A Sapient Society - Reflections

Upon Reflection

On Monday I posted a wild idea for a sapient society, actually a sort of architectural framework for how a society of any scale might be functionally organized to reflect a human-centered yet Ecos-balanced approach to living. At the time I thought this was sort of radical, but then on reflection I realized that this organization is exactly what we evolved in the first place!

Ancient tribes of humans had something of this architecture in their structure. The core has always been the collective knowledge of generations and the wisdom of the elders. Certain individuals performed duties of governance, education, communications, etc. And most everybody participated in the operational functions of living, collecting food, wood, constructing shelters, etc. In other words, we humans have always been constructed to work in social structures like this. Large (120-150 people) or small (20-30 people), tribes have been the social and cultural context for human evolution for a really long time.

We just kind of screwed up when agriculture allowed us to start modifying this basic plan and growing our social units beyond a comfortable size.

No one was to blame really. It wasn't anyone's fault that we didn't have the foresight to see the kind of problems that would emerge from restructuring our normal social organization in order to more efficiently accommodate the needs of a farming life. We are, after all, adaptive. Agriculture put emphasis on a different set of skills from tribal living. The knowledge core (my university of noesis) had to become much more focused on specialization. Schools and trade guilds were invented to fulfill the disciplinarian role of education, to make specialists for efficiency purposes. The stored knowledge and wisdom became oriented toward seasonal time scales. Governance started to rely more heavily on a top-down autocratic kind of command and control rather than guidance.

What was missing was knowledge about ourselves, about our humanness. Early civilization was built on the best guesses anyone could make about how to best organize. All of these civilizations were 'self-organizing' with whatever knowledge of human nature seemed available. And, too, don't forget that a lot of causal explanation for human nature and the way the world worked was based on the belief in unseen spirits and gods. Let's face it, we were pretty ignorant about an awful lot having to do with our own natures. What developed was a kluge of organization, a Rube Goldberg design working with the best tools we had at the time. That included slavery and war. That included giving in to materialism (remember we evolved in an environment of scarcity, so when technology started producing plenty we got greedy) and creating unnecessary opulence. We created kings and priests and generals and overlords.

Deep in the human psyche we have always had the desire to organize for mutual support and cooperation. All of our failed and semi-successful attempts to set up commerce and a polity have, at root, been attempts to embody the utopian ideal of the tribal organization.

Things just got too big and too complicated before we really understood. All of our 'isms' and 'ists' are nothing more than groping, sometimes desperate, searches for the way back to humanity. Socialism isn't bad. Capitalism isn't bad. Even fascism isn't inherently bad in the sense that it seeks organization around a 'knowledge' core. The problem with all of them is that those cores (state control, free markets, and their various combinations with a 'ruling class') were not based on wisdom and knowledge/understanding of the larger meaning of human existence. The state was created in a vain attempt to support the individuals but ended up turning humans into machines and instruments.

I'm not calling for anything really new in the 'new social order'. I'm calling for something very old, very primordial in human consciousness. The only thing new is a better (though hardly complete) understanding of what it means to be human. We now understand that we are not angels or separate from nature, but an integral part of the grand evolutionary story. We're just part of the latest chapter. And we have our faults and foibles as cognitive creatures just as any species has its weaknesses when it comes to natural selection. We now know that we screwed up when we put wisdom on the back burner in favor of material wealth. But we also know we did it out of ignorance and can forgive ourselves.

That is, we can forgive ourselves if we have learned anything from our mistakes and resolve to correct those mistakes. That is almost certainly the only way we will win forgiveness from nature.

Can we devise new tribes? Can we organize new social arrangements along the lines I've outlined? Are there among us those who can live human lives recognizing a core of wisdom and knowledge and understanding as the organizing principle? Can we begin, in some small ways to recapture our humanity without giving up appropriate technology (like communications)? Or am I still just a dreamer of utopia?

Comments

[Martin]

George,

I'm fascinated by your blog, which I follow time ago. I have the same interest as you, so every word you write is almost as if I was "recalling" it in my mind...

I only wanted to let you know this; your work is worth it. Congratulations; thanks for these encouraging and wise words you take the effort to write so often. I would also let you know your writings make a difference: just as I'm reading them and I try to spread the seed, I'm sure there are out there a lot of people feeling the same and looking forward a more humanely built society grounded on our real place in the world, in nature and in the reality.

Excuse my English: I'm a Spanish reader and I do a lot of mistakes in your language :)

[George Mobus]

Martin,

Thank you so much for your kind and encouraging words.

Seeds planted in good soil, with a little watering, grow.

Maybe these will too.

Regards
George
PS. Your English is far better than my Spanish, believe me!