From tolerance, the human future...

A fascinating article based on experiments in social collaboration among animals may suggest new clues to the differences between human beings and their closest evolutionary cousins, which may help explain the basis of human intelligence -- and our common (and future) achievement: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/woods_hare09/woods_hare09_index.html

Roughly stated, researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare note that humans have evolved the capacity to have a "theory of mind" which gives each of us the desire to know what others are thinking and the determination to find that out -- a capacity that no other species possesses, though some domesticated animals seem to have developed the reading of social cues on which this theory of mind may be based, even faster than physical evolution can explain.

But unlike animals, we don't have to rely on interpreting body language to collaborate with each other. We've developed language based directly on thought, expressed in words. Unlike our evolutionary cousins, we've also learned to set aside the aversion to cooperating with others who are outside our immediate family group and build collaborative networks (and cooperation is inconceivable without exchanging words). Stated another way, we've done things together on the basis of communicating with and tolerating those who are different from us. Thus it might be said that we've built civilization, not on zero-sum material competition, but on enlarging our sense of affinity for one another.

All this may give new meaning to the insight of the inventor of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, who said in the 17th century that science would one day enable all people to escape from "animal time". From civilization has come science, and now science (and other disciplines of thought and work) may be helping us to understand ourselves and our underlying talents better, in order to help us drive our own further development. Carl Sagan predicted that the next stage in human evolution would be self-guided. And now we may know how: If we can leave our residual hatreds and antagonisms behind, there may be an extraordinary new evolutionary leap forward for humanity in the next centuries. And that may give new meaning to the famous statement of St. Paul: "Love is the fulfilling of the law."

What are we ignoring?

In his remarkable book, The Perennial Philosophy, first published in 1962, the late English novelist Aldous Huxley wrote:

"There is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change...What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there's a will there's always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers -- that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense, and sustained. It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their predecessors."

What are we ignoring now? Unless it can safely be said that we are not ignoring anything, then perhaps we cannot be certain that the default beliefs of the prevailing worldview -- for example, that life and consciousness are fundamentally material, or that violence is a form of power, or that money is a prerequisite for creativity -- are true. We understand a great deal about the operations of many external phenomena that are presented in daily experience. Science and other forms of empirical investigation have sharpened that understanding. Do we understand as much about who we are, or even how we think? Can we proceed from within a set of definitions of what exists, which rest on material premises, to understand certain faculties -- such as our capacity for free and unprompted imagination, or our intuition about distant people or imminent events -- which seem to require no passage of time or no material means of apprehension? What are we ignoring that might lead to new explanations of these and other commonly reported natural faculties?

The traits and operation of the external structure of the world in which we appear to move may not fully explain the agency we bring to changing it. In regard to the creations of thought, mechanism is not causation, let alone meaning. The idea of a painting cannot be derived from the canvas on which it appears, or even from the brush. The destination of the car you intend to drive to Philadelphia cannot be ascertained by examining its engine. For centuries, some of the finest writers have testified that when it came to their best material, they felt they were not creating the text so much as transcribing what they were hearing. "The book wrote itself," we are often told.

In the book of Exodus, when Moses saw God face to face on Mount Sinai, he asked God who he should say he had been talking with, when he returned to the people. "Tell them, I AM has sent you to them," was the answer -- That Which Exists. Adi Shankara, the 9th century Hindu philosopher, said that there is not even a class of substance to which the Brahman, or Divine Ground, belongs. "It is the One before whom words recoil." In an age of obsession with celebrities, in which the media coach us to believe that the desirable story and the reliable explanation live on the surface of a painted screen, the concept that there is a Cause that has no image, and that cannot be described with words, but which employs and loves us, seems increasingly strange and safely ignorable. How convenient it would be to live in a world in which what we get is only what we can see.