CHAPTER FIVE

PAN-HUMAN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

by Hugh M. Lewis

From the advent of fire and the hearth, from the construction of rudimentary shelters, from the manufacture of stone tools, to the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, the wheel, spinning, weaving, and pot-throwing, boating and fishing, and the rise of the pristine civilizations upon earth, cultural inventions and innovations have never ever long been culturally specific secrets. Generally, basic cultural inventions diffuse rapidly and widely out, and frequently similar kinds of inventions and innovations are developed independently in different, otherwise unconnected regions of the earth. In the diffusion of basic cultural inventions, we can refer to the stimulus diffusion of the basic trait and the symbolic complex, the "ideas" that the trait embodies.

The rise of pan-human civilization as defined by the trait complexes of these basic cultural inventions and innovations is in a sense historically irreversible and inevitable. Thus pan-human civilization is by definition a cultural non-specific or general patterning that occurs on the superorganic level of cultural patterning. The rise of pan-human civilization has been linked to the technological developments, especially of the industrial and post-industrial ages, which are tied to the growth of science, industry and political economic institutions abroad. Development in this limited "modern" sense has become a dominant metaphor for human civilization, at least implicitly, though frequently discounted are other important forms of social innovation--standard forms of currency, weights and measures, infrastructure, literacy, medical institutions, democracy, effective bureaucratic administration, national armies, education, the media, and even the notion of the assembly-line itself. Development in the modern sense has meant in general a growth of urban areas, a rise in the material and economic standards of living, the concomitant rise in material affluence, security and convenience, factors of development that are normally considered to be a "trickle-down" by-product of scientific and technological progress, the basic driving forces of modernization.

But it is important to disconnect notions of pan-human civilization and alternative forms of cultural development from the implicitly prescriptive notion of industrial modernization, the center of which is the enlightenment notion of progress toward some utopian dreamtime. There has been a diffusion of many religious ideas and institutions--of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, of millenarian ideas. We can see the spread of nationalisms and the growth of national forms of social organization as distinct aspects of cultural development. Different civilizations have focused upon and elaborated to a height of achievement particular symbolisms and cultural forms which are distinct, and in their style patterning, unique in time and place.

All forms of cultural development represent advances in the sophistication of basic informational patternings of culture, patternings which tend to transcend narrow symbolic or institutional boundaries of specific cultural orientations.

We may place the different forms of development along a similar, parallel set of continuums from the more primitive, less differentiated forms, toward the more sophisticated, effective and articulated forms. In this developmental sense, there is a general increase from simpler to more complex forms. Forms of human consciousness and of symbolization tend to reflect these similar kinds of changes, as do forms of social organization. It is in this sense that we can speak of a broad based continuum of human cultural development that has followed the same basic trends of increasing sophistication and differentiation. Modern and past communities can be ranged according to their relative positioning along different parts of this continuum. In general, on this continuum, we can see a broad, sporadic movement, a curve in which relatively small isolated groups with simple technologies are situated at one end, while there is a gradual increase in the size of the group, the sophistication of the groups institutional organization, the number of traits and inventions acquired by the group, etc.

It is recommended that this type of continuum is what implicitly underlies our contemporary categorizations of different nation-states as more-or-less undeveloped, underdeveloped, developing or overdeveloped, or as third, second and first world economies.

This notion of cultural development must also be critically disconnected from the idea of genetic evolution as something that is somehow "progressive." Cultural development is linked to patterns cultural, and not natural, selection. Cultural development as a form of transculturation--transmission, diffusion and acquisition of new basic traits, occurs unevenly between different groups, but has the same ultimate consequences for all groups. The informational patterning of cultural development is largely phenotypic and acquired after birth--it is rooted in the cultural context in which such development and acquisition co-occur. Thus there is very little direct relationship between genetic and cultural levels of information or selection.

There is much about contemporary modern development which has been, from a strict culture or historical standpoint, unnecessary. A clear case in point has been the growth of industrial based militarization in the world, the rise of a global arms industry, and the increasing destructive violence of modern warfare.

There is another form of development that we must attend to as having merit in the world. These are forms that have largely lagged behind technological or other forms of innovation. These are the normative development of humankind and what is understood as human development--i. e. education, equal standards of health, wealth, improved quality of life for more people, etc. Conservative politicians and apologists of the predominant modes of capitalist modernization have pointed to the trickle down effect of modern development as a case that it really works. Yet as we approach seemingly insuperable dilemmas of environmental destruction and pollution, human overcrowding, alienation, the mechanical dislocation and replacement of human labor, we face growing environmental and social problems that are not adequately addressed within the current capitalist world system. Normative development must include the realization of human rights, freedoms from numerous forms of victimization and exploitation which are prevalent in the world, the promotion of peace and pacifist values of non-violence, self-actualization and creativity.