by Hugh M. Lewis

In the 1930's Ruth Benedict issued a plea in her essay "Anthropology and the Abnormal" for greater tolerance of the range of human variation, especially set against what she interpreted correctly as the constraints and contradictions of contemporary American culture and character. That plea reverberates today on American political platforms and in court rooms adjudicating rights for homosexual unions, abortion, race-based discrimination and the mentally ill. This plea was based on the notion that human variation existed on a continuum that varied widely, not only on the basis of cultural factors, but also for psychological factors as well.

If we exam the fundamental unit of human systems, the human individual, we discover a phenomenal complexity of pattern that defies even until today tidy nomothetic systems of classifications as for instance that found in the DSMIV used by psychiatrists in the categorization of mental illness and behavioral deviance. However we may lump and classify human beings, individual's still remain unique to themselves in the synergistic patterning of their own behavior.

This phenomenal complexity is largely due to the highly developed frontal & cortical regions of the human brain, associated development of nerve & muscular structures of the hands and mouth/facial regions, and an evolution of an extremely generalized and adaptive form of behavior that is based upon the capacity to symbolically manipulate and manage the environment in fairly arbitrary and willful ways. This behavior and brain development furthermore occurred in social contexts that can be described as cultural in pattern, if we ascribe to human beings the unique condition of being cultural animals. (Culture in this case being defined technically as non-instinctive behavior that is learned or acquired post-partum within an environmental context or set and that is transmitted from one individual to another in social groups that endure successive generations. In fact forms of primitive culture and learning have been more recently described and demonstrated in a comparative manner for many different groupings of the Great Apes, as well as for other various primates)

Each individual human being, when looked at from the standpoint of being a human system, a microcosm in a larger sea of humanity, constitutes an entirely unique set of adaptive patterns that obtains, in the words of Jean Piaget, a form of equilibriation with the adaptive constraints of their environment. This overall pattern of adaptive behavioral equilibrium, somewhat loosely defined as "habitus," that is exhibited uniquely by each human being, whether we are a schizophrenic street person, a president of a large company or nation, a school teacher or a repeat criminal in a high security prison, may be said in the parlance of General Systems Theory to be a form of "emergent pattern" or set of synergistic properties that are associated with the identity and life-trajectory of any particular individual. 

In my own household, there are four individuals spanning three generations, three females and myself, a male. It is observable from day to day, week to week, and month to month, that each individual has an entirely unique habitus associated with their life and behavior centered as this is on the home environment. I would even include our pet dog, a young female mixed, who also has her own more narrowly defined but no less interesting sense of habitus. For the most part, these five sets of behavioral patterns occur and coexist in a shared environment without significant disruption or significant disrepair of relations or destructive interference of behavior. There are occasions of argument in the conversational apparatus, marking some subjective psychological discrepancies of pattern due primarily to age, gender and values, and sometimes a background sense of "being too close and enclosed" too much of the time between us. But otherwise, it is evident that each individual within this common behavioral setting has carved for themselves an adaptive sense of equilibrium that requires to some extent their own contexts, possessions, daily and weekly routines and habits. Very few demands are placed between individuals in this context, except for parental demands on our daughter.

The point of this digression is simply to illustrate what can be taken as a fairly healthy, if unusual pattern of complex human habitus in a shared context. Unfortunately, not all shared contexts in the world are so blessed or fortunate, in spite of whatever circumstances. We may say that the promotion of each individuals sense of habitus in the world is appropriate, as long as this sense of habitus does not come at the expense of other individuals and their own sense of habitus. It is what we get when we have one-man dictatorships who rule by fear and a system of authoritarian violence. In such a context, of which there have been and remain many such instances in the world, one person's enlarged sense of habitus is allowed to dominate, manipulate, exploit and control the sense of habitus of entire nations of people at the same time, constraining and foreshortening those lives in every conceivable manner.

If we define the individual as a fundamental human system, and the sense of equilibrium of that system as their adaptive habitus, then we can define the larger social contexts in which this sense of habitus becomes expressed and played out in the state-path trajectories of the individual human system, as the human meta-system. There have been and are many such human meta-systems. We understand these meta-systems anthropologically as cultural patterns and systems of adaptation that tend to take on a complexity and uniqueness that is even greater than that ascribable to the individual people who are part of such systems. Sociologically we tend to look at such meta-systems from the standpoint of social institutions, functions and patterns that may be more or less formalized, and usually from the standpoint of the larger state or structural system in which social groups are embedded. 

From the standpoint of the development of human meta-systems on earth, as a function of the natural history of human evolution, I will venture the following analytic stadial model:

1. A prolonged pre- or proto-cultural period of human group adaptation that was probably remarkably similar to patterns found among extant primate groups, from the earliest dawn of the hominid line, probably 6 to 4.5 million BP, down to the first rise of modern & archaic Homo sapien and Homo neanderthalensus populations approximately 2 to 100,000 BP. The transition between pre, proto- or full cultural patterns of adaptation are probably not clear and probably emerged independently in many different periods and places over a very long span of time.

2. A traditional cultural pattern of human group adaptation, based primarily upon a form of oral human information transmission, that probably arose among Archaic and Neanderthal populations, associated with group hunting/foraging patterns, language development, and related technologies, and that was obviously in full swing with the advent of modern Homo sapiens populations about 65 to 45 thousand BP, and that shows evidence of rapid development from about 30,000 BP forward.

3. A conventional cultural pattern of human group adaptation based upon written script and literacy, that arose at the latest between 4 and 5,000 BC and probably earlier, associated with the rise of patterns of domestication, state formation, centralization of governing authority, and that became full blown with the advent of alphabetic scripts and the rise of complex state civilizations.

4. A post-conventional cultural pattern of human group adaptation that is based upon new computer-automated technologies of electronic information storage and transmission. We are witness today to the emergence and transition of this fourth period of human group adaptation, and this is the basis of what we call today the Information Revolution.

We are really in the throes of the fourth Information revolution that humankind has experienced in its long evolutionary history from its first rise on the forest plains of Africa 5 million years ago. This pattern reflects directly the rise and transformation of human knowledge systems in context, that is the result of the predominant method of communication and information storage that a society depends upon.

The prediction is made that if this trend continues in an historical sense, there should emerge gradually a structural pattern of integration of human systems into a single global meta-system, and a single "meta-cultural" patterning that can be described as global in scope and orientation. This pattern should "transcend" traditional and conventional ethno-cultural patterns that tend to be localized and nationalistic in scope, and these latter orientations should become "embedded" in the background beneath an overlay produced by trends in globalization.

A key aspect of this process, and a key theoretical factor in understanding human systems as complex and unique, one of a kind in the entire universe, in fact, is what can be referred to as the symbolic transformation and resulting plasticity of human behavior in adaptation to shared environments. This is a critical component of the development of human meta-systems that most state theorists, looking to war and to materialist mechanisms of social or ecological transformation, fail to take into account, and this serves as the key point of departure for the entire human systems framework.

It may be said unequivocally that human beings, in their habitus, are symbolic creatures and rely upon their brain-behavioral-group apparatus of symbolization as the basis of their adaptive habitus in the world. Impulses, drives and needs that are in dogs rather direct, instinctively bound and in a sense, more "honest" if sometimes vulgar and violent, are in human beings transformed through the complex interplay of a variety of mechanisms, including home life, play, school, work, and social interaction in various contexts, into a large suite of possible forms of complex behaviors that can be arbitrarily manipulated, channeled, sublimated, and indirectly expressed in numerous constructive or destructive, adaptive or maladaptive ways.

To summarize an overwrought e-say, and to make a very long and old human story short, I will conclude this by stating that in the rise of a global meta-cultural system, it remains undecided how the future pattern of human development will be ultimately decided. It is possible, given recent evidence of the last Century especially, that a totalitarian regime, whether capitalist or otherwise, could arise to a position of global domination, and that the entire human meta-systems framework would come under the control and guise of a very limited number of individuals. If we observe the world system today, and patterns of global stratification, we see ultimately developed a scenario not too different from this pattern.

Returning finally to Ruth Benedict's plea for greater socio-structural tolerance for the wide-range of human variation, I would suggest that the future of the fourth Information Revolution that is resulting in the further transformation of human society and human meta-systems, can and in a sense must ultimately be founded upon a call for wide-range tolerance to the full spectrum of human behavioral adaptation similar to what Ruth Benedict stated 70 years ago. The main problem set for the rise of what can be interpreted as a fair and just global meta-system is the open meta-cultural development of individual and group patterning of habitus, i.e., the problem of human development on the individual and group levels of analysis. In other words, what is called for centrally is the promotion of strategies of human development upon multiple levels simultaneously, for the individual, the family, the local or regional community, and the larger nation or state-system, as well as globally. These encompass programs of nutrition, health, poverty-relief, infra-structural & super-structural development, rehabilitation, education, etc. The uniqueness of each individual, and their habitus, must become better realized and appreciated in a constructive and productive manner. This is as true for rich and poor alike, for the insane as for the sane. Hence modernization, development & globalization is more than just about economic development benefiting mostly an elite, it is foremost about human development in all its natural and cultural contexts.

A central part of the phenomenon of the empowerment of the Internet is that it makes these forms of development, at all levels and in all unique instances, not only possible, but truly feasible.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I