The end of the World as we know it

Understanding the present in the light of the evolution of Consciousness.

“A mood of universal destruction and renewal… has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos – the right moment – for a “metamorphosis of the gods”…. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man…. Does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?”  - Carl Jung

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Depending on your perspective, the world in which we are living is either a very scary place to be stuck right now or the venue for an imminent and extraordinary transformation in human consciousness; we humans are about to enter a Golden Age of tolerance, mutual understanding and plenty of Public Holidays or we are about to suffocate in clouds of carbon monoxide and toxic radiation. The future is pregnant with opportunity and/or disaster. Which is it to be? Where is Steiner when you need him? How did we end up here anyway?

How we ended up here is perhaps a good place to start, if just to try and get a clearer perspective. After all, this is not the first time humanity has felt the winds of change. There does however appear to be an important difference this time around. In past times there was always the reassurance of the beneficence of God (or the gods). As God’s special creation, we could expect to get through whatever calamity befell the planet, at least those of us who said our prayers at night. Such reassurance is spread pretty thinly around the place nowadays. In fact it has been getting thinner and thinner over the last five hundred and so years.

 So, how did we get here?

 Ironically, it was a bishop who really started the ground shaking under the edifice of religious certainty. A strong case could be made that it was Copernicus, alive during the height of the Renaissance in Europe, who launched the scientific revolution with his book, De Revolutionibus (dedicated to the Pope incidentally), in which he posited a Sun-centred universe. So radically different was this idea from the accepted wisdom, and indeed everyday experience, it took some decades to gain traction, but the eventual scientific triumph of Copernicanism paved the way for Kepler, Galileo, and then Descartes, Newton and a whole new cosmology. Far from being the centre of the universe, the human being became an ephemeral speck on an insignificant rock revolving around a star among billions of other stars in a universe of inconceivable vastness. The celestial – terrestrial dichotomy was gone; the heavenly bodies were simply material entities moved by the same forces of gravity and inertia as those found on the Earth. Any numinous significance for humankind attributed to them was merely ancient superstition. God was not gone. On the contrary, these early scientific revolutionaries were all avowed believers in the creator God. Once created however, the creation could be left to run like clockwork, without God’s intervention. No, God was not gone, but the parent-child relationship between God and humankind was no longer a given.

Things got a little more awkward for God whenDarwincame along. The evidence of natural history suggested evolution occurred through processes of natural selection and random mutation. Instead of being the centre of God’s Divine Plan, Man was simply the most recent manifestation of a random, amoral and brutal struggle for survival. God was superfluous in a survival-oriented Darwinian evolution in a vast mechanistic Newtonian cosmos.

Just as we human beings were coming to terms with being only slightly more sophisticated than apes (in most instances!), Freud came along and whipped away our remaining dignities. The virtues we prided ourselves on -our rationality, our moral conscience, our compassion etc – were things we deluded ourselves into imagining were under our conscious control. Instead they were simply manifestations of unconscious desires, neuroses and instincts. Reason, our last claim to stand above nature, was nothing more exalted than a recent development of our primordial id. True human freedom was a will-o’-the-wisp.

Being scientifically unverifiable, belief in Scriptural revelation came increasingly to be seen as  wish-fulfillment fantasy and the religious outlook as anthropomorphic projection. The qualities ascribed to the omnipotent God were called into question by, among other things, the extreme suffering  and injustice in the world. What sort of loving God would allow World Wars, pogroms and natural disasters to happen? No, there was no deeper meaning for things. Things existed because they existed, the universe was devoid of meaning, so we were best just getting on, abandoning our existential angst and enjoying the short lives we had. On the positive side, though we might be just transient accidents of material evolution, things were not all bad. Our modern scientific outlook had not just cleansed us of primitive, religious notions but had also made possible extraordinary material progress. In place of ‘hoping’, there was ‘planning’. Utopia did not have to wait for death and new life in Heaven. We could build it here! And so it was we marched into the Brave New World.

The promise of science?

Yet the Brave New World did not prove quite as consoling as we might have hoped. Our trail-blazing science did indeed bring significant material progress but without delivering a concomitant increase in human happiness or reduction in human misery. The world was shocked into skepticism of science’s claims by some of the catastrophic consequences of its creation: nuclear disaster, arms proliferation, environmental degradation to name but a few. For all its claims of objectivity, science was found to be not above social, political and economic bias. Debates around such developments as genetic engineering or such issues as climate change for instance called into question the picture of scientific development as involving a relentless process of rigorous testing of theories in the quest for a more accurate picture of objective truth. Thomas Kuhn in his study of the history of science noted the inherent conservatism within the scientific community, characterised by the tendency to proceed by seeking confirmation of prevailing paradigms, even where to do so involved interpreting conflicting data in ways biased to support the existing paradigm. Scientists operating within different paradigms tended to create their own data and ways of interpreting their data to validate their paradigms, so that it could seem that scientists operating within different paradigms existed in completely different worlds. Even when conflicting evidence became overwhelming, the shift to a new paradigm was far from straightforward, depending as it did, according to Kuhn, as much on the established customs of the scientific community as on disinterested tests and arguments. Scientists too are attached to their beliefs!

Developments within science itself in the early twentieth century shook the very foundations upon which the scientific hegemony had been built.  The quantum-relativistic revolution revealed the extent to which the reductionist perspective was likely to miss the very nature of things. Matter’s hard substantiality and its mechanistic causality was an illusion. The previously reliable scientific world view could no longer claim a monopoly on the truth. Indeed, the philosopher, Kant’s conclusion of a century and a half before, namely that we cannot know the world-in-itself but only the world-as-rendered-by –the-human-mind was becoming the conclusion of science. Though it has taken several decades for the revolution in physics to send its shock waves through the other sciences, we have entered the twenty first century bereft of universally accepted certainties. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “In the twentieth century nothing is in agreement with anything else.” On the positive side, this weakening of the old materialistic worldview, has created opportunities for other viewpoints to gain a sympathetic hearing. Formerly repressed or unorthodox perspectives are encouraged in an intellectual climate of open conversation among different understandings and cultural paradigms. The negative side of this has been a near dogmatic relativism. Reason, upon which, from the time of the Enlightenment, so much hope has been pinned, far from justifying universal values to guide our lives, has brought instead a legalism and numbing bureaucratic rationality. The separation of self and observable world which had enabled the development of abstract thought and scientific objectivity and that had fostered our sense of individual autonomy has left us isolated, cast  alone into an impersonal universe that meets our striving to understand the nature of our humanity with complete indifference.

Tarnas (1991) suggests that many of the soul symptoms of our age can be understood in the context of this picture of reality. We may resign ourselves to the indifference of the universe by denying our feelings, becoming cynical, apathetic or numb, slavishly giving ourselves up to the world. Or we may instead inflate our feelings in compensation, becoming narcissistic and egocentric, objectifying and exploiting the outer world. Alternatively we may take the flight course, escaping our harsh reality through addiction, be it to drugs, shopping, Justin Bieber or whatever! Where such avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained we risk descending down a spiral of anxiety, victimisation and psychopathological disorders.

So maybe the brief recapitulation of recent history to discover where we are was not such a good idea after all! Certainly the picture looks pretty bleak, and I have not even touched on the collapse of the global financial system and world economy! But wait, I hear you say, there is more to this story than this cursory description of the thrust of Western intellectual development since the Renaissance suggests. And you’re right.

An alternative paradigm

Rewind to the Enlightenment in Europe, circa end of the eighteenth century, and just as the dualistic paradigm was reaching its philosophical culmination in Kant, an alternative epistemological perspective was emerging which saw the relation of the human mind to the world not as dualistic (me here, world there) but participatory (me world same). This view originally expressed at this time by Goethe (though a given pre-Renaissance) was developed further by Hegel, Coleridge and Emerson in the 19^th century and then by Steiner in the 20^th. In this perspective, nature pervades everything, including the human mind and imagination. The truth and order of nature does not exist outside the human mind, such that the mind is only able to produce concepts that ‘correspond’ to the external reality. Nor is it something that the human mind imposes its own order on. Rather, there exists an order and truth of nature that the human mind can directly know because nature and mind are of the same essence. According to this perspective, we will never arrive at nature’s deep truths by detaching ourselves from nature and observing it like a machine. Instead, through developing our power of perception we can come to ‘see’ the archetypal form in each phenomenon, and through developing our power of imagination we can directly contact the creative process within nature.  For most of us, our normal ‘seeing’ is dulled by our ‘stuff’: old, established ways of seeing (“That’s typical of …”), our intellectual educations, our fears, doubts, conditioning. . A developed inner life is necessary for this heightened cognition, but the potential to achieve such cognition exists for us all.

Deepak Chopra (2011) recounts a parable that captures well the nature of this perception.

In a remote town lived a gifted sculptor. His work decorated the town’s streets and parks, and everyone agreed that it was extraordinarily beautiful. But the artist was reclusive and remained out of sight. On day a visitor arrived and so admired the statues that he insisted on meeting the sculptor, but no one could tell him how to find the artist he sought. In fact, it turned out that none of the townspeople had actually met him: the sculpture had just appeared, as if on its own.

Then an old man stepped forward and said that he had been fortunate enough to meet the elusive sculptor.

“How did you manage that?” the visitor asked.

The old man replied, “I stood before these wonderful works of art and kept admiring them. The more I gazed, the more I saw. There was intricacy and subtlety beyond anything I had ever observed before. I couldn’t stop marvelling. Somehow the sculptor must have become aware of my rapture, for, to my astonishment, he appeared by my side.

“I said, ‘Why did you pick me to show yourself to, when no one else has found you, no matter how hard they searched?’

“He said, ‘No creator can resist appearing when his work is loved as intensely as you love mine.’”

This perspective, eclipsed by the force of the dominant materialistic paradigm, has, with the weakening of this paradigm and the opening of contemporary intellectual debate to different perspectives, re-emerged with new vigour and new champions, like Deepak Chopra himself. So were Goethe, Steiner et al just ahead of their time or is this perspective simply a throwback to the naïve ‘participation mystique’ of pre-enlightenment times? Seen from another angle, was the whole journey down the path of reductionist science one monumental blind alley human arrogance propelled us down or a necessary phase in our evolving? Is the human race simply careering through the darkness along some crazy helter skelter or is there some underlying method in the madness?

The evolution of ideas

Perhaps a place to start in attempting to answer these questions is with another question: what explains the progression of science from one paradigm to another? Is it simply a matter of a boffin coming up with a better theory and if so, where did s/he get the theory? Here we touch on a dilemma in the development of scientific knowledge that the philosopher, Popper, drew attention to. It runs as follows. Science has proceeded through the insights of individuals, that have led to theories that have been found to work in the empirical world. But if the human mind does not have access to a priori certain truth, how is it that the mind can come up with such extraordinarily successful theories as say those of a Newton? Popper’s own conclusion – luck – seems, at the very least, to ignore declarations of the discoverers themselves of the revelatory nature of their breakthroughs.Newtonfor instance declared to God, “I think Thy thoughts after Thee!” It’s not just a question of the laws of motion or relativity theory. What is the origin of pure concepts like the sum of the internal angles of a triangle being 180 which seem to be absolutely objective and universally shared? A ‘materialist’ might argue these concepts reside in the brain, but to give a material source to such concepts is no more convincing than to posit an origin beyond the physical part of the human being, in a spiritual, Platonic world of ideas. Rudolf Steiner in his seminal book, the Philosophy of Freedom, put the point strongly when he wrote:

“Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the world. Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter or material processes. But, in doing so, it is already confronted by two different sets of facts: the material world, and the thoughts about it. The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material processes. He believes that thinking takes place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place in animal organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic effects to matter, so he credits matter in certain circumstances with the capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. He ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself. And thus he is back again at his starting point. How does matter come to think about its own nature? Why is it not simply satisfied with itself and content just to exist? The materialist has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something quite vague and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him again. The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem; it can only shift it from one place to another.” (Philosophy of Freedom)

So then, what is this spiritual source of the new paradigm-shifting ideas that have determined not only the course of science but of all forms of human thought? Tarnas (1991) offers the following suggestion:

“a paradigm emerges in the history of science… is recognized as superior, as true and valid, precisely when that paradigm resonates with the current archetypal state of the evolving collective psyche.” (p.438)

In other words, paradigm shifts occur not simply as a result of improved data gathering and reasoning connected to data, but as a response to shifts in consciousness over time.

“As the inner gestalt changes in the cultural mind, new empirical evidence just happens to appear, pertinent writings from the past suddenly are unearthed, appropriate epistemological justifications are formulated, supportive sociological changes coincidentally take place, new technologies become available, the telescope is invented and just happens to fall into Galileo’s hands.”(p.439)

 Thus, theories arise in human minds from something far greater than the individual minds themselves, coming instead from a universal unconscious that, in the words of Tarnas, “is bringing forth through the human mind and human imagination its own gradually unfolding reality.” (p.437)

Paradigm shifts, he argues, occur at times of ‘ripeness’, where the existing paradigm has fulfilled its purpose having been developed to the point where it comes to be experienced as constricting. The new breaks out from the old, creating new opportunity for growth. Just as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Brahe, among others, facilitated the shift out of the ancient-medieval worldview, so are we now perhaps standing at the threshold of another revolution and a definitive shift away from the materialistic-reductionist mindset that has enabled the tremendous intellectual development it has, but that now appears to have become mired in irresolvable contradictions.

So, according to this view, we are, in a certain sense, facing the end of the world as we know it. Defenders of the materialistic-reductionist ‘faith’, virulent in their rigid skepticism of whatever does not conform to their paradigm, will continue to resist perspectives that smack of anything of a spiritual nature. That consciousness emerged out of the cosmic soup some 13 billion years ago and its evolution has followed a random process of natural selection that, given the second law of thermodynamics, must ultimately end in entropy and heat death is a view that is still widely held and lauded for its dispassionate realism. Yet, still unable to explain the emergence of consciousness or why nature follows laws without recourse to hypothesising the existence of trillions upon trillions of other universes – none of which has yet to be seen let alone proven – this view can claim to be nothing more than science’s best current theory. Its staunch defence may hold us indefinitely in our state of metaphysical and epistemological irresolution and in doing so our scientific community will ironically be echoing the stance of the Church five hundred years ago.

On the other hand, our current state of deep uncertainty and sense of impending radical change together with the growing impetus towards a more holistic and participatory vision may perhaps be a true precursor of a major shift in consciousness that will manifest in a new world view based around ideals and principles fundamentally different from those that have marked our post-modern age to date. It may be that we are simply the latest manifestation of an indifferent evolution, hamstrung by our psychological conditioning to being unable to do any more than strive to make the best of our briefly endowed lot. Or it may be that we are indeed co-creators of reality here on earth at a unique time in the evolution of consciousness, faced with the extraordinary opportunity and responsibility this brings. If this is so, may we have the courage, insight and imagination to respond to this special calling.

Paul White
Faculty of Education, Taruna
2011

REFERENCES:

Kuhn, T. (1996) The structure of scientific revolutions (3^rd ed).University ofChicago Press

Tarnas, R. (1991). The passion of the Western mind. Random House publishing

Deepak Chopra & Leonard Mlodinow (2011) The War of the Worldviews. Harmony books.

Steiner, R (1979). The philosophy of freedom. Rudolf Steiner Press, London