What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big
investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible
healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together
they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending
catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future.
That’s because the problems these ideas are designed to
solve, critical as they are, are symptoms of an even more profound problem: the
implicit values of a global economic and political system that is driving
civilization toward a precipice.
Even with the best of intentions, those actively working to
reform the current system are a bit like software engineers valiantly trying to
fix multiple bugs in a faulty software program: each fix complicates the code,
leading inevitably to a new set of bugs that require even more heroic
workarounds. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t just the software:
an entirely new operating system is required to get where we need to go.
This realization dawned on me gradually over the years I spent researching my book,
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning.
My research began as a personal search for meaning. I’d been through a personal crisis when the certainties on
which I’d built my early life came crashing down around me. I wanted my life
going forward to be truly meaningful—but
based on what foundation? I was determined to sort through the received
narratives of meaning until I came across a foundation I could really believe
in.
My drive to answer these questions led me to explore the patterns of meaning that different cultures
throughout history have constructed. Just like peeling an onion, I realized
that one layer of meaning frequently covered deeper layers that structure the
daily thoughts and values that most people take for granted. It was a journey
of nearly ten years, during which I dedicated myself to deep research in
disciplines such as neuroscience, history and anthropology.
Finally, I discovered that what makes humans unique is that we—to a greater extent than
any other species—have what I call a ‘patterning instinct:’ we are driven to
pattern meaning into our world. That drive is what led humans to develop
language, myth, and culture. It enabled us to invent tools and develop science,
giving us tremendous benefits but also putting us on a collision course
with the natural world.
Each culture tends to construct its worldview on a root metaphor of the universe, which in turn defines
people’s relationship to nature and each other, ultimately leading to a set of
values that directs how that culture behaves. It’s those culturally derived
values that have shaped history.
Early hunter-gatherers, for example, understood nature as a ‘giving parent,’ seeing
themselves as part of a large extended family, intrinsically connected with the
spirits of the natural world around them. When agriculture first emerged about
twelve thousand years ago, new values such as property, hierarchy and wealth
appeared, leading early civilizations to view the universe as dominated by a
hierarchy of gods who required propitiation through worship, ritual and
sacrifice.
Beginning with the ancient Greeks, a radically new, dualistic way of thinking about the universe
emerged, conceiving a split cosmos divided between a heavenly domain of eternal
abstraction and a worldly domain polluted with imperfection. This cosmological
split was paralleled by the conception of a split human being composed of an
eternal soul temporarily imprisoned in a physical body that is destined to die.
Christianity, the world’s first systematic dualistic cosmology, built on the
Greek model by placing the source of meaning in an external God in the heavens,
while the natural world became merely a desacralized theater for the
human drama to be enacted.
The Christian cosmos set the stage for the modern worldview that emerged in seventeenth century
Europe with the Scientific Revolution. The belief in the divinity of reason,
inherited from the ancient Greeks, served as an inspiration for the scientific discoveries
of pioneers such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, who all believed that they
were glimpsing ‘the mind of God.’
But the worldview that inspired these breakthroughs had a darker side. The Scientific Revolution
was built on metaphors such as ‘nature as a machine’ and ‘conquering nature’
which have shaped the values and behaviors of the modern age. The entailments
of a dualistic cosmos inherited from the Greeks have defined our received
beliefs, many of which we accept implicitly even though
they are based on flawed assumptions.
We are told that humans are fundamentally selfish—indeed even our genes are selfish—and that an
efficiently functioning society is one where everyone rationally pursues their own
self-interest. We accept technocratic fixes to problems that require more
integrated, systemic solutions on the premise that nature is just a very
complicated machine—one that is entirely separate from humanity.
Continued growth in Gross Domestic Product is seen as the basis for economic and political success,
even though GDP measures nothing more than the rate at which we are
transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, no
matter how beneficial or harmful it may be. And the world’s financial markets
are based on the belief that the global economy will keep growing indefinitely
even though that is impossible on a finite planet. ‘No problem,’ we are told, since
technology will always find a new solution.
These underlying flaws in our global operating system stem ultimately
from a sense of disconnection. Our minds and bodies, reason and emotion are seen
as split parts within ourselves. Human beings are understood as individuals
separated from each other, and humanity as a whole is perceived as separate
from nature. At the deepest level, it is this sense of separation that is inexorably
leading human civilization to potential disaster.
However, the same human patterning instinct that has brought
us to this precipice is also capable of turning us around and onto a path of sustainable flourishing. We have
the capacity to build an alternative worldview around a sense of connectedness
within the web of life—a sense shared by indigenous cultures around the world
from the earliest times.
I’ve seen this idea disparaged as a New Agey, kumbaya-style mentality even by otherwise progressive
thinkers. However, modern scientific findings validate the underlying
connectedness of all living beings. Insights from complexity theory and
systems biology show that the connections between things are frequently more
important than the things themselves. Life itself is now understood as a
self-organizing, self-regenerating complex that extends like a fractal at
ever-increasing scale, from a single cell to the global system of life on
Earth.
Human beings, too, are best understood not by their selfish
drives for power but by cooperation, group identity, and a sense of fair play.
In contrast to chimpanzees, who are obsessed with competing against each other,
human beings evolved to become the most cooperative of primates, working
collaboratively on complex tasks and creating communities with shared values
and practices that became the basis for culture and civilization. In the view
of prominent evolutionary psychologists, it was our intrinsic sense of fairness
that led to the evolutionary success of our species and created the cognitive
foundation for crucial values of the modern world such as freedom, equality and
representative government.
Just as the values of previous generations shaped history,
so the values we collectively choose to live by today will shape our future. The
cognitive patterns instilled in us by the dominant culture are the results of a
particular worldview that arose at a specific time and place in human history.
This worldview has now passed its expiration date. It is causing enormous unnecessary
suffering throughout the globe and driving our civilization toward collapse.
Rather than trying to transcend what we are, our most
important task is to peel away this received worldview, reach within ourselves
to feel our deepest motivations as living beings embedded in the web of life,
and act on them.