Back in the early part of the nineteenth century, a group of Scottish philosophers, historians and economists developed a new way of looking at the world.
They decided that human development followed a linear path from more primitive to more civilized. Later thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, added further enhancements to this theory.
All human civilizations, they said, must pass through four stages: hunting, pasturing, agriculture and commerce. Every current society, therefore, must belong in one of these four stages right now, and that stage defines the level of advancement of that society. The tribal societies of Africa and North America were, they said, at the first stage. The nomadic peoples of central Asia and Arabia were at the second stage. Most of the Far East was in the agricultural stage (also called the "feudal" stage), and only western Europe was at the highest stage of human development.
As the Industrial Revolution advanced, of course, the final stage was redefined as "industrial" rather than purely commercial.
This was a convenient fiction for the time. It justified European hegemony over the rest of the world. It provided an ethical basis for colonialism and wars of aggression. Conservatives could use the theory to justify military conquest and mass enslavement of populations. Liberals used it to justify their concept of "the white man's burden," that is, that it was the responsibility of the "civilized" West to bring the rest of the world up to its exalted level, whether the rest of the world wanted to or not.
It was all very scientific, you know. Knowledge of history gave Europe a justification for world dominance.
You and I still see the world through the colored glasses given us by the Scottish "inventors of progress." We see certain societies as "primitive" (in the first stage). We see the "backward" countries of the world as needing our "expertise" to "come into the twentieth century." We think any nation that isn't a western industrial democracy is somehow deficient and in need of modernizing.
This theory was later expanded into other realms of science, as well. Everything, it was decided, followed a definite linear progression. Cosmic determinism, according to Laplace, said that if we were to know exactly where everything in the universe was at any moment, and its direction and speed, we could predict the future position of the stars with absolute certainty. This is often called the "billiard ball theory" of the universe.
Some scientists argued this applied to the human sphere as well as the world at large. Du Bois-Reymond said in 1872 that if we were to know the exact position, direction and speed of all the atoms in the universe we could predict the exact course of human civilization.
Evolutionary thought carried these ideas to another scientific extreme. Although Darwin rejected the idea, others (such as Spencer) taught that the struggle for survival was the primary controlling element behind the linear development of organisms. That is, progress is determined by how successful a species or civilization is in competing and destroying its opponents. This justified capitalism's destructive tendencies admirably.
Marx was caught up in this paradigm as well. He decided that the evolutionary trend in society would continue past the fourth stage into a "classless" system of "superindustrialization." Although he dropped this idea later in life, his followers like Lenin and Mao kept it, and the debacle of Russian and Chinese "communism" resulted.
When you and I look at our world today, our perception of that world is colored by the way we have been taught to perceive history. We talk about "progress" as if it were a scientifically proven entity. We look down our noses at "primitive" cultures. We look with pride at how "advanced" our civilization is.
Never mind that western civilization produced the Crusades, Adolf Hitler, the destruction of the artisan and village structure that originally gave it form, and the only two world wars in history. We have "bought into" the myth of western supremacy.
The particular myopia that clouds our minds in this case is a simple one. We have been taught to view civilization only in terms of machines and energy. Efficient use of machines and energy, according to our point of view, is a sign of advanced culture. Europe developed a mechanized society that harnessed vast resources into war-making and mass production. In the process, millions of people died in combat and millions more were uprooted from ancestral homes and gathered into large cities to feed the ravenous maws of industrialization.
This is good. Backwards people who live peacefully in villages and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. They are "bad." They need the civilizing influence of advanced industrial technology.
Another paradigm that developed about the same time was that of "democracy." All people, it was said, in the industrial societies received equal benefits from the fruits of technology and colonialism. This is patently wrong. When the balance sheets from colonialism are added up, we find that the colonial nation invariably spends more money in arms and transport than it receives in added trade. The common people on both sides are worse off as a result of colonialism, but a tiny minority of people become immensely wealthy.
There have always been two civilizations in every culture -- the society of the rich and the society of the poor. The poor are the vast majority. The rich are the ruling class. The lower classes are kept in their place by myths and lies. We are given the illusion of control through such things as the ballot and education.
Until the ruling classes could be certain of keeping the masses in check, they ruled by pure terror. The history of medieval civilization is one of peasant uprisings and brutal repression. Later, as a more educated common people was needed to run the factories, new methods of control were developed.
Nationalism was invented. The "masses" were made to believe they were a part of something greater than themselves. Patriotism is a perceptive lens that makes us fail to see the absurdity of our own existence. Education became a process of making automatons of citizens. The use of bells ringing every hour in schools and students moving in mass from room to room was begun with the express purpose of preparing students for the automation of factories.
In the west, laws and police systems also serve to keep the lower classes in their place. We have been taught that property is more important than human or environmental need. If one man owns a forest, we are told, he has the right to cut it down to produce paper or lumber or munitions, never mind that a thousand people freeze from lack of firewood, or that a dozen species are driven to extinction.
This is, by the way, a modern concept, and did not really exist until quite recently. Peasants throughout Europe had the right to hunt and obtain wood from any local forest up to the time of the industrial revolution.
Stringent laws and tough police systems are provided us with the avowed purpose of controlling crime and violence. They don't serve that purpose. The most industrialized nations, and the ones with the most stringent laws, also have the highest rates of violent crime. Look at this table of violent crimes per 100,000 in population:
The United States -- 18.8
Great Britain -- 4.5
Germany -- 4.5
Italy -- 2.7
Spain -- 1.4
We are taught we live in the "land of the free" yet we live in one of the most oppressive societies in the world, with more people in our prisons, per capita, than any other industrial nation.
The ballot box is a joke. In our early history, only a small minority could vote -- only white males who owned land. Today, with so-called universal suffrage, we are allowed to choose between two (or at most three) candidates with surprisingly similar viewpoints and goals. Whenever candidates espouse truly "popular" positions, they are labeled "communist" or "subversive" or are simply eliminated by assassination or other means.
When we look at the world around us, we are really seeing not what is actually "out there" but what we have been trained to see. We see a "democracy" in a world controlled by a wealthy minority. We see "progress" in colonialism. We see "civilization" in the most brutal and inhumane system on the planet.
The problem did not begin, however, with the industrial revolution. It goes much further back than that.
We are still seeing the world through the warped mirror of Socrates and Plato and that ilk. They created dualisms of thought that didn't exist before their time and we still filter our world through their logical lenses.
At one time, human beings looked at the world as something of which they themselves were a part. The value of the universe to them was more important than anything else. Whether something was "true" or not was immaterial. If it "worked" for them, it was okay. This allowed humans to live in harmony with their world, because the intrinsic value of everything was important.
Along came Socrates and everything changed. He ruled that only truth was important. It didn't make any difference how "important" something was. If it weren't scientifically provable, it didn't really exist. This way of looking at things produced the mindset for modern scientific thought. It elevated technology to a higher level than such things as ethics and love and friendship.
It also created some concepts that still color our perceptions of the world: mind and matter, form and substance, subject and object. We became separate from the world itself. We became merely observers of a world that was objectively "out there."
We no longer saw that the interaction between ourselves and a butterfly produced a reality that was truly unique. After Plato, the butterfly became nothing but an element of a concrete universe that could be manipulated by humans. A forest no longer is a place where human beings can interact with the environment; it becomes a resource to be exploited.
Ironically, Socratic thinking also inhibited scientific "progress." The invention of the zero, something that cannot be proven using Plato's methods, had to be invented by the nomadic Arabs in order for full industrialization of the west could take place.
When we look at our universe, we do not see what is actually "out there." We see only what we have been programmed to see by the culture in which we live.
Current thinking by particle physicists -- the ultimate result of four thousand years of Socratic thinking -- is now returning more to the Sophist philosophies so effectively destroyed by Plato. The universe is not a determined objective reality, at all, we are discovering.
It is a largely random entity, filled with an almost infinite variety of vibrations which are perceptible at different levels. The inter-reaction of humans with those vibrations of necessity alters them, causing them to become something else.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is an example of this. Whenever we attempt to measure the location and/or speed of an object, we must subject that object to some measuring device. We must touch it with a ruler or project a photon beam at it or something like that. Whenever we measure any object, we alter it. We change it. It is impossible to know anything about any object in the universe without changing it into something other than what it was.
The world is no longer seen to be something alien, "out there." It is now realized (as the Sophists realized thousands of years ago) that the world is a part of ourselves and that each of us carries around with us a separate universe which is constantly changing because of our own actions in that universe.
Seen this way, the warped images of the universe created by our language and our thinking patterns become highly important elements. They can be deadly. We are not capable of really looking at the universe because we are accustomed to seeing only those elements of the universe the controlling interests in society choose for us to see.
We are prisoners within our own minds, shackled by thought patterns and by the lies and myths of the ruling classes of society.
How do we break out of our bonds?
We first must begin to change the way we perceive the world. We must learn to "feel" the world as much as we "visualize" it. We must begin to accept the world as a place of value as well as a place of existence. That is, the quality of the universe is just as important as the "truth" of what may be measured in human terms.
Examine carefully every "truth" you are presented. Don't accept what is presented to you without evaluation of its value as well as its evidential reality. Challenge authority.
What you see is not what is actually out there because your mind interacts with the universe to produce your perceptive reality. If your mind is controlled by others, your perceptive reality will conform to their needs rather than your own.
Blessed be!