Back to Nature #3 The Evolution of Consciousness January 6, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Geo-politics, Human Ecology, Science and Rationaltiy , trackbackThe Evolution of Consciousness
Part 1
In “Back to nature #2” I explored Deep Ecology and the idea that the response to the environmental problems we face should be to in some way “go back to nature” because “nature knows best”. I questioned this idea on the grounds that some versions imply an anthropocentric stance, projecting human feelings, consciousness and motives onto the non-human world in a way that seems more intended to fulfill our own psychological needs rather than actually healing our relationship with nature.
In this post, I want to explore an alternative: that rather than try to return to an earlier form of consciousness, that our consciousness itself – our way of understanding and relating to the world- is evolving.
What follows should be seen as a Story of the Evolution of consciousness. It is based on one particular model that has become popular in recent years- Spiral Dynamics, which I first came across in the writings of Ken Wilber. I do not endorse either the theory as a whole nor Wilber in particular, but see it as a tool that I think is worth consideration for anyone interested in the question: “Why aren’t more people interested in sustainabilty and protection of the environment?”
I am freely interpreting this version to make a story and adapting it . I am not claiming to attempt rigorous accuracy, but the basic idea does I feel have many different kinds of evidence to support it. The important thing is the implications such a view would have for seeking solutions to current global problems, and considering how it differs from the “return to nature” story.
In Spiral Dynamics, cultural “memes” or stage of development are colour coded, so I am referring to each stage with the same colours.
Enjoy reading it and make of it what you will.
Beige- Survival
The first glimmerings of what was to emerge as distinctively human forms of consciousness may have occurred some two million years ago. The Dawn Humans- so recently emerging as a novel form in the already 3billion-year old story of Life on earth- were limited still to the vagaries’ of a tough world where survival was the main activity. Instinct and other qualities bestowed by evolution ensured our ancestors survived in the environment they were ideally suited to. 
On the scale of the individual this may correspond to a new born baby in terms of its consciousness still largely unformed, aware at first only of itself and subsequently of its mother, siblings, and slowly the awareness grows to form the first concept of an Outside World. This stage is essentially undifferentiated from its surroundings- the individual personality not yet solid.
Purple- Magic and Tribalism
For tens of thousands of years humanity lived lightly on the earth in small tribes. The economic base was hunting and gathering. As the earliest forms of social organization developed, along with language and tool-making, so the efficiency needed to survive and manage energy flows through food increased. Fire was the major technological achievement, making it easier to find game once the brush and understory were burnt.
The first more organized systems of cultivation may have emerged at this time, a kind of nomadic forest gardening, in which tree crops and other useful plants may have been favoured through selective thinning and maybe even planted and grown from seed.
At this stage, further developments in the human brain permitted language to become more complex. Art, as cave paintings and other symbolic forms emerged. The beginnings of a rich and diverse range of human belief systems tried to make sense of the world they had been born into.
Animistic beliefs saw spirits behind natural phenomena. Divination, messages in the animal and plant worlds, shamanism and hallucinogenic plants may all have played their role in people’s mythology. Neolithic monuments such as the stone circles of Britain and elsewhere may represent this stage of human consciousness. Tribal people were strongly united within the tribe and within their specific set of beliefs; but essentially still parochial with superstition and fear of the unknown still prevalent.
A child at this stage may also understand the world through magical thinking. The centre of its own universe, a young child may believe the clouds are making patterns just for her, that Santa is real and fairies and goblins populate the garden. It is a stage of narcissism: a lack of experience of the wider world, and yet strong receptiveness to it which allows it to develop.
Red- Will and Power
Red becomes more organized but potentially more aggressive. With the eventual expansion of human populations and the first signs of competition over resources coming into play, Red is dominated by egotistical and individualistic impulses. This is the era of the Hero- for a child, perhaps the Superhero phase.
Agriculture has emerged- some ten thousand years ago. Propelled into the domestication of plants and animals by the effects of over-hunting in some areas, or perhaps local climate change, agriculture lead to larger populations, and this required a different kind of belief system. This stage sees the emergence of mythological forms of thinking which began to supersede magical forms. A Pantheon of Gods and more complex mythologies began to be developed to explain the human adventure and the relationship to nature and to the Divine. The Gods were like super-humans, playing out their own stories on a grander stage of immortality. Slavery, sacrifices to the gods to ensure fertility from the land, and increasingly complex city states and empires arose. Debauchery and dysfunction amongst emperors and leaders who, with such large armies and free energy from slaves by invasion and conquer often went hand in hand with overshoot on a grand scale: the Mayans, the Anazasi, ultimately the Roman empire as well may all have suffered the same fate of overstretching their resource base. In child development this could likened to “the terrible two’s”: an egotistical stage where rage may play a role in getting what is wanted as the child tests the boundaries of what is permitted and possible. In the modern world still we may see Red meme structures in the form of the Mafia, street gangs, and fundamentalist terrorism. Red does not want to be negotiated with. Red believes it fortune and power on its side; the only way out of Red is into some kind of Blue structure.
Blue- Structure and Order
Blue is marked by the emergence of whole civilizations united under one common belief: an all-powerful Creator as in the Great Monotheistic religions born in the Middle east of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Blue is characterized by structure, conservativism and hierarchical authority, legitimized in the institutions of the Church. Mythology becomes more standardized as Great Books- the Word of God- lay down the law. The Law of God is immutable- it cannot be disputed- and the conveyors of the law in the Church hierarchy are often considered infallible.
For the Red meme child, the transition into Blue involves going to school and being more formally socialized into the wider mores and rules of the culture. The Scouts and the Police forces of the State could also be seen as Blue structures. Blue represents the limits of the mythological-agriculturally based societies: although Blue managed to unite many of the warring Red tribes into far larger belief systems, held together by faith in one supreme God, no one Blue system could take over the whole world without meeting another similar system at the same stage.
Orange- Making the Miracles Happen
Blue prospered and held sway for at least the past two thousand years. But as agriculture developed and succeeded in yielding more surplus energy, there were more opportunities for a class of intellectuals and administrators to emerge who had time to philosophize and spend time inquiring deeper into the mysteries of the universe.
Eventually this resulted in Galileo and a few other inspired individuals in making a radical discovery about our place in the universe: the Sun is not going around the Earth as it seems to be at all; rather, the earth is going round the sun. Far from being the centre of the universe as taught by the church, the Earth is in fact a mere satellite, orbiting the sun which is the rue centre of our solar system, just like the other planets. The implications of this discovery were dramatic and far-reaching: not only did we have to revise our view of ourselves, but we also had to revise the very way in which we gain knowledge about the world. No longer could we just take the Church authority at face value. The Pope himself might not be infallible after all. To have been in Galileo’s place must have been a truly extraordinary situation. He did not lose his faith, but he felt compelled to challenge the status quo, even at great risk to his personal safety. He could not ignore the Higher Truth that was being revealed to him through his scientific measurements. .
The enormous power of the scientific method, though fiercely resisted by the old Blue Structures that had held sway for so long, quickly gained preeminence and overturned to a degree thousands of years of myth and religion.
How did it mange this? Technology- the offspring of science- was able to make the miracles happen. It was no longer necessary to believe- what counted was what worked. The proof was in the pudding, and the rapid increase in technological innovations that followed particularly in medicine and machines lead to such increases at least on some levels in human well-being that it became clear that science was here to stay.
The most significant aspect of his discovery was the discovery of a new method of seeking the truth: experimentation and inquiry based on the scientific method. No longer was Belief something that was simply given by the particular religion or creed one happened to belong to; evidence became required and the possibility of creating replicable and verifiable evidence based on experiments. Whether a Christian, Buddhist, Jew or Atheist, anyone anywhere in the world had the potential to repeat Galileo’s experiments and check the evidence for themselves.
In so doing, the Orange Meme of Science and rationality heralded in the possibility of something that even the massive continent-wide mythological structures of Blue were unable to achieve: with the scientific evidence- (rather than belief-) based method for revealing the truth about Reality the potential emerged for a truly Global Consciousness.
Green – Feelings for the Earth
While Purple was animistic in its belief systems, Red Polytheistic and Blue Monotheistic, Orange became so infatuated with the technological wonders made possible by the scientific method that “belief” in anything “spiritual” became increasingly redundant. The separation from the natural resource base that had begun with agriculture- or possibly even before with the first tools allowing over-hunting- became greatly exacerbated with the rise of the Industrial Era. The exploitation of fossil fuels suddenly released far more surplus energy than had ever before been available to humankind and lead to the construction of vast cities inhabited with millions and eventually billions of people who were not directly involved with the careful husbandry of the natural resources that sustained them at all.
Wealth previously undreamt of became available to substantial classes of people who had leisure time, free education, the ability to travel the world, and the opportunity to explore many more belief systems.
Out of this era, lead by the post-war baby Boom generation, emerged the post-war Civil Rights movements, feminism, gay rights, even Animal Rights movements, and of course the Green and Environmental Movement attempting to redress the excesses of Orange Technology.
Science began to be perceived with suspicion, hostility even by those who saw the damage and destruction that was being perpetrated in its name. At the same time, new but misunderstood ideas from science, especially Quantum Physics became synonymous with a New Spirituality based on a Return to Gaia. The buzz-word was Holism, which covered a multitude of sins from Alternative Therapies- “treating the whole person” to holistic education, design and political movements.
Genuine developments in the Earth Sciences lead to Systems Theory and Gaia theory. One of the drivers in science became concern about climate change which, using advanced computer modeling resulted in dramatic increases in our understanding of the way the biological and physiological systems combine to self-organize.
One of the products of the Green Meme was also permaculture- a Design for Life based on the ecological sciences.
For a whole at least there was optimism for a New Age, and age of healing and holism, of putting back together the fractured pieces of the human spirit, a new integration of old and new, humans and nature, body and spirit, feelings and the intellect.
Yet, 45 years on from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring the brave new world of ecological harmony seems more elusive than ever. The worst predictions of environmental alarmists seems to be coming true, and while governments argue over how to carve up the last remaining slices of the earth’s resource pie the human impact and population seems to be increasing towards an inevitable end-game of collapse and total system failure.
The great promise of Green has not come to pass. The vast majority of the world seems stuck at Blue or Orange with little interest in the values of Green.
In the next installment, I want to unpack some of the implications and issues presented by this story, consider some of the failings and successes of Green more closely, and ask the question: if this evolutionary unfolding of consciousness is in any way valid, each new phase transcending but including the previous ones, what next?
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On the krest of the Boomer wave, in 1971, I went Bak to the Land on a large kommune in Kalifornia, where we built illegal houses of resykled materials, grew vegetables and went naked. We were mainly kountekultural, and espoused values of harmlessness, sharing, and no rules. It was a wonderful time. Now, 37 years later, I am bak on that very same land, only now, instead of being kounterultural I want to be kreativekultural. I feel that now, with Permakulture, we know what to do, not just what not to do.
The hard part, it seems to me, is getting along with people. I am proud of the intentional kommunity movement for exploring this very diffikult thing. We don’t even have the language, the words, to express many of the feelings that kome up. Those folks are developing new sosial norms –memes, I guess, for how to akomplish things as teams rather than with hierarky.
In my Major Design Group in the Permaulture Kourse, there were eight, and a few of us, myself inkluded, had to eat some Humble Pie in publik! We were under pressure of time to make a design and had to get past resistanses. I saw that the ethos of personal growth, et al, very prominent in this area, made a krusial differense for that group. It ended happy with a beautiful design I kould not have done nearly as well alone, nor as joyfully.
This was a revelation for me, being a loner “make it happen” sort of person. I observed the same revelation kome to the new young mayor of Newark, N.J. in the U.S, Kory Booker, another high akhiever type. In a New Yorker story on his struggles to exsel, I quote the last paragraph: “It’s this weird moment,”…”I’m elekted to the highest job of my life, something I’ve been aspiring to for years, and you’d think I’d feel this great sense of independense and power. But it’s not so. It’s the time of my life when I aktually feel –maybe not weaker, but more dependent upon others than ever before. And that my sukkess is kompletely dependent opon how other people are doing.”