Towards a Global Community

In a Comment posted a couple of days ago, AK said “There is no global community.  Humanity remains fatally divided. There is no evolution towards a greater good.” To which I replied, “I agree that humanity remains hugely divided - whether fatally or not remains to be seen. As to whether history and evolution are going anywhere, I choose to believe that the whole show has been tending towards greater complexity, heightened awareness, and more inclusive communities.” I’d like to expand on that – first, to address the issue of humanity’s becoming a global community, and in a subsequent post to say more about evolution’s movement towards greater complexity and heightened awareness.

It seems self-evident to me that the universe, as we currently understand it, moves always and simultaneously in two opposing yet complementary directions – towards increasing diversity and towards more organised and inclusive wholes. 

In the beginning, when the universe exploded into being 13.7 billion years ago, it flickered chaotically between existence and non-existence. Elemental particles and anti-particles cascaded into existence and then annihilated one another, until eventually a proton and neutron joined together to create the first enduring partnership – a simple nucleus. Hundreds of thousands of years later, electrons came to the party, bonded with these nuclei, and formed an expanded community of elemental particles – the first atoms of hydrogen and helium. And so the process has continued ever since. Discrete entities came together into bonded relationships to form more complex and diverse wholes, which in turn came together into still more inclusive wholes and created ever greater diversity in the process.

The same process is evident in the evolution of life on our planet. Atoms bonded with other atoms to form molecules, and some – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur – formed molecules that are the building blocks of life. As these accumulated in the warm shallow water of Earth, they formed a pre-biotic soup, the critical ingredients of which were three kinds of molecules: sugars, amino acids, and nucleotides – which came together to form still larger bio-molecules from which the first living cells emerged. Even a single cell is a mind-boggling marvel of complexity and organisation, consisting of sub-structures (organelles) that carry out the most amazing assortment of functions. And here we are some four billion years later, with bodies composed of (count them!) ten trillion cells, organised into a cooperative community of organs and organ systems collectively known as AK or Mark or Misa or whoever else happens to be reading this blog.

This same process operates at the level of human communities. When modern Homo sapiens came on the scene 200,000 years ago, we lived in hunter-gatherer bands or family groups of only about 30 members. The development of horticulture (from 10,000 BCE) brought multiple bands or lineages together into more settled villages of up to 2000 members.  These in turn grew into the more highly structured and integrated city-states of the early civilizations (ca. 3500 BCE), with populations reaching 10,000 in Mesopotamia and 50,000 in the Harappan civilization in India. From there we grew into multi-ethnic empires and then into the economic and geopolitical alliances of nation-states with which we are familiar today.

The direction of the process seems clear – towards greater diversity and more inclusive communities. And in today’s world, that process is happening with unprecedented speed. Ever more closely linked by global communication networks, mass media, and world trade, humanity is rapidly becoming a global community. Yes, we remain deeply divided. But there is nothing new in this. Throughout the history of evolution, separate organisms have always been fiercely competitive before they decided that their survival would be better served by coming together into a cooperative community.  The deep divisions we face today and the potentially catastrophic consequences of colliding worldviews, such as between Islamic fundamentalism and the American Dream, may be precisely the spur we need to find common ground.

The change required in our collective behaviour, if we are to avert catastrophe, depends on our evolving a new worldview that is shared throughout the emerging global community. We must somehow reach agreement on at least the foundational pillars of such a worldview, while allowing for elaborations that satisfy the meaning-requirements of the diverse cultures that must continue to enrich our global community. This is the adaptive imperative of our time. We are living in a perilous age. Homo sapiens is proving to be a risky experiment in freedom. Because of us, life on this planet is suffering its fifth mass extinction since its emergence four billion years ago. Throughout that long history, countless species have disappeared through their failure to adapt. It remains to be seen whether we will be among them.

The upside is that the challenges of our time present us with an opportunity to take the next step in our growth and evolution. Tracking the evolution of worldviews since we emerged as meaning-seeking creatures, they parallel the stages of individual human development – and a case can be made for our present worldviews and their associated behaviour being equivalent to the stage of mid-adolescence. It is possible that the challenge of our becoming a truly global community is a unique invitation to take the next step into mature adulthood.