The Darkest Hour Before Dawn Or The Sum Of All Dark Ages?

When even the wealthiest and most famous people in the world cannot escape man’s decimation of the Earth, you know the human crisis is coming to a head. Man cannot continue fragmenting the natural world without inducing a global collapse of natural systems.

Clearly, radical change is necessary, and goes well beyond superficial ideas such as “renegotiating our relationship with fire.” To see what is required to change course, it’s necessary to understand what made Homo sapiens such a dominant and destructive species.

Symbolic cognitive processes are the defining element of our adaptive strategy. Symbolic processes are “our ability to abstract elements of our experience and represent them with discrete mental symbols.” That means consciously separating out ‘things,’ generating names and images for them, and manipulating them, both mentally and physically. Everything we do as humans is based on this ability.

Ironically, given the urban wildfire wiping out huge areas of Los Angeles, man’s control of his environment began with the “domestication of fire” by Homo erectus about a million years ago. And the control of nature, as illusory as it is, has made us an obsessively externally oriented species.

Again with the LA fires, people are externalizing the root cause that lies within us, which inevitably means seeking scapegoats and enemies.

That isn’t just the mindset of MAGA right-wingnuts. In progressive circles, displacement ranges from truisms such as “fossil fuels aren’t liberating us but holding us hostage,” to outright Trumpian stupidities like, “the real enemy is wealthy people invested in the status quo.” (The real enemy is the primitive need for enemies.)

We need to get serious about understanding the root cause of the problem, which is within, not outside us. The darkness in human consciousness -- self-centeredness, greed, power, hate, etc. -- is not only directly proportional to man’s decimation of the Earth, but is the cause of it.

The human brain existed in its present form for thousands of years before some social stimulus unleashed latent cognitive capabilities. At that point humans made the transition from essentially subconscious intuitive functioning to conscious symbolic functioning.

Neanderthals were a tremendously successful but distinct human species, which had achieved the zenith of a lifestyle based on intuitive processes alone.

But then came the Cro Magnons, “fully modern humans,” having migrated from Africa (as have all previous hominid species) after a cognitive breakthrough. They were, in the nomenclature, Homo sapiens sapiens, indistinguishable anatomically and cognitively from us. Our species, with minor intermingling with the Neanderthals, displaced and drove into extinction our cousins, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

Before 100 thousand years ago, there is little evidence of symbolic cognitive functions. However after 40 thousand years ago in Europe (and probably well before that in Africa, though there’s less evidence there so far), there is abundant evidence that an entirely new order of humans had emerged. In cave art, tool- making, sculpture, engraving, music, elaborate burial of the dead and much else, human culture as we know it had suddenly appeared.

There are two shibboleths that have become accepted intellectual currency: the idea that evolution works through gradual progression toward a perfected form; and the idea that ready-made adaptations emerge through natural selection, making creatures more fit to compete.

First, evolution is not evolutionary but revolutionary. Over the history of life on Earth, long periods of stability and even stasis are “punctuated” by short bursts of radical change.

Second, most innovations in nature arise through a process called “exaptation,” where “a characteristic arises in one context before being exploited in another.” The classic example is birds’ feathers, which, millions of years before they were used for flight, evolved for insulation.

That means the human brain arose for other functions, but was later exapted for the uniquely powerful symbolic activity that enabled us to live in a world of our own making, reconstructed in our minds. That dubious superpower has reached its logical end in a putz of a POTUS and his followers denying climate change even exists.

Why did the emergence of conscious symbolic activity in a single species end up being so destructive to other creatures and to the integrality of the Earth itself? Because without self-knowing, the evolution of cognitive symbolic processes (that is, conscious thought) carried with it an overwhelming tendency toward fragmentation.

In our time, the venerated self is a fragment that perpetuates and exponentially increases fragmentation. If you want to halt climate change, first end the illusion of a separate ‘me.’ Then stand against the rich and powerful who continue to benefit from the destruction of the Earth.

How could evolution produce an exaptation antithetical to the seamless wholeness of the rest of nature? “Higher thought” is apparently both a necessary and perilous stage in the emergence of true consciousness.

No one knows what drove the brain’s enlargement before symbolic thought emerged, but one thing is clear: morphology precedes, not follows innovation in nature. In other words, nature can only produce innovations (like flight, or symbolic thought) out of structures that already exist; it doesn’t develop structures for a particular use. That’s the meaning of exaptation.

Given the global ecological, psycho-spiritual, economic and political crisis of humankind, is there a latent exaptation that can be released which will enable us to meet the present climacteric? Yes, the universal capacity for flashes and states of insight.

Insight, unlike intuition, does not have its source in previous experience. Where science is concerned, insight is the pre-verbal flash of understanding of some phenomenon, which then advances scientific knowledge. For example, Newton’s apple and Einstein’s clock are metaphors of the new insights they had into gravity and time respectively.

But insight can also be a post-verbal state of silence, which has nothing to do with knowledge and does not add to it. It is this level and kind of insight that ends symbolic thought’s domination in the brain and keeps thought in its place.

Gaining insight into thought, and entering the limitless space of stillness and silence, has become essential to humanity’s survival and growth. Therefore the work is first internal, not external in stopping man’s headlong rush to fragment nature, culture and the human psyche into broken bits and bytes.

We humans were given the Promethean fire of symbolic thought, but we have turned this gift into a curse upon the Earth, which is now angrily reflecting our collective stupidity back to us.

So is the human brain exapted for awakening insight, just as it was exapted for symbolic thinking? It stands to reason, since a dynamic order and immeasurable intelligence is intrinsic to nature.

Just as the pre-modern human brain contained the potential for conscious thought, our brains, which are generating more and more disintegration by using thought unwisely, contain the capacity for insight sufficient to quiet the mind and use thought wisely.

So are we entering a protracted Dark Age, or stuck at a critical juncture and can radically change? Has the die been cast, or do things hang in the balance?

One feels, during these contemplations, the compassion of the universe for humans in our terrible dilemma. After all, humans didn’t ask for the Promethean fire of symbolic thought.

Nevertheless, it is our responsibility to awaken intelligence within ourselves, and make the transition from symbolic humans to insightful human beings.

Martin LeFevre

Lefevremartin77@gmail

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