LeFevre: Where Did Man Go Wrong? Part Two

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It seems rather absurd to attempt to explain where man went wrong in three columns, or even to encapsulate 15 years of intense enquiry. If a person is questioning however, few words are necessary; and if one is not, three books of explanation won’t be enough.

My boyhood enthusiasm for America’s early space program, plus a rebellious religious nature that led to so-called mystical experiences, matured into a passion for asking the big questions. Even so, one has to ask just the right questions, and persist in asking them, until the universe releases its secrets.

The question ‘where did man go wrong?’ misses the mark. That way of putting it is shorthand for how and why humans evolved to be a planetary force of disorder and destruction, when life unfolds in dynamic order.

The human brain used to be called ‘the pinnacle of creation.’ But using it, humans are bringing much of life on earth to the brink of extinction.

This line of questioning doesn’t grow out of misanthropy, but out of deep curiosity, and a love of life and humanity, albeit philosophically expressed.

To even consider the question of ‘where man went wrong,’ one has to have a clear perception and feeling for the wholeness of nature, and of the fragmentation of man.

If one views nature in terms of the categories, objects, and elements that humans separate it into, then one can’t see the seamless order of the universe. Then again, if one has fixed beliefs about what it means to be human, one can’t explore how humans came to be a contradiction in nature.

That, it seems to me, raises the most important question a human being can ask. Given that nature (by which I’m also including the cosmos) is an unfolding order moving in undivided wholeness, and that Homo sapiens inextricably evolved along with all life, how did humans come to be such a huge factor of disorder, to ourselves and the planet itself?

Some thinkers see man’s increasing tendency toward disorder, destructiveness, and darkness as rooted in patriarchy, or in the Agricultural Revolution, or in the Industrial Revolution. To my mind, these and other historical or cultural developments are secondary; the root is in the evolution of ‘higher thought’ itself.

The phrase ‘higher thought’ privileges man, and reveals a tendency to idolize the human adaptive pattern of symbolic thought, rather than understand its place, or lack of place in the natural order.

Since the cognitive threshold to ‘fully modern humans’was crossed about 100,000 years ago, the human brain and ‘human nature’ have remained essentially unchanged. Remove a Cro Magnon child from Europe and raise her in Los Angeles, and she would become as conditioned in this culture as any other child.

It’s worth reflecting on the fact that all other animals fit within and derive their sustenance from adapting to a single ecological niche. Only humans (on this planet anyway) evolved an adaptive pattern that enabled us to break the bonds of niche.

That adaptation is, at bottom, the ability to intentionally remove parts of the environment from the whole, accrue knowledge about them (animals, plants, and minerals), and exploit and recombine these reified ‘things’ in as many ways as our minds can conceive.

This constellation of cognitive abilities is the source of both our success as a species, and our alienation from nature and each other. In one sense therefore, man did not go wrong, but evolution went wrong in us.

The human condition is much more complex and subtle than anyone can entirely encompass of course, but one can have insights that give the broad strokes, and perhaps point toward the way out of man’s quickening spiral of fragmentation and darkness.

The trajectory of human history is the opposite that the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin believed. Rather than an ascending spiral of evolution progressing to an imagined ‘Omega point’ (the maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe is purportedly evolving), the cycles of history have been accelerating in the other direction, generating increasingly deep and global crises, now requiring an evolutionary leap to resolve.

In short, evolution produced a brain capable of consciously manipulating its environments, rather than living unconsciously within ecological niches. The hardware (increased gray matter and complexity) that came with the evolution of symbolic thought gave us the capacity for self-awareness, but the software of self-centeredness threatens to destroy everything.

Egocentricity (not just in the individualistic sense, but also as ‘my family,’ ‘my religion,’ ‘my country’) is not the inherent and immutable sine qua non of human nature. But it is a very strong tendency and ancient habit in all cultures.

In the final analysis, because thought is a separative mechanism into which we generally don’t have insight, it is projected and idolized as the basic principle of the universe. ‘God’ is perfect thought.

Humankind internalized separation as the ‘me and mine,’and as ‘us vs. them.’ That is the ‘original sin,’ or rather, ongoing mistake that we now have no choice but to address at the root within ourselves.

In this view, darkness and evil don’t have any supernatural basis, and don’t require theological explanations. Rather, they are inevitable and accreting byproducts of the unwise use of symbolic thought.

Self-made fragmentation is flattening and deadening everyone and everything But is it also ever more urgently driving a conscious transmutation in the human brain, allowing us to make the next evolutionary leap?

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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