Introduction to the Grand Transformation

What does the “I” in human language represent from an abstract perspective?  The “I” represents the individuality of a person.  When I say “I”, I am indicating everything that can be attributed to ‘me.’  For many people, their “I” seems to indicate not just their own unique, individual, characteristics and relations but, also, in some sense indicates or implies that many their own characteristics are similar in all individuals or in subsets with whom their identify.  The implication is that if I am a certain way, if I feel, think, am capable of, could act if I so chose, believe, understand and know certain things, then this should be true of all others or some subset of others.  On the other hand, the other or stranger can function like a Rorschach Ink Blot on which the “I” projects onto or imputes to the stranger its private, non-conscious, or unacceptable attributes, thus becoming not just a stranger but an alien, unacceptable other.  In the case of assumed commonality, we can, as most authorities do, call this overgeneralization.  In the case of assuming the unknown or little known other to be alien or have odious traits, we can, as most authorities do, call this projection.  Both of these tendencies seem to be nearly universal among humans.  Bucking the demoralizing, slavish, barren, unproductive, and ossified traditions in education, opening up education to novel ways to learn, think, and take perspectives is a way to correct this ubiquitous human flaw.  Making this grand transformation is what this essay is about.

The Duplex Pyramids Philosophy

My philosophy is called “Natural Systems.”  The logo for Natural Systems is Duplex Pyramids.  This essence of my philosophy is that the factors shaping and influencing the human mind and human behavior are multidimensional structures and systems within which humans exist.  The nature of humans evolved from harsh and threatening conditions.  To survive, early humans had very short life spans and to reproduce quickly but had to nurture and train their young for many years.  With none of modern America’s sexual conventions, living crowded in caves, and having nothing to do at night but eat, sleep, and have sex, the perpetually ready for sex males and the easily aroused females were able to keep reproduction going at a faster pace than death from wild animals.  

Human Biology Plus Environment-of-Origin Equals Destiny

Eventually, these sexually and reproductively prolific humans began to form close communities for protection from threats of wild animals.  Nevertheless, they had to spend most of their day time hunting and foraging for food.  Labor was simple compared to today.  It had to become somewhat differentiated.  The females increased their skills for tending to their living space, cooking and feeding the group, making clothing, and nurturing their young.  Capabilities and flexibility for use of their voice, acuity of hearing and listening, and fine motor skills were at a premium.  These became their most valuable traits.  Since males had to spend most of their time hunting and defending against threats, physical strength and agility, stamina, and aggressiveness remained their most valuable traits.  These small groups were like what we now refer to as tribes.  Alien tribes would raid and take their women and food and had to be defended against.  After millions of years, humans began move out of small caves and to gather into larger communities and to construct primitive dwellings.  Possessiveness of mates and separation in to kinship groups may have arisen with this new development.  Communities retained their in-group, tribal characteristic relating to other communities as out-group, rival or alien tribes.  This change to community living required increasingly more differentiation in labor but the nurturing and aggression genes remained constant to the present day.

The Great Turning Point

At some point, approximately 70,000 years ago[i], the human population was reduced, due to some extreme environmental challenges, to a very small number.  Scientists surmise that these must have been those who could survive in the widest variety of climates and circumstances.  They must also have been those who survive on the widest variety of diets.  They must have been those with optimal digestive systems so that they could survive on the minimum of food intake while exerting enormous energy in the still severely violent and challenging environment.  Furthermore, through these long periods of severe environmental challenges, this surviving remnant must have consisted primarily of those who possessed brains with surpassingly optimal plasticity or variety of superlative and varied mental capabilities.  Yet, they must also have retained many of those primitive capabilities that had been necessary in their more violent life circumstance which had persisted over the previous millions of years.  One of these persisting traits had to have been their proclivity for near constant sexual activity and prodigious reproductive capacity.  Gradually, over the succession of millennia since then, their population has increased geometrically to such an astounding extent that today they are on the brink of making their existence no longer sustainable by nature.

The Early Rudimentary Formation of Culture

Simply and briefly, as human civilization evolved from these early stages, the female labor roles remained domestic while the males increasingly directed their aggressive tendencies toward their fellows in the form of competition, forming hierarchies of dominance within their community, and toward aggression and plundering of neighboring communities.  Now, the men trained the young males in the skills of fighting other men and other communities.  The women continued to train the young females in domestic skills but now added skills in how to keep their families and community harmonious. 

Early Evolving Civilization Complemented Human’s Primitive Biology

Education as we know it evolved very slowly over many millennia.  Other than exercising forceful control through spoken reprimands and commands and physical punishment, the young of both genders were expected to simply grow up with no special attention paid to human relations or the various aspects of maturity and wisdom.  Eventually, some religions, around three-thousand years ago, began to evolve a form of didactic instruction in maturity or what some might call spirituality.  Typically, didactic instruction has always worked for very few.  When people are given roles, for example as part of their job, they learn the knowledge and skills required for the role.  Occupational roles seldom include acquiring and practicing maturity and wisdom.  To this day, the various aspects of maturity and wisdom are expected to simply evolve with age while offensive behavior continues to be met simply with admonition and punishment.  Human biological nature, or instincts and drives, has remained constant while alongside them now are the superlative mental capabilities that survived the seventy-thousand millennia’s catastrophe.  This unique outcome of human, biological evolution is confronting the human species with a dilemma of crisis like proportions.  Civilizations, after that catastrophe, have gradually and arbitrarily evolved, accommodating this paradoxical new juxtaposition of traits in human nature.  However, civilizations have become increasingly more socially complex and increasingly more mentally complex and demanding.  Civilizations, with their fabulous intellectual success with respect to accumulation of knowledge, technology and inventions, and organization of social systems and institutions, now have arrived at a point where they are at calamitous odds with human’s ancient biological nature. 

The Tragic Incompatibility

This new, complex, global civilization with its incompatibility with human biology and individual egocentricity demands a universal program for training humans to incorporate and use the various aspects of maturity and wisdom.  Maturity for humans in this complex new civilized world has remained neglected except for a very tiny minority called the intelligentsia.  Propensities for sexual promiscuity and over-reproduction, violent reaction to threats, and economies that are based on exploitation and seizing the valuables of others would have remained unchecked unless some official forms of policing, punishing, and incarcerating offenders had been developed.  Education increasingly began to be demanded of the populace but subservient to business and industry, while still neglecting maturity training.  To varying degrees in the many modern civilizations of the last three millennia or so, mastery of the growing complex economic world has required acquiring complex skills in manipulation, deception, exploitation, and dominance; skills which were quite at odds with the parallel but marginalized modern philosophies of ethics and the altruistic teachings of religions.

The Global Reform Imperative

Natural Systems, therefore, attempts to show how the arbitrary evolution of the structures and systems of civilizations must be critiqued.  More importantly, global plans must be developed to redirect and reform the antiquated, ossified institutions.  Along with that, the obsolete social conventions of all civilizations must be radically altered.  New institutions and social conventions must be forged so as to cause them to work for the common good of all peoples and survival of the human species and all life on this planet. 

The ‘Both-And’ Requirement for Reform:  Mature Systems and Mature Persons

The reform of our world’s civilizations requires extending the Duplex Pyramids metaphor to the Global scene.  A key element in these global plans must be the development of new systems of training the young to be mature[ii] and wise so as to facilitate and perpetuate this new type of civilization as one where all must work for the common good of all.  However, to train the young in maturity and wisdom would not only be ineffective but would be cruel if the structures and systems of civilization are not reformed simultaneously.  The egocentric, provincial, little “I” so pervasive in the past must be replaced with a socially responsible, altruistic, mature, wise, and globally aware “We” for survival in this new universal human and humane culture.  A major part of maturity training should be training to take the perspective of “the other” wherever they might be around the globe, in other words, universal empathy.  The essay that follows is meant to provide the needed critique and suggestions for plans for reforming the structures and systems of all civilizations in our new global community.

Avoiding a Tragic Destiny

As both demography and biologically grounded human character determine the destiny of humanity and nature, modern humans must do the impossible and rise above, critique, and reform both if we are avoid a tragic destiny.