I consider the arc of human history a macrocosm of an individual person’s growth and development. I’ve described the development of our civilization as a process of spiritual growth; and as we near the decline of the empire of industrial civilization, we enter another stage in the growth process.

This, of course, is not a new idea; people have been talking about a “shift in consciousness” for a long time, in many different ways. But steeped as I have been in the paradigm of primitivism, in which we all exist in a state of “original sin” just for having been born in civilization, the concept of civilization as a developmental stage rather than an unnecessary evil was, if not quite a new idea, still a concept in dire need of revival, for my own sanity.

The primitivist view on the history of civilization might be typified by statements like this:

To me there does not have to be anything learned from civilization — no ultimate result is needed to justify civilization or give its occurrence meaning or purpose or value or any “point” whatsoever … At some future point civilization will no longer exist and humans will once again live for life’s richness rather than struggle to find life’s meaning. For those of us on the path to rewilding … our process mirrors the process of humanity at large — many of us pass through pointlessness to life’s richness along the way.

A good friend of mine said this, and it’s a position that I myself have held — and then struggled against — ever since my year in the woods. At one point during that year, I remember sitting around a fire and listening to everyone around me say that they could find nothing redeeming in civilization, that even all of the supposedly good things, like music and art, were just palliatives, distracting us from a demeaned and meaningless existence. It was a deeply troubling conversation, because I could articulate no specifics with which to argue against them, but it simply felt wrong.

That conversation led to a brief post. I wrote another one on the same topic last year, a post titled Seeking the “Primitive.” In that post I concluded that what primitivists really seek is not, primarily, a particular state of technological development (or lack thereof) or social organization, as the term “primitivism” implies, but a state of consciousness.

I mention all of this to describe my struggle to see civilization, and human development, fully and clearly, with both its good and its bad, and to orient myself in a broader, more confusing world in which there is not just black-and-white dichotomy of the “primitive” or the “civilized” person, but a chaotic kaleidoscope of perspectives, approaches, and experiences, all of which have validity. Maneuvering in these shades of grey has been very meaningful to me, as I try to understand who I am in this world.

It’s always good to find affirming views.

Philosopher Ken Wilber is not someone I have read in much depth in the past, though I have quoted his ideas on the pre/trans fallacy before (specifically, in the post I just mentioned). So it was with pleasant surprise that I picked up one of his earlier works, Up From Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, and found ideas that are extremely resonant with the ones I have independently developed.

Wilber states that history and evolution, above and beyond their particular details of the how and the when, are usually either considered to have no overall meaning (the scientific or materialist view) or to have specific religious meaning (e.g. the Christian point of view). But the third alternative is that which I already suggested in my post: History is “the story of the unfolding of the relationship between man and the ultimate Whole … history is the unfolding of human consciousness.”

Many religions stress humankind’s unique place in the cosmos. Primitivists sometimes deride this as an anthropocentric attempt to compensate for the insecurity of having lost our connection with our place in the universe. And I think this is true; however, another way to say it is that we have developed a separate ego, a self-consciousness, which by its nature separates us from the primal ground of all Being, and that this type of consciousness is a relatively unique form of consciousness.

In order to develop our very specialized kind of consciousness, we’ve cut ourselves off from a sense of Oneness; and in the process we’ve developed specific forms of language, analytical ability, and tremendous power to affect the world in our own particular ways, grounded in this mind-body split. It’s a dissociation which has been as rich as it has been traumatic.

Thus, our history is, at base, a story of our developing consciousness, and specifically, of our awakening to a separate self.

The goal now is not to negate both the riches as well as the trauma, but to understand them and integrate them into the next level of being.

Each stage of evolution transcends but includes its predecessors. Thus, early life forms (plants) went beyond but included lifeless matter and minerals in their makeup; and animals went beyond plant forms (simple life) but included life in their makeup. Just so, humans go beyond but include animal characteristics, and, by implication, humans include but transcend all prior evolutionary stages.

I resonate deeply with this general conceptualization of human evolution.

At this point, though, I’m sure many primitivists will raise a number of objections, the main one being that this is a linear view of evolution, one that implies that humans are the pinnacle of existence — and, in that sense, narcissistic, ignoring that the vast majority of life on earth has remained “simple,” and thus ascribing a lower level of development to all other living beings.

For example, primitivist Ran Prieur writes:

There is no disputing the fossil record, in which life on Earth has changed many times. The lie is to project the myth of “progress” onto these changes, to declare that they go in a simple straight line, in one direction, and always getting “better.” This is a circular argument, where our collective insanity slaps a mask of itself on the biological world to justify itself.

In reality biological changes are unlike the lie of “progress” — they go in all kinds of directions, with populations falling and rising, organisms getting bigger and smaller, and moving from water to land to water. And nothing gets “better” except that species get better adapted to their environments, and in the absence of catastrophes the totality of life gets more diverse and complex.

And this, too, is true. It is an egotistical lie to consider all of Earth’s evolution peaking in this one species called Homo sapiens.

But to me, the view that evolution has no broader meaning, and that we don’t develop through experiencing whatever bliss or trauma is in the present, as both primitivist quotes above suggest, is just as absurd as believing that we are the “acme of evolution.”

Surely the meaning of our existence and our future is more complex than that.