Continued…

The truth is, we don’t really know how to make sense of ourselves—how
we fit into the natural world. When I say we, I don’t mean just you and me. I
mean the global scientific community. The evidence that humans evolved
from a species of great ape is overwhelming. But no one really knows how
to factor that information into our understanding of ourselves.

While the great majority of educated humanity recognizes that we emerged
out of the animal world, no one has been able to produce an evolutionary
model that can explain how we could have become so different from other
animals. Unable to even specify what distinguishes us, evolutionary
scientists deny that such a distinction exists. They attempt to force their
ideas about us into the same molds used to make sense of other animals.

To many, the fact that we don’t know what we are may not seem to be a
problem. Indeed, it could be argued that we are what we are, whether or
not we know what we are. That is a profoundly mistaken idea. We are a
unique kind of being; we are an intelligent life-form. That doesn’t mean we
don’t make stupid mistakes or that we are always rational. It means that
information plays a different role in our survival. We don’t survive, as other
animals do, with the biological resources that nature provides us with.

Human survival depends on our capacity to understand cause and
effect—how things work. It is this intellectual capacity that has enabled us
to make use of nature’s powers and to organize ourselves into vast,
collective complexes. However, our capacity to create technological and
organizational forces ran ahead of our understanding of how these were
impacting our world. We were blind to the ways in which these forces were
degrading the life-sustaining processes of our planet.

An intelligent being survives by what it knows. Our current crisis is not the
expression some inevitable conflict between humanity and the rest of
nature. It is, rather, a reflection of the stage of development we are at.
While our organism is built on a great ape biological platform, we are truly
different from every other animal. Unlike them, we did not emerge fully
formed from our evolutionary process. That puzzling statement embodies a
critically important truth about what we are and the nature of the current
crisis we are facing.

Around 60,000 years ago, the biological phase of our evolutionary
development more or less came to a close. That was when our Homo
sapiens ancestors evolved a fully developed language capacity. Language
holds the key to what we are. With language, intelligence became
separated from knowledge. Intelligence is a capacity an animal is born with;
knowledge is something that is acquired through experience and
communication–learning.

Language enables humans to materialize their thought processes: to
represent ideas with symbols (words). This allows us to share and
collectively process our internal mental states: to re-work our ideas and to
build upon them. With language, humans are able to construct abstract
models of the world—models that elevate our understanding beyond the
information provided by the senses.

Our senses can tell us that creature over there is like certain others—a
lizard. They cannot tell us that it is a reptile—a category that includes
turtles, an animal that our senses tell us is very different from a lizard. Even
less can our senses tell us that it is a vertebrate, a category that includes
such distinctive creatures as fish, amphibians, mammals and birds.
Abstraction allows us to discover an order in nature that transcends the
evidence of the senses.

With language, knowledge not only broke free from the limitations of the
senses, it also broke free from the circle of individual experience. Human
mental capacities were no longer defined by the biology of individual
brains, but rather, become inseparably connected to the pool of knowledge
accumulated by human communities. Language turned knowledge into a
collective, social-historical phenomenon.

The Cultural Bubble

The fact that our knowledge of the world is not the direct product of our own individual experience, but rather, is derived largely from our membership in community, reveals something fundamental about human life. We do not have a direct relationship with nature.

Humans live in a bubble. As I just pointed out, most of what we know about
the world comes to us from our society—our myths, science, histories—the
accumulation of knowledge we have access to. But this bubble is bigger
than knowledge. All our necessities, food and goods, are the products of
the operation of a complex, humanly-constructed economic system. The
way we treat each other, our rights and duties, are regulated by a set of
legal and ethical rules, and are enforced by a network of social institutions.

Our health is ministered to by a scientific establishment and a highly
organized medical care system–and so it goes. Everything we do—from
procreation to art and entertainment, takes place within a social framework
that we have built and that operates by our rules.

This bubble is what anthropologists call culture. It is a construct that stands
between us and the natural world—and it determines how we interact with
that world: how we think about it and what powers we can bring to bear on
it. The problem we face today is that this cultural bubble is driven by
dynamics that are at odds with those that govern the working of the natural
world. If these two can’t be reconciled, it will be our human world that will
perish.

The Awakening

In sum, we are an intelligent being that does not know what it is. This is
what I mean when I say our evolutionary development has not been
completed. With other animals, their evolutionary process could be said to
have come to an end when they have become a distinct species—when the
biology of a community of animals has acquired a form that allows them to
exploit some ecological niche.

We are different. A species that survives by knowledge, whose biology has
evolved not to fit into some specific environment but to accumulate
information—information that enables it to exploit every environment– is
very different. Knowledge has no end point. We are, then, an open-ended
being. Our growth process is never completed. However, while there may
not be a finish line, that does not mean that there are not different stages in
our developmental process. That, I believe, is where we are at today. We
need to complete a critically important part of our birth process: we must
bring the workings of our cultural bubble into line with the laws that govern
the natural world.

There is no ready-made formula for how to move forward. But there are, I
believe, four important elements we must come to terms with.

The first has to do with biological evolution. To understand what we
are, we must first recognize our roots in the animal world—how we
are a part of the stream of life that emerged from the substance of our
planet. At the same time, we must understand how we became so
different from all the others. Both of these are necessary if we are to
understand how we fit into the natural world. Evolution provides the
framework within which the human drama has unfolded.

The second has to do with our cognitive powers. We must deepen
our understanding of our unique intellectual gifts–what they share
and where they differ from those of the animal world. In particular, we
need to understand their shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Our
access to information provided by others is a great source of
strength, but it carries with it a susceptibility to disinformation. While
we have a capacity for objectivity, our perceptions are never entirely
divorced from our wishes, fears, needs, and illusions.

Third, we cannot rescue nature at the expense of our own
development. There is no going backwards. Our role, I have come to
believe, is to bring intelligence into the organization of nature. If we
are to have a future, we will need to build a real partnership between
humanity and the natural world.

And last, we must figure out how to manage our cultural bubble. This
may be the most critical and difficult problem of all. Humanity is going
to have to work together on an unprecedented level if we are to avoid
being a destructive force. That, I believe, will bring us back to the
problem we posed at the beginning of this essay; the need to find a
balance between individual liberty and collective purpose.

These are the issues I would like to pursue on this website.