An attempt at a "new story" of our emergence from the violence of the ancient cities. Those cities spun the cocoon in which our civilization matured. The human self is like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. In this study author and religious scholar John William Kuckuk traces the path of human evolution and what it means for the world today. He examines the advantages our ancestors had that helped them survive, considering how the brain developed. From Greek and biblical beginnings the human self grew more self-conscious as Europe developed. Through the Renaissance, the late Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, our culture developed a new appreciation of the human self. He also relates how philosophy, media, and religion steered the course of Western history and how culture continues to evolve. The complex dynamics among species, peoples, and schools of thought have led to violence, misunderstandings, and the repression of the human spirit. As humanity continues to evolve, we can work toward a better future by understanding our past.
Out of the Cocoon
Rethinking Our Selves: An Introduction to a New FutureBy John William KuckukiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 John William Kuckuk
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4697-4514-5Contents
PREFACE.............................................................................1INTRODUCTION: MAYBE A NEW BEGINNING.................................................5I. THE SOCIAL SELF..................................................................27II. SELF DEVELOPMENT-TRANSCENDENCE OF INSTINCT......................................37III. EVOLUTION OF OUR SELF - FROM EARLY MAN TO PYTHAGORAS...........................53IV. SURVIVAL OF THE SELF – FROM REPRESSION TO ERASMUS.........................73V. RECOVERING THE SELF: FROM CONFUSION TO ARROGANCE.................................91VI. ANEW AUTHORITY TO FIT A NEW SELF-FROM MONARCHY TO DEMOCRACY.....................109VII. SEARCHING FOR ANEW LANGUAGE FITTING THE NEW SELF...............................125VIII. THE SECOND CHRISTIAN REFORMATION..............................................145IX. THE THIRD CHRISTIAN REFORMATION.................................................155X. REBUILDING THE SOCIAL ORDER......................................................175XI. A PHILOSOPHY OF PRAGMATIC IDEALISM..............................................195XII. PIETY IN THE NEW WORLD.........................................................225XIII. EASING INTO OUR NEW CULTURE...................................................239XIV FAITH FOR OUR NEW CULTURE.......................................................267POSTSCRIPT ON INSIGHT...............................................................295END NOTES...........................................................................301AUTHOR'S CHRONOLOGY.................................................................325ALPHABETIC INDEX....................................................................329
Chapter One
THE SOCIAL SELF
A. OUR PERSPECTIVE ON TIME
Many schemes for reviewing the history of civilization have been proposed. We will not review them. In 1966 Arnold Toynbee began his modest effort to find precedents in history in Change and Habit with observations of our short memories and habitual patterns. But he adds that it is in times like our own that the human capacity for choice operates to change habits. He reminded us "The light derived from experience is ... the only guide [we have] for dealing with the future...." "Adults can choose what they will transmit and what discard, and a rising generation (can to a degree add its mind to the evolution of society)." "History," he says, "is the process of change and Time-Spirit is the 'humming loom of Time' (Goethe, Faust)."
Douglas John Hall brought to light one of the most provocative insights in modern times, the notion of "the end of Christendom." Hall extended the view of many Christians from a very short modern period to encompass the end of the history of Rome and its influence on the present shape of Christianity in the West. "Christendom" was dominated by medieval institutions, but its influence extended past the Enlightenment.
Hall's focus is still narrowly on Christianity in North America. His humility in recognizing the difficulty of speaking sweepingly about world Christianity reflects the new world. It is a world in which we are not so apt to speak in absolute and global generalizations as our predecessors. We are bit more circumspect and considerably more analytical in talking of culture and belief. Hall is a "Reformed" theologian; the Reformed branch of Protestant Christianity is directly related to Calvin just as Lutheranism is a child of Martin Luther. The Reformed branch has always been "rational" in the best sense of the word, emerging in a world in which specialization of knowledge had not yet torn apart the wholeness of human perception and experience. Life was still more whole than we know today. The erudite Calvin's iconographic representation is a flaming heart, denoting love and compassion. The rational element in the Reformed world is strong but always balanced by a fresh new sense of humanity, a key element in the new Protestant view of Christianity.
Hall also reflects the new mind increasingly evident in our culture in his careful, contextual, dialogical treatment of Christian theology. We will be more brazen and extend our time frame far beyond Hall's because many recent developments seem to point in the direction we will explore here. And an urgency has arrived, which Hall sensed, in the condition of human life which calls for our attention.
What the forerunners of our culture could not see clearly was the struggle of the human spirit at the end of the Middle Ages to free itself from a very long period of repression. They were aware of the role of slavery in ancient times, but had no sense of a humanity extending back tens of thousands of years. There was as yet no sense of geologic time. For them slavery was one of the many "sins" from which in their day Christianity was understood to free individual people. One's private "self" saved from sin was closely identified with the "soul." This soul was treasured in the dualistic Medieval Church as a part of the person which was the object of salvation. The Reformation highlighted the basic unity of the person in the Judeo-Christian faith. One of the results of this was the identification of "the priesthood of all believers" – a democratization of the medieval church. This ended one of the remaining vestiges in their lives of oligarchy (and the self-image of sheep-like slaves) and enabled people to recover their self-confidence.
Many Western Christians have limited their historic sensitivity to the Christian period. Its beginning is universally defined by the dating mechanism we all use, now "CE" for Common Era, and "BCE" for Before the Common Era. Both periods begin with the year one, CE is positive, BCE is negative. The trouble with this mechanism is two-fold. First, the known history of our Western civilization (and most of the world) goes back much further "BCE" than we have come in the period "CE." The earliest cities probably took form between 5000 and 3000 BCE in the Indus valley of the northwest Indian subcontinent we call Pakistan and in Mesopotamia (Iraq). Judging by our best archaeological evidence, civilization began in these cities.
And before that, we are aware of the beginnings of modern agriculture as early as 10,000 BCE. This is the time of the great Agricultural Revolution in which human beings began the transition from hunter-gatherer life to settled farming and herding. But that is not really "the beginning," either.
The second problem is that we humans left Africa at least 100,000 years ago, and were evolving in Africa for perhaps five million years before that. It is a very long "history." Most of the really old skeletal remains of humans have been found in Africa. They include predecessors to Homo-sapiens (our species) as early as 200,000 years ago when a woman scientists called Eve lived. She may have been the progenitor of all current people. But she was far from the first of our ancestors. Just a few years ago, fossil remains of a child who died 3.3 million years ago were the first complete remains of a child of our ancient ancestors we have found. The child was of the same species as "Lucy," a woman who died only 150,000 years later. Evolution is a very slow process.
After such a glance back to the earliest beginnings, the earliest known people in our own species may sound rather close, more within our comprehension. The earliest Homo sapiens probably lived about 200,000 years ago, with a brain about the size of ours. Still, it was more than another hundred thousand years before our ancestors began moving in great numbers from Africa into Eurasia. By 45,000 years ago there were numbers of us in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia, but it was probably only 35,000 years ago that Europe was largely settled. We are told that Americans are all descendants of the same African woman and most Americans came from this immigration into Europe. This short period of human history (for the mathematically inclined) is just one one-hundredth of the time since the earliest known human child lived. And in these 35,000 years, only one-seventh are within our documentable "history."
Yet in this brief period, Homo sapiens has transformed human life. Our journey began with a very small view of our world. It has come, now, to encompass a view beyond the extent of the heavens visible to the eye, to celestial structures billions of "light-years" from us. A light-year is the distance light can travel in a year at 186,000 miles per second – 3,100 million miles per minute. The numbers in this vastly expanded universe quickly became truly "astronomical" as astronomers from earlier times, like Kepler and Galileo, began pushing the boundaries of their sight with primitive telescopes. Before that star gazing was pretty much unaided. Glass making and grinding of lenses advanced rapidly in medieval Europe.
But there is something now within sight that has been as hidden from us as the outer reaches of the universe. It is the evolution of the human self. While the brain enlarged throughout the evolution of animals until it reached a size appropriate to each species, the human brain is actually smaller than that of the predecessor to our species, the Neanderthals. This surprising fact leaves us. Why should Homo sapiens, with a lighter frame and a smaller brain, have replaced the Neanderthal, which is exactly what happened before 25,000 years ago? The probable answer is that Homo sapiens' size required less food – and that was the ice age. We could survive with less time foraging and more time to spend on other pursuits like making finer tools. Neanderthal people never achieved much finesse in producing their stone tools. But during the Old Stone Age, Homo-sapiens forged ahead to invent civilization.
B. THE EMERGENCE OF CULTURE
Gathering in the first cities probably stimulated the emergence of the self-consciousness by which we call ourselves Homo sapiens. Farming had increased our ability to produce food and people began to use their time more creatively. Animals are surely aware of themselves in a very elementary sense; instinct guides them to seek food and shelter though in recent years observers have discovered among some of them indications of sympathy and similar human traits. Their instincts prepare them to evade predators, and to reproduce and, in the higher species, nurture their young. But we have limited evidence of a self-consciousness in them like that of human beings.
The huge growth of the brain and the emergence of Homo-sapiens from previous species may have accompanied the harvesting of sea life. Beginning about 80,000 years ago, seals and seafood may have been a nutritional trigger which provided the rich diet needed to fuel big brains and active life. Large brains enabled Homo sapiens to react creatively to innumerable stimuli. Early people apparently were expert at finding and constructing suitable natural shelters wherever they went. But for long millennia they continued to live in very small enclosures used mainly for sleeping.
They spent their time alone seeking food and in family and small tribal groups. Many animals have lived among others in groups for a very long time. Bees and ants are the animal kingdom's most social creatures, living a totally hierarchical existence throughout their lifespan. In our lengthy pre-historic period, though some important changes in human behavior took place, the stimulation to encourage human social development was limited. In larger villages and eventually in the new phenomena we call cities, people developed patterns of life they shared with one another–the elementary marks of social culture.
From the earliest times, people grew in their self-awareness. They increasingly recognized that each one of them was different. That is a consequence of the way DNA is replicated from generation to generation. Eventually they became aware of their habits of social interaction. As cities grew and time passed, social interaction produced numerous complex patterns. In each social grouping many of these were totally integrated into their way of life. We ourselves are no longer self-conscious about many habitual responses. It is quite amazing that even jumping to the aid of a person in danger may be given no thought until after the emergency. When this occurs it merits newspaper coverage, and the actor often tells us he or she never thought of their own safety in the process. Our sophisticated sense of ourselves and how we are related to innumerable others has grown in us gradually.
During the very long period before the city, literally tens of thousands of years, people were developing the extraordinary capacity of human beings for social interaction. For example, the ability to read one another's facial expressions grew with the growing musculature of the human face. This probably began long before humans started speaking words, and they had already become proficient in reading facial and body expressions which are still important today. The growing ability to decipher anger, pleasure, and many other facial expressions is obvious in very young children. In our primate cousins this is a skill limited to little more than the extremities of snarling and squeaking, both as much aural as visual. But humans expanded that limited range and then added the capacity to talk in vast numbers of tones, volumes, and distinct sounds. A great array of facial expressions accompanied their words. This occurred as people became increasingly aware of themselves.
It is hard to imagine the story of the emergence of Western civilization without the lengthy, slow evolution of the human self. The people who lived for tens of thousands of years in their tiny family and tribal groups could not have been as self-conscious as we are today. They spent almost all their time foraging and, later, raising crops, and hunting. But when those small groups gathered in larger and larger settlements, and eventually in cities of thousands, they were energized by their interactions. They carried their earlier creativity forward by leaps and bounds. It was like the awakening of the brain, and it signaled a massive change in the ways people lived.
From this time forward we are able to find increasing signs that seem to give the idea of culture meaning. We maintain that those who lived earlier also chose ways of living that must be considered their culture. There had been much "progress" in the Ice Age preceding the Agricultural Revolution. Before the city emerged, people perfected stone tools in the late Stone Age or Mesolithic Period. Some have said that the advent of the city was the moment when civilization itself began. We know enough about the development of urban life to allow the city to function as the beginning of the rise and shape of our civilization. It is a period of only five to six thousand years – a small sliver of the evolution of our human species. But we always have a view of a much longer prior period of human life in which "culture" really "began."
C. THE NATURE OF CULTURE
We use the term "culture" now to mean the accumulated social life of a people. It is a very amorphous term, hard to pin down, defying definition. We can identify differences in cultures of different small groups and any group at different times. Cultures change constantly, the product of the way the people in any group live. We may talk about sub-cultures and cultures within cultures. Scholars have spent many pages trying to define culture without much success. About all they can do is to describe a culture at one point in time or another and perhaps to compare differences. But University of California (Los Angeles) School of Medicine's Leslie Brothers explains why narrative has become an analytical tool recently–because we have come to realize how we ourselves have been shaped both by our parents from birth and by the culture, the context, in which we were raised.
In the stories of people we have found how the "social order is continuously invented and reworked." Stories tell how people narrated the essentials of their lives, what was important to them, what preoccupied their attention, how they viewed existence. The predecessor to the story is daily conversation, the anecdotes we share with one another, the incidents that animate us. Storytellers skillfully weave people's face-to-face communication (talk) into sophisticated tales of their realities. And from such narratives we construct our views of the cultures of past societies. Their technologies have been the focus of our views of culture; these are but tools of in the lives of the people. Gradually, archeology and anthropology are becoming more sophisticated in their grasp of the signs of how people who invented the technologies lived, and more importantly from our point of view, how they thought since without thinking we do not create civilization. Brothers says,
... we are adapted not only to form the concept of person, but also as receptacles both for communal stories and for performances of what it means to be a person —and what a person in one's culture or one's family should do, think, and say. Moreover, we are highly flexible in this regard, even eager to redefine ourselves and each other through our interactions. The brain's social functions are relatively new to neuroscience. In contrast, the idea that people make social realities through their interactions has long been articulated by philosophers and workers in the social sciences....
Understanding their social interactions only gradually became the center piece in our understanding the lives of human beings. In distant pre-history after the larynx was reshaped by evolution to connect esophagus and trachea, people must have found their elaborate sound-making capacity a major addition to the primate ability to relate to each other. Singing, probably in guttural and screeching tones, may have preceded speech by thousands of years. They had probably already been inventing many hunting techniques and discovered how to use fire. With their exploration of oral communication they slowly began to invent society.
(Continues...)
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