of peace and harmony and abundance? Did we make a dreadful mistake when we developed technology, oppression, and war? What is the overall direction and meaning of social evolution? This is a crucial question, because it strongly affects our view of ourselves as a species and our understanding of where we need to go in the future.

Views of Social Evolution

There are two common answers to this question.

(1) Progress. History and social evolution have produced continual uphill progress toward human betterment, through the gradually broadening civilization of the world and an improvement in civic virtues. Or alternatively, this progress comes from our increasing understanding and control of the natural world and ourselves through science and technology. Or both. This is the dominant view today in the industrialized world, but belief in it is being increasingly strained as the realities of the planetary crisis become more apparent. There is clearly some truth in this perspective, but it ignores not only the current crisis but also the many evils of civilization and technology—oppression, exploitation, war, environmental destruction.

(2) Wrong Turn. Some radical social critics believe that at one time humans lived in harmony with the natural world and one another. Then something happened to cause us to fall on evil ways, and we began to engage in domination, war, and environmental destruction. Some believe this wrong turn occurred when we left our primitive state as hunter-gatherers; others see it as happening with the introduction of widespread war or with the triumph of patriarchy in the bronze age; still others believe it came at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when we lost our sense of spirituality and accelerated our technological domination of the earth. Wherever they place it, these critics agree that we made a mistake in social evolution which must be righted. Our job now is to restore the original harmony that was lost. We must regain our spirituality, or our egalitarian social structure, or the partnership between the sexes, or our connection to the earth, or all of these. There is much truth in this perspective, but it doesn’t provide an explanation for the substantial creative, spiritual, scientific, and humanitarian accomplishments since the wrong turn.

My study of human history has prompted me to develop a model of social evolution that is quite different from either of these views. It explains how the present crisis emerged through the natural flow of historical trends, and how these trends can now shape the transition to a healthier world. In nurturing this transition, if we understand these social forces, we can flow with them and use them to create the future. This will help us understand the personal changes we need to make and how to influence others. We can see how our institutions and social structures must change and how to tell real change from window dressing.

My Model

The following is a brief description of this model.

At the start of social evolution, we human beings enjoyed certain qualities, which I call ground qualities: We lived in harmony with the earth, and felt a deep personal connection with nature. We had a sense of belonging to our primary kinship groups, to the natural world, and to the cosmos. We enjoyed a richness and immediacy of experience—feeling our emotions, being fully alive to sensual and spiritual reality. We lived in small intimate community groups that were relatively egalitarian. There was little in the way of entrenched power, political oppression, or economic exploitation.

As time went by, our population continually grew in a world of limited resources, and groups threatened each other with war. Therefore over the course of history we were forced to develop other qualities in order to survive. These emergent qualities gave us more conscious choice and power over our environment and ourselves. We developed technology to help us feed ourselves and make our surroundings hospitable and comfortable, to give us power in the world. We developed reflexive consciousness—the ability to step back and reflect on our experience—which gave us the ability to reason, plan, and organize. From this we developed science, technology, and complex social systems—institutions, governments, economies—which gave us the necessary capacity to hold our societies together.

These emergent qualities helped free us from the vagaries of weather and climate and threats from predators. They allowed us to grow more food and harness more energy, to coordinate increasing numbers of people. They gave us the military power to protect ourselves. They gave us a way of understanding ourselves and the world and the advantages of civilization and higher culture. In time we had the opportunity for education and personal development.

The ground qualities are characterized by vitality and organic wholeness; they keep us alive, flowing, and connected; they give life meaning. The emergent qualities are characterized by power and differentiated organization; they allow us to get things done, to make intelligent decisions, to make the world the way we want it to be, to compete successfully with other species and other societies. So far in social evolution the ground and emergent qualities have largely been opposed to each other, the more we have gained power and organization, the more we have lost aliveness and belonging. The more we have learned to separate things into pieces, the more we have lost our wholeness. The more we have treated each other and the natural world as objects, the more we have lost empathy and meaning and become alienated from nature, from each other, and from ourselves.

In fact, today’s crisis is the outcome of a long process of increasing domination of the emergent qualities and suppression of the ground qualities. Our economic system now emphasizes material growth (emergent) at all costs, trampling over community and self-sufficiency (ground). Our technical power (emergent) and our population are so great that we are acting in ways that threaten our ecological well being (ground) and perhaps our very survival. We are paying the price for losing our original vitality and wholeness, and it is quite high.

Not only do the emergent qualities suppress the ground qualities, there is an increasing split between the qualities. Men tend to be rational and women tend to be emotional and intuitive. Corporations tend to be powerful economically and devoid of human connection and meaning. Those ethnic groups that have retained a sense of community tend to be oppressed and kept out of societal power. Those peoples who are closest to the earth have the least economic and political power. It seems that we must choose between the power of the emergent or the vitality of the ground.

The Next Step

However, it is possible to integrate the ground and emergent qualities. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. In fact, now it is necessary. It is our only salvation at this point in history. This era is the dialectical turning point in social evolution.

Too often thoughtful social critics and people who understand our world crisis think only of regaining the ground qualities. In recognizing our over-reliance on the emergent qualities and our need for the ground qualities, they often view the ground qualities as all-good and the emergent qualities as all-bad. They praise the wonders of emotions, intuition, and spirituality (ground) and warn of the dangers of rational, linear thinking (emergent). They speak of the beauty of nature (ground) and the evils of technology (emergent), the joy of community (ground) and the dangers of the global economy and transnational corporations (emergent). While much of this is valid, this kind of split thinking throws the baby out with the bath water. While nature, emotion, and community are beautiful, the emergent qualities are also valuable for a healthy society, and with our world as large as it is, we can’t do without them. Our difficulties at this time are not because humanity has too much technology or rational thinking, but rather because these are split off from the ground qualities. Our technology doesn’t work with the natural cycles of the earth; our rational education ignores the heart and the intuition. It’s not that we have too much government or economic activity, but rather that what we have suppresses community and dialogue; it fosters competition rather than cooperation, domination rather than equality.

We need technology to feed our immense population, to promote health, even to restore what we have destroyed ecologically. We can’t go back to being hunter-gatherers. However, it must be ecological technology, which works in harmony with natural cycles. We need rational thinking, research, science, and philosophy. We can’t comprehend the scope of our problems and the necessary solutions with only feelings and intuition. That route can lead too easily to naive, wishful thinking or blind fanaticism. However, our minds must be integrated with our hearts, our vision with our spirit, our experimental science with our intuitive knowing. We need large scale social institutions and a world government and economy. We can’t coordinate a world of 6 billion without these structures. However, they must be large scale only where necessary and small scale when possible. They must handle those problems that are national (or global) in scope at the national (or global) level, and allow other issues to be handled at the community or bioregional level. Above all they must be democratic, participatory, and cooperative—not only our governments, but also our economies. And our economies must be designed to be ecological, to promote business practices that are harmonious with natural processes.

At this time in human history we need integration—integration of conscious power and organic vitality. We must have both sides of our nature now. We are called on to practice this in our personal lives and to embody it in our institutions and our culture. This is the natural outcome of our social evolution. The emergent qualities have grown and flourished and the ground qualities have been suppressed, but now it is time for a natural dialectical turn toward integration.

This will require massive changes in society at every level, a very tall order, but nothing else will do to overcome the crisis we face. This is one of those times in human history when a whole-system transformation is called for, and the core of this transformation is the integration of the ground and emergent qualities.

What You Can Do

What are the implications of this understanding for your life? What can you do to participate in this transformation and to facilitate it? There are actually many possibilities, depending on your social position, interests, personal strengths, and talents. The ground and emergent qualities are often split between the genders, races, and ethnic groups. You can help to integrate them by developing yourself and your life to be an integration of the ground and emergent qualities. If you are unbalanced in either direction, you can work on developing your weak side in a way that is integrated.

For example, if you are a white, middle-class, American male, you probably have, and are expected to have, personal versions of the emergent qualities—intellect, personal power, technical ability, etc. In addition, you may be socially situated so as to make it easy for you to make the best use of these personal qualities and to achieve power, social standing, access to the benefits of technology, etc. On the negative side, you are also most likely to end up alienated from community, relationship, and participatory consciousness. You could contribute to social transformation by developing your ground qualities. You might pursue a life in the country, living simply, consuming little, and focusing on your relationship with nature. You could devote yourself full to time to art. You could leave your suburban life to join a residential intentional community. You might quit a corporate job to become an environmental or community activist.

However, we must ask whether you pursue these new interests in a way that rejects the emergent qualities. In your life in the country, do you spurn all technology? As an artist, do you completely abandon the rational mind? As a community member, do you reject all structure and organization? As an activist, do you hate the establishment rather than working to form alliances? This kind of radical turnaround can be valuable, but it may go too far. We need both emergent and ground qualities to make a healthy society. For example, it might be better to work on developing community-enhancing economic structures, or develping your empathy along with your assertiveness. You might stay in your corporate job and support ecological policies. You might continue as a college professor and teach about the value of community or spirituality. If you are a scientist or engineer, you might work on developing ecological technology.

On the other hand, you might be a representative of the ground qualities. You might be a woman whose upbringing stressed relatedness and intuition. You may have been born into an ethnic group with close community ties or onto a family farm. In these cases, you have a position or talents that are not valued by society.

You can contribute to social transformation by valuing your ground quality and encouraging others to develop it as well. For example, you might teach classes in psychic development or parenting. You might write novels extolling the virtues of your ethnic community or the natural world. You can contribute a great deal to social evolution by educating us about the advantages of the ground qualities.

However, it is important that you don’t denigrate the emergent qualities in the process. Assert the value of your ground quality while integrating the emergent quality. For example, the intuitive woman might develop her intellect so that she could help rational people to understand the value of intuition. The rural person might become an innovator in developing a sustainable technology of forestry. The community person could become an organizer of community-based worker-owned businesses. The ethnic person might develop approaches for advancement of her people in society without rejecting the dominant social groups. Thus your are an advocate for integration of the ground and emergent qualities.

There are many other possibilities, but this gives you a flavor of how the integration of ground and emergent qualities can be accomplished. You can explore how this might be made a part of your life.

Conclusion

Up until now, our social evolution has been driven by the need for societies to survive in war and feed their increasing populations, and so it is not surprising that our achievements have been mixed. We have accomplished much that is admirable and much that is destructive. However, now we have enough understanding to consciously take charge of our evolution and create a new global society that truly promotes the well-being of humanity and the biosphere.