THE WORLD

by Hugh M. Lewis

The world has become, as far as we are concerned, an increasingly and almost exclusively human world. Humankind emerged from a world dominated by nature, and human civilization became predominant in place of nature. As human civilization has developed, nature has been steadily reduced to a sterile remnant of what it once had been. Whereas previously human civilization was always surrounded by and encapsulated by the wilderness, it is now human civilization that surrounds and encapsulates nature. Nature survives only in the interstitial cracks of human civilization.

Because the world is predominantly human, it must now be measured in terms of its human dimensionalities rather than in terms of its natural vistas. It is an artificial world of human-made asymmetries, straight lines, sharp angles, and continuous curves rather than the natural bilateral symmetry, jagged edges and chaotic twists and turns of natural design. Because of its humanness, it is a world to be measured in terms of its social differences and human living spaces, and in the many ways in which humankind has adapted the earth’s natural environments to its own needs and how it has adapted itself to the resulting world.

It is futile to try to turn back the pages of history to a pristine period before the predominance of human civilization in the world. Our natural reaction to the civilized abominations of our own doing is to seek a primordial world—a perfect, unsullied paradise—that is both before and beyond the eruptions of human time. But any such attempt to return deliberately to a world before time and outside of the confluence of human history is, at best, bound to end in pathological isolation and social sterility, and, at worse, in unnecessary destruction and disaster for the human world as a whole. The most we can hope for now is to try to brake the forward momentum of modernizing historical change long enough to cause a general shift in its overall direction in a way that will prove less costly and devastating for the natural world. Many human actions and activities that were unconsidered and done with complete abandon just a few decades ago are now becoming increasingly taboo and even immoral from a human and natural ecological point of view. There has been a steadily rising human awareness, almost a worldwide collective conscientiousness about the importance of fundamental environmental issues. This increasing awareness of the state of the world is the necessary corollary of our own human sense of history. We can no longer freely trespass upon the natural world with the impunity and immunity of its indirect consequences and unexpected reverberations that our forbearers of civilization had. We are becoming increasingly subject to the consequences of our own machination in a fragile, delicately interdependent world.

The human world is one characterized by its lack of balance, its substitute artificiality, its social and natural asymmetry, its historical linearity and lack of evolutionary ecology. The natural world is composed of a delicate and intricate web of living and evolving interdependencies. It is an elaborate system of checks and balances and of mutual systemic controls that evolved over many millennia—gradually and toward increasing stability. Natural selection worked against the long-term survival of evolutionarily extreme forms and designs that tended to threaten or upset the balances and controls of life on earth. Exceptions to the rule were either modified or eliminated. Evolution has long had an inexorable kind of selective, systemic rationality—a natural logic of its own that promoted the survival of the whole and the many over the interests of the part and the few. As humankind wrests control from the natural world, it would serve as well to heed the earth's ages old, worldly wisdom. We have developed a civilization that is increasingly beyond our control in a world that is increasingly under our control. In this new world system, it is the few and the exceptional whose interests are parasitically promoted over the needs and interests of the many and the whole. The choices have long been recognized and available to us, and yet we have consistently failed to meet the challenge that our own human survival and human nature has posed for the world. The man made logic of our own world system of civilization is proving to be fundamentally pathological because, in its own pursuit of development, it systematically destroys the basis of its own growth and survival in the natural world.

We live in a human world of mass production and mass consumption, mass media and mass ideology, mass bureaucracy and mass organization, mass money and mass psychology, mass education and mass mobilization, mass needs and mass solutions. Our mass oriented world is fundamentally impersonal and alienating of individual subjectivity, systematically substituting artificial symbols for natural needs and inclinations. The individual is confronted existentially with the success imperative of ‘participate or perish’ in the mass orientation of the world. Few if any alternatives remain viable to the individual rather than this imperative for participation, which are not becoming increasingly co-opted and restricted by the mass orienting world system. Almighty money, and its pursuit, is becoming the secular symbol of this mass oriented system in place of the emblem of God, which has been declared dead by the nineteenth century existentialists. Money buys the passport of entry into the system. It is the ticket for citizenship and participation within the world system. It is a paradox that though everyone is engaged equally in the pursuit of money within the system, the poor only become poorer and the rich get richer. The only things that their hard earned money can buy for the poor people are the very things that the rich profit from, while the entire energy and lifetime of the many poor people is virtually consumed in the processes of production of those very things that they spend their money on and that earn a profit for the wealthy, who in turn produce virtually nothing in the world or for the world except words, waste and human want.

The pathos and the fundamental irrationality of our world system is not too difficult to discover. In spite of the tragic prospects of a world population bomb, international family planning and birth control policies remain poorly underdeveloped and, even in many cases, blatantly disregarded or even resisted in practice. Though pollution grows at a daily rate in every aspect of the earth’s environment, the basic processes producing this pollution remain unrestricted and even accelerated in their developmental promotion. The earth’s finite base of nonrenewable resources are being quickly consumed, and for the most part, unrecycled, while viable and more healthy alternatives have long been known to exist, and the technologies to develop and exploit these alternative resources long available. Those few resources that are considered renewable, the water table and the forest stands, the earth itself, are being consumed faster than they can be renewed. Perhaps the earth’s most valuable and precious resource of all, life, is being rapidly obliterated in its biological, evolutionary potential and in its ecological coordination. All this in the pursuit of money and the corrupt kind of power that only money can buy. These trends in the development of the world system are increasingly out of control, and ultimately only a very small minority of humankind are actually benefiting from these net developments. The ultimate madness of the mass oriented system is that even those who most benefit from its development will also be the very ones who have the most to lose from its inexorable breakdown. The madness of such a world system is its mutually assured destruction—a destruction of the whole world in which no one, no matter how wealthy, can escape.

It is something of a unhappy coincidence that the impending world crisis lends itself readily to millennial and apocalyptic prophecies. It is almost as if such prophetic visions were ideologically self-fulfilling or were based upon some fundamental, predictive understanding of human nature and human history. It is unfortunate because it is liable to be these very analogies that will bind us to the realities and prevent us from seeking reasonable solutions to our world problems.

But there is more than a single grain of truth to these prophetic histories in that it is the very values that they preach—frugality, humility, spiritual purity, faith and devotion, as well as brotherhood, love and charity—that are likely to be the most needed virtues, and least common vices, in our global climax.

Though Protestant and puritanical, such values are not necessarily laconic and militaristic. People preoccupied with the production of weapons, with the power of weapons, with the arts, sciences and strategies of war, have little time left over for the development of the arts and science of life and living. It does not need to be reiterated that the production of weapons in the world has contributed nothing of net and lasting value to the welfare of the world, but has only led to unnecessary destruction and waste.

To combine a Protestant and puritanical spirit with a pacifistic political orientation is a much-needed formula for salvation in an increasingly human world. We have only to witness the modern development of a democratized Japan to see how well such a formula works.

It is imperative that we begin teaching our children how to value life and living, and how to make the most of peace, rather than making of peace merely the preparation for yet another bloody, useless war. If we do not begin soon, not only can we blame ourselves, but our children will grow up to blame us as well.

We must recognize and acknowledge the intrinsic merit of the cultivation of any and all forms of artistic production, as well as the intrinsic value of improvement of human development, no matter how subjectively and qualitatively defined, and no matter how poorly measured by quantitative indices. It is a paradox that the vast amounts of human time, energy and money wasted upon the production and improvement of weapons contributes virtually nothing to the improvement of the general quality of life of humankind, while next to nothing is left over for the cultivation of human arts that take nothing from life and living that it does not give back in a qualitatively improved form.

It is only the military minded and money mongering who fail to see anything valuable in human arts that cannot be counted and which cannot be used as a means of controlling, exploiting and destroying others. It only speaks of the warped values of a modern humanity that sees art as a waste of time and weapons only as a means for making money and protecting property.

Because it is becoming an increasingly human world, its dimensionalities must be increasingly measured in terms of the general human condition and of the consequences of human stress and response, initiative and reaction within the world. Old formulas of human nature and of a kind of social Darwinism must be given up in favor of newer formulas that do not equate the patternings of human history with the dynamics of human evolution, and that do not confuse the causes of cultural change with the consequences of biological predisposition and genetic heritage, which in general only results in war and conflict arising from competition. It will do us little good to see the modern developments of the world as a by-product of human evolution, and it may well be the case that these kinds of ideologies even promote and legitimate the kind of status quo and may prevent the positive kinds of historical changes that may help to resolve our modern world crisis. We can ill afford to continue promoting ideologies that hold that human historical developments in the world are basically predetermined by human biological and evolutionary destiny. If anything, historical civilization had led to the destruction of human nature and its own evolutionary platform.

If we destroy nature, then we are destroying ourselves, because we are a part of nature.

The frustration of human creativity must eventuate in human destructiveness. The frustration of human love results in human hate. The frightening aspect of modern machineries of destruction and death are not that they depend upon human aggressiveness and hate for their functioning, but they are largely impersonal and indifferent in their design and operation. The tyranny of modern evil is not the same kind of rational tyranny that depended upon the promotion of basic human aggression and hate for its function, but it is a tyranny of the fundamentally alienated and anomic. Its irrationality is its very rationality. A person can be a creative lover of humankind and yet still feel compelled by reason to push a button that leads to the distant destruction of a faceless human enemy. The role of aggression and hate remain mostly only symbolic and ideological in the cultivation of popular support for modern machineries of death—it is at best a displaced aggression and distant hatred, indirect in destructiveness. Modern tyranny is cold and calculating, corrupt and controlling, and yet it remains mostly invisible in the daily lives of people.

We are faced with a fundamental existential alternative for the future. If creating order from chaos and pattern from randomness is what is constitutive of life, and making the ordered chaotic and random is what is constitutive of death and destruction, then creativity is antientropic and life giving while destructiveness is chaos producing and death making. It follows that a creative world is one in which more is produced from less, and something comes from nothing. A destructive world is precisely the opposite, where less is produced from more, and nothing comes from something.

We have a choice to become creative in our world, or to remain destructive of it.

Though we must act in the world, we can never know all of the consequences of our actions. Nothing that humans do is ever completely condemnable nor completely condonable. There is no human motive that is pure and unmixed. There is no person without two sides, and no system without contradiction and double-standards. There is neither all good nor all bad in the world, but that people make it seem so. Because we must act even though we cannot ultimately know either the causes or consequences of our actions, we must not be too quick to presume to know or judge the actions of others in the world. It is in the recognition of the inherent possibility of our own evil in the world that we come to understand, and to ultimately forgive the evil of others.

Poor motives are frequently thinly disguised, and it requires little insight of wisdom to see through the veil to the human substance beneath. Under the skin beneath the veil of illusion there is always a veritable mine of human potentiality and virtue.

Imaginary visions of human possibility always hide in the shadows cast by the light of day.

Between the black and the white is an infinite field of gray composed of a rainbow of colors.

Those who are blind to their illusions are susceptible to the illusions of others. Those who are convinced of their own importance, are subject to the suggestion of superiority and power of others in the world. In this way we can say that in a world so composed of illusion, the blind lead the blind, and the one eyed would surely be king.

When people learn to see themselves for what they really are, they then inevitably become ashamed of their own nakedness. It is always sobering to laugh at the irony of the common nudity of the human condition. Beneath all our clothes and all our illusions, we are all primitive children of nature.

The nearly overwhelming sense of security and solidarity of a mass oriented society is that everyone seems to be doing the same things no matter how foolish it may really be. This is an utterly false and dangerous illusion that justifies the method of social order by the blind madness of the crowd. Principles of social organization can be simply reduced to the problem of crowd control. It is obvious where such principles come from—the social psychology of crowds and theory of behavior modification. The masses of people across the world are rendered increasingly susceptible to the inducements and incentives of the world system, at the same time being rendered increasingly predictable and controllable as well.

Human civilization emerged from the darkness of the natural order of things. It dawned with the light of a new age. Civilization came to superimpose a human made order on top of the natural scheme of things. Analogies to these metaphors of darkness and light are the corresponding metaphors of night and day, the sun and the moon, sleep and wakeful activity, birth and death, the blindness of vice and the virtue of vision, the darkness of ignorance and the light of understanding. Frightening unknown creatures of the imagination stalk the night by the light of the glowing moon, while it is the human being toiling beneath the bright sunlight who commands the day. Upon these basic metaphors and their somewhat fortuitous associations we have built a world civilization. What difference might it have made if our mythos began instead as ‘in the beginning was the circle of fire.’