A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE EVOLUTION OF WESTERN CONSCIOUSNESS

In order to fully appreciate the emerging worldview, it’s important to see it in historical perspective.  Western society has been through at least six paradigm shifts over the past five thousand years. The following summary of these various stages is very oversimplified, but provides a general idea of the evolution of consciousness in the West.

World events are governed by a pantheon of gods. Problems such as bad weather or natural disasters are caused by angry gods. In order to make things work out better, you pray and make animal or human sacrifices to them. Everything in nature contains a spirit. There is a spirit in every mountain, river, and lake, and in every creature large or small. The earth is like a Great Mother with whom humanity has a merged, symbiotic relationship.

Ancient Greece saw the beginning of two great traditions of the Western mind. Plato and other idealist philosophers argued that only the forms of everything were ultimately real. In a sense, only mental reality was real, and the material world was a partially illusory outpicturing of absolute ideas. These ideas could not be understood through the senses but only grasped through intuition. On the other hand, Aristotle, and subsequent materialist philosophers, argued that the material world was real, forms could only exist when embodied in material objects, and that human sense-experience was the point of departure for all knowledge. Thus he established the foundation for the later development of science.

In the West, a Christian God reigned over everything. Human action was not explained— only judged as good or evil in accord with whether it followed the "Will of God." Reality was organized into a rigid hierarchy, with God at the top. Under God were angels, and on earth, the divinely ordained representatives of God were the Pope and kings. Under kings were the nobility, and under them ordinary men. Under men were women, and at the bottom were children and the lowly beasts. Knowledge of one’s senses was considered inferior, and the nature of reality was legislated by what the Church and what church scholastics said was true. If you disagreed, you might be tortured or killed.

During the Renaissance, a major break of the western mind away from the Church occurred. Nature revealed its secrets not through divine revelation but through evidence of the senses. Science and the scientific method provided an objective, dispassionate view of the universe that could be understood in terms of empirically tested principles and mathematical laws. From the beginning of the Renaissance down through the early 18th century, God was still understood to be behind everything, if only to set it all in motion. During the time of Bach, Kant, and Voltaire, the universe was compared to an elaborate clockwork set in motion by God.

During the Enlightenment in the West—the late 18th and 19th centuries—God and all spiritual forces were entirely removed from the universe. Reality became a neutral object of scientific study without any inherent meaning or purpose. Meaning and purposes were viewed as "subjective" constructs of the human mind that might be falsely projected onto the "objective" world of nature. The universe itself had no meaning; it was a complex material system explained by the causal and statistical laws of science.

Since nature has no inherent meaning or purpose, why not exploit it for the sake of bettering our lives. Just use all the oil, coal, natural gas, water, forests, and animals we need to maximize the quality of life for everyone. Technology will solve all of our problems and eventually lead us to a utopian existence.

The problem with this view is that the world’s population increased six fold from one to six billion between 1800 and 2000. By the end of the 20th century, unrestrained technological and industrial growth left us with an environmental disaster of such magnitude that the very survival of humanity and all other species was at stake.

Modernism is still the dominant view of our time. It leaves us primarily with science and technology (devoid of any spiritual perspective) to find our way out of the global crisis we’ve created. Technology can, of course, solve many of the problems posed by humanity’s overuse of fossil fuels. New, clean energy technologies (wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels) can and are being developed. However technology alone, without a shift in values toward increasing reverence for nature, as well as increasing compassion for the 3 billion impoverished people on the earth, will not be enough.

Postmodernism is a development out of modernism among certain more educated segments of Western society. Since the universe and world are ultimately meaningless, whatever meaning they have is something created by culture. Each culture creates its own meaning and projects it onto the world. Since there is no overarching God or spiritual force (and, in fact, no absolutes of any sort), there are no universal standards to live by. Each of us is simply a product of our particular culture, and, as a result of socialization, we live according to the arbitrary cultural norms we were raised with. When there is a question of what is the right or ethical thing to do, pragmatism rules the day. Do whatever works to preserve the order of society. There can be no God or spiritual basis for ethics or anything else we cherish. Our values are our own making. We live our lives by utilitarian values and what maximizes satisfaction of our biological and ego needs.

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