The Rise of Human K-Civilization: Trans-culturation & Cultural Convergence

by Hugh M. Lewis

Unlike genetic and gene-culture theories of human adaptation and transmission, historical & archaeological evidence demonstrates amply, in multiple independent instances, and therefore unequivocally, that the primary mechanism of human cultural development and the rise of human technological and cultural civilization, has been the consequence of the horizontal and diagonal transmission of knowledge between people due to the capacity and need of human beings to learn from their environments and adapt to what they learn. Acculturation, defined as the contact and transmission between cultures, can therefore be defined as the principle agency of human cultural change, development and evolution, in very distant, remote times of a forgotten past, as well as in contemporary times of the immediate present.

I have upon multiple instances claimed that the predominant process of human development has been what I've called "trans-culturation" based largely on the diffusion and horizontal transmission of ideas, knowledge and technologies, between different groupings of people, and the selective adaptation and adoption of these "things" to new contexts. Trans-culturation is a pan-human process, and though people may seek to control its outcomes, in the long run it serves to benefit all people equally in the same way. The streamlining of systems and the disappearing sky-line of the future is based upon this central process of trans-culturation, and it identifies the central mechanism underlying the development and evolution of human civilization, whatever the respective or divergent cultural patterns may be of different ethnocultural groupings of humanity relative to particular time and place.

Trans-culturation can be defined clearly from a systems-based perspective in terms of the realization of alternative human culture-based systems, symbolic by design, and the resulting patterns of structural integration of larger and larger human systems, more complexly organized and stratified, and the emergence of epigenetic human adaptive behaviors that are the result of these processes.

In spite of the natural historical tendencies for cultural-linguistic divergence of groupings in relative isolation, and the overall tendencies of human differentiation at individual and cultural levels of integration, the rise of Simultaneous E-Culture is having a long term consequence of overcoming these naturally divisive tendencies with the result being that there is an increasing convergence of human cultural systems along various prototypical lines of patterning, even to the point of the emergence of a single global e-based lingua franca, or e-trade language, or at least set of languages. The convergence of conventional cultures upon a common implicit model of a single, Simultaneous E-culture has the consequence, in trans-culturative terms of inducing global social and structural integration of a single system, and the rise of what I would call Human K-Civilization--which is a form of multi-state system of post-imperial civilization that is better adapted to the long term behavioral and evolutionary needs of the human species in global context. 

K-Civilization can be described as a global infra-structural framework of integration of human beings into a single working system that is capable of transcending all cultural differences and thereby incorporating effectively many diverse groupings of people at the same time. It is a style of human civilization that would, by definition, be K-adapted to the long run of human survival and reproductive success on earth--which means it would be capable of sustaining indefinitely into the future a dynamic equilibrium with the bio-geophysical context upon which human civilization is based.

This sense of civilization exists already in patterning that people are adopting, even if the structural framework for integration on its basis has not yet been fully achieved. It is based upon a framework of cultural reconstruction and resymbolization of reality that requires several generations of people to be fully accomplished and made to take hold in a fully symbolically cohesive manner and in a way that is behaviorally naturalized in terms of their everyday life-worlds.. 

Human K-civilization can be regarded as an expectable outcome of the long term trajectory of trans-cultural and transformational processes of human social development and cultural evolution in general. There is increasing realization that long-term human development and evolution is a non-zero sum game in which non-exclusive control and human cooperation, in selective contexts, pays off in the long run. Nation states, defined along conventional premises, are realizing that they cannot afford to commit their resources to total war, as such a consequence would be entirely self-destructive. Conventional Nation states are becoming increasingly integrated upon structural and social levels, and this process of integration proceeds at a vary rapid pace, in spite of the ossification of authoritarian power structures and obsolete symbolic ideologies or paradigms that have little adaptive bearing to the current and rapidly changing world situation.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I