“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
The EEA of Cognitive Evolution
Transcendent Thought.—That a state of affairs is incomprehensible is for us no objection to it. The human imagination is not a metric by which to distinguish reality from appearance, the true from the false, the sacred from the profane—with degree of reality presumptively corresponding proportionally to degree of comprehension. We can determine clearly enough the conditions under which the human imagination took shape—the environment of our evolutionary adaptedness, which, in the case of cognitive evolution no less than biological evolution, is ongoing. As with transitional forms of life, all forms of thought are transitional with the exception of the final form, which is the penultimate form of extinction. The incomprehensible is our spur to thought that transcends familiar categories of understanding, and so it places all previous thought in a more comprehensive perspective—with perfect irony, the incomprehensible is a necessary condition to attaining comprehension of a higher order. On occasion, the higher order of comprehension is revealed to us in an intuitive breakthrough in which a novel conception suddenly opens a new perspective on our familiar understanding of the world. Perhaps more often, it is our slow, incremental reconciliation with the counterintuitive, forced upon us through repetition with increasing clarity, that gradually extends our ability to conceptualize the incomprehensible, bringing that formerly beyond our scope within the purview of the human mind. The strangeness of the world forces itself upon us, and we must respond with equally strange forms of thought and understanding.
Self-Transcendence and Developmental Stages of Civilization
In Thinking about Civilization (and further elaborated in Suboptimal Civilizations) I distinguished among what I call orders of civilization, and this included, inter alia, civilization of the first and of the second order, as follows:
Civilization of the First Order is a socioeconomic system of large-scale organization that supplies the matter upon which history works; in other words, this is the synchronic milieu of a given civilization, a snapshot in time.
…and…
Civilization of the Second Order is an entire cycle of civilization, from birth through growth to maturity and senescence unto death, taken whole. (Iterated, civilization of the second order is a series, as described above.)
Civilization of the first order, if it takes the longue durée as a
synchronic whole, may comprise an entire era of civilization, and thus is a “snapshot” only in an unusual sense of that term; arguably,
this is what Marc Bloch, the Annales school historian, does in his book Feudal Society, which treats medieval European civilization in isolation and as a coherent whole. Civilization
of the second order moves beyond this conception of history and
considers how civilizations change and thus exhibit a developmental
sequence of stages.I want to here focus on this second conception in contradistinction to the first.
In What Do Stagnant Supercivilizations Do During Their Million Year Lifespans?
I mentioned in passing, “…the self-transcendence that marks developing civilizations.” This is an important idea for which I have not yet provided any sufficient exposition. The qualitative change of one kind of civilization into another kind of civilization, mediated by an episode of self-transcendence, diverges from the organic norms of biological or evolutionary change.
A civilization may pass through organic stages of development, but the
stages in the history of a civilization may also be of a different kind
altogether, in which one kind of civilization supplants another kind
of civilization, and these two kinds of civilization are not
necessarily related as less advanced to more advanced, or less complex
to more complex, or less mature to more mature.
What is distinctive about social change, which includes changes to
social institutions like civilization (whether or not the sequences of stages that a civilization passes through
in its development is progress, whether or not it is evolution), are precisely those points where
the history of social institutions can diverge from the natural history
of organic, biological, or evolutionary processes. An example of this is
the possibility of originally distinct social institutions growing
together, i..e., concrescence, which is the antithesis of the
evolutionary branching of life that defines biodiversity and the
structure of the biosphere. The self-transcendence of a civilization
that results in the change from one kind of civilization into another –
a metábasis eis állo génos (μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος) – or the preemption of one kind of civilization by another, is another instance of non-organic, non-evolutionary change that marks the development of civilization.
In light of the possibility of self-transcendence that is not organic and which does not define the lifecycle of a civilization, I will reformulate civilization of the second order as follows:
Civilization of the Second Order is a sequence of civilizations of the first order related through descent with modification, representing a continuity of tradition through time, but of different kinds of civilizations, which may or may not exhibit a development from origins through maturity to extinction.
It is an improvement to understand the stages of
development through which a civilization passes as the result of
episodes of self-transcendence as it allows us to set aside (without
entirely abandoning) the idea of a strictly organic conception of the
development of civilization.
The development of a civilization may be organic, and may be a development from less complex to more complex, or less advanced to more advanced, but a change is civilization is not necessarily these things, and so the more generalized conception is preferable as it comprises all these possibilities.
With these qualifications in mind, we can observe that the difference between civilization of the first order and
civilization of the second order is that of the stages of self-transcendence
through which a civilization passes in its developmental sequence in the latter conception.
This ties together the idea of self-transcendence as central to civilization, as well as distinguishing – at the same time as relating relating – a snapshot of a civilization in time and the entire development of a civilization.
Post with 1 note
Two Forms of Technological Soteriology
Recently in Easter and the Brotherhood of Mankind
I discussed the close coupling of eschatology and soteriology in the
western tradition. This is something that I have been meaning to address
for a long time, but I haven’t had the words for it as yet. (The words
are still inadequate, but I hope the idea came through nevertheless.) In
the course of this exposition I noted that science presents us with a
grand cosmological eschatology, but no associated soteriology. I
received a comment on that post from
Gregor L. Hartmann, who rightly pointed out that transhumanist hopes for
a life everlasting (albeit technologically embodied) constitutes a
technological soteriology.
In another essay, Technologies of Life Extension, I reviewed a range of different possibilities open to the transhumanist for life extension, which implies that transhumanism
is not one, but many. And, even beyond the many different possible
forms of life extension, there are many different possible forms of life
enhancement (something I touched upon in
Transhumanism and Adaptive Radiation).
So I’ve thought a lot about how transhumanism could transform the life
of the individual ways, but I had initially failed to see this as a form
of soteriology consistent with and predicated upon scientific
civilization and a scientific conception of the cosmos.
Now
another form of technological soteriology has occurred to me, perhaps as
obvious as the example of transhumanism, and that is simply for the
individual to identify himself or herself with the project of
elaborating the scientific conception of the cosmos. This can take a
form as adventurous as becoming an astronaut and exploring new worlds,
or a form as intellectual as continuing to elaborate the scientific
vision of the cosmos and the place of human beings within it. In other
words, there are many forms of technological soteriology even within the
idea of identifying oneself with cosmological eschatology.
Since the project of science is essentially infinitistic, the soteriology of coupling one’s life, or the life of one’s species, to the scientific project, is also infinitistic. This observation brings out a contrast that hadn’t previously thought of: perfections are usually conceived as finite goods, and the role of the idea of perfection in traditional soteriologies is prominent (and has a political parallel in Comte de Maistre). While perfection may be a distant goal, if an individual attains perfection, they have arrived at their destination, and there is nothing further than remains except to continue to exist in this unchanging perfection (which would be one way to describe eternity in heaven).
The
soteriology of identification with cosmological eschatology admits of
no unchanging perfection. Scientific exploration and discovery can
continue without end, as can the elaboration of scientific knowledge
based upon this exploration and discovery. This infinitistic ideal
possibly differentiates technological soteriology from its finitistic
alternatives more definitively than only ontological commitments of the
finitistic or infinitistic worldviews.
Another point: the
soteriology of identification with cosmological eschatology is equally
valid for the individual or for the species, so that this soteriology
can offer the same hope to both the individual seeking to identify with
the scientific project and an entire species that seeks to identify with
the scientific project. That hope is the possibility of making a real
contribution to the scientific enterprise, and so securing a permanent
legacy for oneself or one’s species. Also, this soteriological
conception is not limited to the contributions of a single species or a
single kind of conscious: even an artificial consciousness could
contribute meaningfully to the scientific project, and so receive in
turn the meaning that derives from participation in a great enterprise
that transcends not only the individual, but also possibly transcends a
civilization and even a species.
Responding to the World we Find
In my last four posts – Settled and Nomadic Religious Experience, Religious Experience in Industrial-Technological Civilization, Religious Experience and the Future of Civilization, and Addendum on Religious Experience and the Future of Civilization – I employed Joseph Campbell’s formulation of the four functions of mythology as a framework for the exposition of religious experience in the context of a changing human condition driven by changing structures of civilization.
Another schematic way that Campbell approached mythology was to distinguish three responses that individuals may have toward the world, and implicitly this is a function of the first function of mythology, the mystical or metaphysical function, which mediates between the inner world of consciousness and the world beyond individual consciousness. This first function of mythology, of the mythological relation between mind and world, can take three distinct forms.
Campbell’s rendering of the three possible responses to the world are:
- Affirmation
- Denial (also called “The Great Reversal” by Campbell)
- Conditional Affirmation
To state it in this way suggests the possibility of conditional denial, which I can understand is a counter-intuitive response, though it should be recognized as a possibility, even if an outlier. But the threefold response above might be informally expressed as yes, no, and maybe.
While Campbell was usually quite careful in his formulations to avoid advocacy, when it came to the three possible responses to the great mystery and monstrosity of the world, Campbell was forthright in his view that only an unambiguous acceptance of the world as it is was a workable and respectable response to the mystery and monstrosity that confronts us as soon as we open our eyes. Nothing less than total and absolute affirmation will do for Campbell.
Campbell’s own differing formulations of the mystical function of mythology reflect his view that, ultimately, there can only be affirmation of the world. Moreover, the terms in which Campbell presents the threefold distinction among responses to the world betray the valuations that he places on these responses, and if we adopt a distinct terminology, the valuations implicit in this distinct terminology may suggest different valuations of the responses.
I have found just an alternative terminology to those of Campbell, noted above, in the series of lectures Philosophy as a Guide to Living by Professor Stephen A. Erickson Ph.D., Pomona College (lecture 11, “Marx’s Utopian Hope”). Erickson’s terminology to describe essentially the same mythological responses to the world, embodying a distinct valuation from that implied by Campbell’s terminology, are as follows:
- Resignation
- Transcendence
- Transformation
All of these terms are freighted with a long history in western intellectual history, but precisely for this reason we can immediately see that, schematically, these are essentially the same categories that Campbell uses, but with a radically different valuation. To speak of “resignation” where Campbell speaks in terms of “affirmation,” “transcendence” where Campbell speaks in terms of “denial,” and “transformation” where Campbell speaks in terms of “conditional affirmation,” is to give a very different sense to the relation of mind to world.
There is, of course, a difference between acceptance of the world in terms of positive affirmation and acceptance of the world in terms of resignation, but both remain modalities of acceptance, as denial and transcendence are modalities of rejection of the world, and amelioration or conditional affirmation and transformation are modalities that look toward changing the world.
I have long been dissatisfied with Campbell’s formulation of conditional acceptance, as I think that this attitude plays a much greater role in our thought than that to which Campbell consigns it. By interpretating a vision of the changed world as transformation rather than conditional affirmation – accepting the world only in so far as it accords with one’s wishes, which sounds petty and egocentric – it is easy to see how many traditional mythologies, including mythologies of surrogate religions, appeal to a transformation of the world as ultimately the only world in which the mind can be at home.
