This post from craigslist touched me.

Over the past couple of months, I have noticed many, many posts concerning white trash and welfare people.

I am a welfare kid. Oldest of 5 children, mother has a 9th grade education. She married my father at 15 (he was 21), had me a year later at age 16, and so forth. Father has an 8th grade education. Dear dad took off after 10 years of marriage — have heard I have several unknown siblings out there somewhere. No, he never once paid a penny of child support. He just left.

Mom’s family is from Missouri — you guessed it, trailer parks, shacks, too many people stuffed into small houses with too many animals, bugs and parasites. We were the runny-nosed kids in worn-out clothes people looked down on to make themselves feel better.

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My intent with the last few posts has been to try to put together a cosmology that fits me, one that sets the primitivist critique of civilization into a background that’s broader than the simple, “Civilization is sin, let’s chuck it.” I’ve tried to present, and find evidence for, human evolution as a primarily spiritual evolution, because that’s the way I see myself and that’s the way I think. I think I’ve succeeded in sketching out a developmental view that makes sense to me, and which tells me that there is a future to humanity that is useful and healthy and is not the same as primitivist paradise.

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Early twentieth century Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner has some interesting things to say on the topic of evolution of human consciousness.

Steiner is very difficult to comprehend sometimes, and trusting information or perspectives that are based in mystical perception or “occult science” is always risky because such information is dependent on the clarity (and honesty) of the channel, and there’s no way to verify it except to develop clear psychic abilities yourself.

Still, what I can understand of what he’s saying on this topic fits in very readily with the other sources I’ve drawn on.

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Ken Wilber, in his seminal work Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, discusses at length the evolution of individual, social, and ecological consciousness.

As with Up From Eden, he takes a developmental view to evolution. It’s not an approach that’s particularly popular among primitivists, but the developmental approach is one that I’m finding more and more preferable, as it explains that we do come from somewhere and we are going somewhere.

Many prefer the idea that all organisms are equal and that evolution is non-directional, or rather just going in the direction of diversity; many target the very concept of development as part of the myth of progress that plagues civilization. They also argue that such views are reflective of the broader tendency in our oppressive civilization to impose our points of view on other — whether on other human cultures, or on nonhumans. In other words, the myth of progress is a result of hierarchy, and both progress and hierarchy are the fundamental evils of civilization.

This view I certainly find valid in a broad sense, and in fact I think it’s very important to understand how these particular memes of progress and hierarchy strongly and very negatively influence all our lives.

But I also find the simplistically non-directional view of evolution reductionistic.

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