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. On a micro level, it’s obvious that individual humans go through developmental stages; and it’s obvious that some people are more “developed” than others in various respects. I think it’s appropriate to apply some of that reasoning to the macro level. Just because evolution doesn’t have a single direction doesn’t mean it has no direction, and doesn’t mean specific species don’t have directions. After all, in a general sense we can see the evolution of atoms to multicellular, complex, specialized organisms. There’s directionality to that. It’s certainly not an exclusive directionality — atoms, molecules, cells, plants, etc. can all survive without us. But I’m interested in the human perspective, what would give human development meaning in this universe.

It may be anthropocentric and reductionistic to apply our standards of evolution onto other living things, and to reduce others to reflections of ourselves. It’s also reductionistic to throw out the whole concept of development just because nonhumans do not pursue the same route. I think it can be eminently useful to examine our own development — where we’ve come from, where we’ve been, where we’re going. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

Further, Wilber’s theories work for me because he’s not simply talking about dominator hierarchies and a linear view of evolution.

Everything, from an atom to a universe has a twofold nature: it is both a whole in and of itself, and a part of something greater. Wilber borrowed Arthur Koestler’s word holon to describe this concept.

Thus, a natural hierarchy is a holarchy — something that exists naturally as both a whole and a part — in other words, everything. I am a holarchy of organs, and each organ is a holarchy of cells, etc. And in the other direction, I am a holon within a political holarchy called the United States, ad infinitum. Everything that exists can be conceived of as a holon and a holarchy, with this twofold nature.

The pathological hierarchies are those holarchies that refuse to admit that they have this twofold nature — they are the “male,” patriarchal, oppressive holarchies. This “male” version occurs if holarchies behave as if they were the whole: they dominate. The “female” version, by contrast, occurs if holarchies behave as if they were only a part of something else: they submit and diffuse pathologically.

But these pathologies do not deny the real, natural, and healthy existence of hierarchies, which are really holarchies. They simply cry out for redemption, a return to healthy holarchies.

Evolution, as well, can be seen as a natural progression of holonic/holarchical development. According to the Big Bang theory (if you accept it), first there were atoms and then eventually they became molecules, and much much later on earth they became bacteria and single-celled organisms, and now here we humans are. This is evolution as the successive enfolding of progressively broader and deeper levels of experience, both differentiated and integrated, with each successive level including but also subsuming the previous stages, holistically, holonically. It’s an approach that makes tremendous sense.

In Wilber’s book I find some resonance with the frustration I feel in considering the paradigm of the primitivist movement, not only in terms of how to view hierarchies and evolution, but more specifically in considering the “back to Eden” ideal. Over the years I’ve moved increasingly toward a developmental view of spiritual evolution, similar to what Wilber outlines, and away from the primitivist aim of returning to hunter-gatherer utopia.

Wilber writes,

Whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation is not integrated, a pathology results, and there are two fundamental ways to approach that pathology.

One is exemplified by the Freudian notion … of “regression in service of ego.” That is, the higher structure relaxes its grip on consciousness, regresses to a previous level where the failed integration first occurred, repairs the damage on that level by reliving it in a benign and healing context, and then integrates that level — embraces that level, embraces the former “shadow” — in the new and higher holon of the ego (or total self-system). For the ego’s problem was that during its formative growth, where it should have transcended and included its lower-level drives (such as sex and aggression), it transcended and repressed them, split them off, alienated them — one of the prerogatives of a higher-level structure with its greater relative autonomy, but a prerogative, we have seen, that is bought only and always at the price of pathology. Thus the cure: regression in service of a higher reintegration — a regression that allows evolution to move forward more harmoniously by healing and wholing a previously alienated holon.

The other general approach is the retro-Romantic, which often recommends regression, period. This approach, in my opinion, simply confuses differentiation and dissociation, confuses transcendence and repression. Thus, whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation happens to go into pathological dissociation, then this approach seeks to permanently turn back the pages of emergent history to a time prior to the differentiation. Not prior to the dissociation — we all agree on that! — but prior to the differentiation itself!

That will indeed get rid of the new pathology, at the cost of getting rid of the new depth, the new creativity, the new consciousness. By that retro-Romantic logic, the only way to really get rid of pathology is to get rid of differentiation altogether, which means everything after the Big Bang was a Big Mistake.

I still accept that a collapse of some sort is inevitable, and thus some sort of “die-off” will occur. But if it is to occur, it should occur for a purpose. I see the first approach — regression in order to integrate and move forward with healthy development — as the far more palatable option.

Wilber continues,

All the more disturbing in the retro-Romantic approach is the whole problem of where these theorists rather arbitrarily decide to stop their retroregression. For example, many theorists, looking with justifiable alarm at the repressions and alienations that often accompanied the Machine Age, maintain that we should never have gone past farming, and there then follows a wonderful eulogizing of the glories of the “nonmechanized” and “nondehumanizing” farming societies, where few humans were alienated from the products of their own labor and the “Great Mother” ruled in peaceful and holistic happiness. Never mind that many of these societies introduced deliberate human sacrifice, multiplied the extent and means of war, put gender stratification at its peak, and made vast numbers of its populations into slaves.

Spotting these obvious difficulties, other theorists then go further and maintain that most of humankind’s problems came with the invention of farming itself, because with farming the human animal began to deliberately alter the biosphere for its own gratification, produced a written language that ensconced power in the dogmatic text, produced an agricultural surplus that allowed some individuals to begin to economically control and enslave others, and began the wholesale subjugation of women. And, indeed, most of that did begin with agrarian farming.

So, these theorists maintain, we really should have never gone past hunting-and-gathering societies. The delightful things then said about these societies — some of which were peace-loving and rather egalitarian, and some of which most definitely were not — are, at the last, astonishingly one-sided. Until other theorists carefully point out that precious few of these societies were actually egalitarian, that warfare most definitely existed, that the very seeds of sexist subjugation were planted here, that slavery was not unheard of …

My point is that it is one thing to remember and embrace and honor our roots; quite another to hack off our leaves and branches and celebrate that as a solution to leaf rot. So we will celebrate the new possibilities of evolution even as we gasp in horror — and try to redress — the multiplicity of new pathologies.

Since it wasn’t the topic of his book, Wilber doesn’t spend too much time on the negative aspects of hunting-gathering societies. But I’d like to linger on it awhile, to deconstruct simplistic myths to better fit the reality that our present situation direly requires.

I’ve been thinking specifically about the topic of violence — always of interest to me. The accumulated archeological and anthropological evidence has shown that, contrary to Rousseau’s stereotype of hunter-gatherers as “noble savages,” the life of the hunter-gatherer included significant amounts of violence.

Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization is a useful resource; despite its title, a significant portion is actually devoted to exploring the roots of human violence in specifically pre-agricultural societies. Gat writes,

One comparative study of 99 hunter-gatherer bands belonging to 37 different cultures found that practically all of them engaged in warfare at the time of the study or had ceased to do so in the recent past. According to another study, in 90 per cent of hunter-gatherer societies there was violent conflict, and most of them engaged in intergroup warfare at least every two years, similar to or more than the rest of human societies. The author of yet other comprehensive cross-cultural studies similarly concluded that “the greater the dependence upon hunting, the greater the frequency of warfare.”

As already mentioned, simple hunter-gatherers, who were thinly dispersed and nomadic, and had no substantial possessions, are at the center of the Rousseauite claim. Supposedly, they were peaceful because they had little to fight over and could always choose to go elsewhere rather than fight. Simple hunter-gatherers are particularly significant because, during most of the two million years of the Pleistocene and until about 35,000 years ago (the Upper Paleolithic), all humans were apparently hunter-gatherers of the simple sort. Yet the evidence from historical simple hunter-gatherers is that they fought, and with substantial casualties.

An interesting example:

In 1803, only 15 years after the first European first arrived in Australia, a 13-year-old English boy named William Buckley (1790-1856) was brought to the new continent with the first convict ship arriving at the penal settlement at Port Philip (now Melbourne). He escaped shortly after, and for 32 years, until 1835, he lived with an Aboriginal tribe. During that time, he learnt to speak their language and participated in their daily activities. No anthropologist has ever achieved a similar familiarity and at such an early date. After returning to “civilization,” Buckley on several occasions related his experience. His account appears to be remarkably authentic with respect to everything that can be verified concerning the natives’ life. Among other things, he describes about a dozen battle scenes, and many lethal feuds, raids, and ambushes, comprising an integral part of the native traditional way of life …

Thus, as the layperson — but, curiously, not many anthropologists — have naturally supposed, most hunter-gatherers, even of the most simple and diffuse sort, regularly engaged in fighting. Moreover, they lived under constant fear of violent conflict, which shaped their ordinary daily life. Death in fighting was among the principal causes of their mortality. … Fighting was probably an integral part of hunter-gatherers’ existence throughout the genus Homo’s evolutionary history of millions of years.

The primitivist counterargument is that there is far less violence in hunter-gatherer societies than in civilization, on the whole, at least on average; and, moreover, that most violence in civilization is on the periphery, so that the genuinely “civilized” in the center don’t have to deal with the violence on the edges of our way of life.

I think this point is pretty much universally agreed. I simply seek a different emphasis. I don’t want to go back to a way of life where violence and other negatives are minimized in an average sense. I want to move in a direction that genuinely moves beyond violence in a conscious way. And I think that simply to discard the terrible destruction of civilization is an error, because it is here that we learn our lessons — here, in the present, not in some imagined past.

Lawrence Keeley, in War Before Civilization, another balanced inquiry into the violence that pervades human history — “primitive” or “civilized — writes on the opposing hunter-gatherer stereotypes, Hobbes’ “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and Rousseau’s “noble savage”:

Both [views] deny tribal peoples their complete humanity. A previous era refused to acknowledge the intelligence, sociability, and generosity of uncivilized people and the richness, effectiveness, and rationality of their ways of life. Today, popular opinion finds it difficult to attribute to tribal peoples a capacity for rapaciousness, cruelty, ecological heedlessness, and Machiavellian guile equal to our own. (For example, when ecological accusations fly, who recalls the ten marvelous and unique species of flightless birds [Moas] hunted to extinction by the ancient Polynesians who first settled New Zealand?) Both laypersons and academics now prefer a vision of tribal peoples as lambs in Eden, spouting ecological mysticism and disdain for the material conditions of life. In short, we wish them to be more righteous and spiritual (in our terms, not theirs), happier and less emotionally complicated, and less prone to rational calculations of self-interest than ourselves. With only rare exceptions, Westerns of the past few centuries have found it difficult to accept that primitive and prehistoric people were ever as clever, as morally equivocal, and as emotionally complex as themselves. When we attribute to primitive and prehistoric people only our virtues and none of our vices, we dehumanize them as much as ourselves.

A wise writer once noted that “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” By believing that primitive and prehistoric peoples were far more humane and peaceful than their modern civilized counterparts, we metaphorically make beasts of ourselves. Our capacity for organized violence, the universal ugliness of war, and the intricate difficulties of keeping a peace are part of the “pain” of being human. Accepting the despairing myth of the pacified past encourages us to neglect solving these universal problems in the only place we can — in the present, among ourselves.

The doctrines of the pacified past unequivocally imply that the only answer to the “mighty scourge of war” is a return to tribal conditions and the destruction of all civilization. But since the primitive and prehistoric worlds were, in fact, quite violent, it seems that the only practical prospect for universal peace must be more civilization, not less. Adherence to the doctrines of the pacified past absolve us from considering the difficult question of what a truly global civilization should consist of and, more importantly, what its political structure should be.

Depictions of precivilized humans as saints and civilized folks as demons are as hypocritical as they are erroneous. Rousseau never left his very civilized circumstances to join tribesmen living in his ideal state — for example, the hunting-gathering bands of Tasmania. Similarly, the modern-day primitive nostalgist listens to tribal music celebrating the sacredness of nature on a stereo composed of completely artificial materials ultimately extracted from strip mines and oil wells on territories seized or extorted from tribal societies. If Westerners have belatedly recognized that they are not the crown of creation and rightful lords of the earth, their now common view of themselves as humanity’s nadir is equally absurd. What is morally wrong with longer life; lower infant mortality; wider knowledge of the universe (including a science of ecology); water and food cleansed of parasites and pathogens; photography; Western literature, art, and music; or larger numbers of humans living on less land with fewer premature deaths, including violent ones? But the converse also applies. Can we morally or practically disdain the “social welfare” system of the Plains Indians, the sculpture and winter clothing of the Eskimos, the music and art of tribal Africans, the navigation skills of the Eskimos, the survival techniques of the Australian Aboriginals, the medical botany of countless tribal peoples, or the many “primitive” methods for resolving disputes without recourse to violence or lawyers? The myths of either primitive or civilized superiority deny the intellectual, psychological, and physiological equality of humankind. In fact, the proponents of the pacified past disclaim the idea that all peoples share a common human nature by denying that all societies are capable of using violence to advance their interests.

So where does this lead us? Merely to a place that says that a stereotyped, idealistic way of life ungrounded in the shades-of-grey complexities of the present — any present — does not guarantee health, wealth, and happiness, whether that way of life is primitive or civilized. Life should be lived in the Now, not in a mystical sense (or not just in a mystical sense), but in a sociopolitical sense.

Returning to the evolution of consciousness:

Ken Wilber considers some of the simpler ecospiritual approaches misguided. Regarding the “embraced by the land” or “participation mystique” experience of self and consciousness and environment — the animism that is celebrated by those who mythologize the hunter-gatherer — Wilber ascribes this to a developmental stage analogous to early childhood, and writes,

… Indissociation … is so often eulogized by Romantics, because, I believe, they mistake indissociation for integration. The magical-animistic structure, as lovely as it might appear to us jaded moderns, was not an integration of the biosphere [the world of the body, individually, and of the web of living organisms, collectively] and the noosphere [the world of mind, individually, and culture, collectively], because these had not yet been differentiated in the first place.

At the same time — and for precisely the same reason — that “lack of separation” might have embodied a type of ecological wisdom, a wisdom that many moderns are understandably trying to recapture. Namely, the tribal kinship consciousness, still lying “close to the body,” close to the biosphere, was for just that reason sometimes more “ecologically sound,” more in tune with natural wisdom, with the Earth and its many moods. And thus it is small wonder that, in these ecologically disastrous times, many moderns are attempting to resurrect the natural wisdom of tribal awareness more attuned with the biosphere.

I am in complete sympathy with that approach; I am not in sympathy with the attempt to turn back the clock and elevate this structure to a privileged status of integrative power that it simply did not possess. Further, whether “close to nature” automatically translates into “ecologically sound” is hotly debated. Lack of capacity to devastate the environment on a large scale does not automatically mean presence of wisdom, let alone reverence for the environment. And, in fact, many tribes … simply remained at one location until they had ecologically depleted the area, and then were forced to move on. Tribal awareness was in all cases close to nature, in the sense of indissociated; ecologically sound is another matter.

… The primal/tribal structure in itself did not necessarily possess ecological wisdom, it simply lacked the means to inflict its ignorance on larger portions of the global commons.

The main difference between tribal and modern eco-devastation is not presence or lack of wisdom, but presence of more dangerous means, where the same ignorance can now be played out on a devastating scale. As we will see, our massively increased means have led, for the first time in history, to an equally massive dissociation of the noosphere and biosphere, and thus the sure is not to reactivate the tribal form of ecological ignorance (take away our means), nor to continue the modern form of that ignorance (the free market will save us), but rather to evolve and develop into an integrative mode of awareness that will — also for the first time in history — integrate the biosphere and noosphere in a higher and deeper union.

According to Wilber’s thesis, having moved beyond the tribal developmental stage, we headed straight into a series of “higher” levels of development, each with its own dizzying array of new opportunities — and pathologies.

His reasoning is compelling.

Whether his theories do justice to indigenous consciousness, I’m still not sure. Some of the things I explored in part 2, particularly Sorenson’s essay, seem to point in that direction. But I’m no expert, so I can’t really say. But I do know that whether or not his theory describes all human evolution, it certainly seems to accurately describe civilized human evolution, and thus it can serve as a useful guide, to point us in the right direction.

One of the big things that has bothered me about the whole neo-tribal movement is my distrust of “tribes.” In part that is probably do to my own hangups about being around groups of people. But then again, there are some good reasons for that, and some of them were given above in my discussion on violence. People who adhere to a tribe become tribal, and that’s why tribalism, to most people except primitivists, exudes a negative connotation. Exclusive identification with your own limited group of people does not make for a particularly broad, integrative state of consciousness, but actually tends to foster the opposite — as our modern patriotism shows. What means do we have to transcend that?

And what means do we have for cultivating a consciousness of ecological harmony that integrates the entire biosphere, rather than just your own local bioregion? Sure, if you’re living really close to the earth, you’ll get to know it really well. But I believe that the beginning of wisdom is to respect the earth despite the distance created by the development of symbolic thought, the rational ego, and the mind-body split. In other words, what’s necessary is integration of the dissociated parts of the soul in a higher holonic state that both includes/respects its parts and unifies them in a meaningful whole — not regression to an undifferentiated state.

That’s where we stand now. In need of integration and harmonization of dissociated aspects of self. Not in need of permanent regression and destruction of important parts of ourselves.

Evolution moved beyond tribalism, and its limited capacity for social-planetary integration, for many reasons, it seems. Tribes may or may not have known how to remain reverential of nature; it was other tribes they could not integrate, and this because they lacked recourse to a binding conventional [in a developmental sense] level of law and morality that very soon would start to build unified societies out of separate and conflicting tribal desires. The problem wasn’t getting along with nature in the biosphere; it was getting along with other and conflicting interests in the noosphere that brought tribalism to its limits for evolutionary integrative power.

… In short, what was needed was not tribal but transtribal awareness, negating but preserving heretofore isolated tribal interests in a higher and wider communion; and mythology, not magic, provided the key for this new transcendence.

And so: some people today eulogize the primal tribal societies because of their “ecological wisdom” or their “reverence for nature” or their “nonaggressive ways.” I don’t think the evidence supports any of those views in a sweeping and general fashion. Rather, I eulogize the primal tribal societies for an entirely different reason: we are all the sons and daughters of tribes. The primal tribes are literally our roots, our foundations, the basis of all that was to follow, the structure upon which all subsequent human evolution would be built, the crucial ground floor upon which so much history would have to rest.

Today’s existent tribes, and today’s nations, and today’s cultures, and today’s accomplishments — all would trace their lineage in an unbroken fashion to the primal tribal holons upon which a human family tree was about to be built. And looking back on our ancestors in that light, I am struck with awe and admiration for the astonishing creativity — the original breakthrough creativity — that allowed humans to rise above a given nature and begin building a noosphere, the very process of which would bring Heaven down to Earth and exalt the Earth to Heaven, the very process of which would eventually bind all peoples of the world together in, if you will, one global tribe.

But in order for that to occur, the original, primal tribes had to find a way to transcend their isolated tribal kinship lineages: they had to find a way to go transtribal …