Destiny and Civilization 

                            introduction

Some intelligent people may resist the logic of human evolution because it means we are animals, primates, instead of divinely created beings. But when they look at the way world affairs are going, they intuitively understand that it is being operated more by animal than intellectual or “divine” control. They also resist the idea of “Creation” since creating something out of nothing does not make much sense.

Even with our world affairs problems, we have reached an achievement on Earth that only we are intelligent enough to appreciate. We have built up an immense cultural heritage of literature, music, art and science that has enabled us to not only expand in numbers but, most importantly, to rise above all other life and dominate the globe.

Our numbers, however, have grown so excessive that now we crowd the Earth and its limited resources. The competition between the religion-dominated segments of our civilization for those increasingly limited resources has begun a decline process which, in one form or another, all civilizations have experienced.

Ours is more ominous, however. Because of the presence of awesome nuclear and biological weapons, our fate, biologically, would be an eventual, cataclysmic, population crash. This is not what will happen, however. The same social evolutionary process that has arrested the decline of all previous societies and enabled new civilizations to arise and expand will operate the same with us. We are going to control our numbers and we are going to expand out into space. We cannot stop here, we have the whole universe before us . . . .

Yes, we are evolved from other animals. Not only are we related to them but we even have an instinct motivational structure that is common to most mammals, especially other primates. Even our moral systems are based upon our instinctive social nature. This instinctive nature is not a hindrance to our success as a species but rather the very cause of it. This is what this book makes clear and what social evolution is all about.

                                                                                    PART 1

one --- NATURAL SELECTION

The millions of years of evolution that preceded us shaped us into a distinct social animal, one that has since managed to accumulate an immense cultural heritage that has helped us to rapidly populate the Earth.

But who are we? We are not just another “HOMINID” or a fellow Neanderthal---nor are we just an evolutionary blur. The anthropological consensus currently points to our emergence about 195,000 years BP (before present) because that is when we had attained the same gross anatomy and gross genetic structure we have today, but for the next 155,000 years, those archaic Sapiens continued to have the same primitive and unchangingly static Mousterian tool-weapon technology as the Neanderthals. Those Sapiens were archaic; we are not. They were not “us.”

Speech began to develop in our ancestral line millions of years ago, but its development was mostly genetic. It evolved through the brutal and ponderously slow process of biological natural selection. What is most important to note is that snail's-pace biological evolution essentially stopped when the brain's speech center ceased to evolve further. Since then, some small biological changes have occurred---such as a slightly smaller brain case, thinner leg bones and a better immunity to influenza---but none of that in any way accounts for the since-then rapid improvement in our technology and, hence, the rapid growth in our numbers here on Earth. The biological evolution of our speech capability came to a halt because no further biological evolution was needed. Fast-paced social evolution had replaced it. It is that point of transition between biological evolution to social evolutionary progress (see Glossary) which separates us from our simian predecessors. No matter how anthropologists classify us within the various hominid species, what we are, what is human, the human race, began at the transition point when social evolution replaced biological evolution some 40,000 years ago. It is the least arbitrary point.

Not only is it proposed here that the demarcation point occurred about 40,000 years ago, but also that natural selection has increased the total human cultural/technological heritage ever since then. The evolutionary natural selection process developed and described here also explains how and why societies and their civilizations rise and fall. Back in 1896 Benjamin Kidd, in his work, “Social Evolution,” explained that natural selection occurred between societies based on major religions. This thesis had important implications that seemed offensive to both the religious faithful and to secular-system-based Free Thinkers as well. As a result, the concept has not been effectively developed since then. Instead, during the half century that immediately followed, such social theorists as Arnold. J. Toynbee, Pitirum Sorokin, Ellsworth Huntington, Lewis Mumford and others tried in other ways to explain, for example, why civilizations rise and fall. They and others theorized that “great men,” climate change, “free-will,” “Challenge and Response,” depleting the environment, urbanization, “the Economic Imperative,” plagues, even “God's will” were the causative factors. Even all together, however, they did not explain what caused the rise and fall process. In desperation, social theorists then took to substituting the term “culture” for “society” and “civilization.” That effectively disguised the problem so they could give up gracefully. The use of such omnibus words as “culture” is one of twenty-one rationalizing stratagems listed back in the Appendix (see items #1 and #4). Its use exemplifies the way such scholars have managed, until now, to prevent fruitful application of evolutionary theory to society and, hence, to the explaining of human history and progress.

What heralded our arrival some 40,000 years ago was the first application of our supreme lingual-speech skills to the creating not of “cultures” but societies. A “society” is the maximum mainstream-size group which we all subliminally use a common world-view (WV) and way-of-thinking belief system to bind ourselves into and which substitutes for the hunting-gathering troop within which Our social evolution involves only the large WV-based societies. It is they which have always consisted of the “mainstream” (see Glossary) and all occupy definite territory.

Is it really necessary for people to be ideologically bonded together by anything, that is, to be “bound” into societies? It would help the reader understand what a society is if we in our own time were able to at consciously recognize our own society, but, unfortunately, it is so ideologically divided as to be confused and nearly opaque to us---which directly explains the problems that now (September/August, 2008) plague ourv“World Community.” Even so, we all still have something resembling a common-belief-bonded society which each of us intuitively favors, the one in which we feel most at ease and in which we were brought up. Normally, very few people feel ashamed of their society and/or feel hostile toward it. Most of us feel an affinity for our own particular ideological heritage, its languages, holidays, traditions, history, and accomplishments. Even most European and American atheists, for example, still consider the whole of Christendom (“Western Society”) to be their society. We all think of it all as “ours” and feel more at home in it. We may love to travel and may convince ourselves we “love all human beings equally,” but we nevertheless tend to be more concerned about hunger in our own society than starvation in another one. When any part of our society seems to be threatened, we drop all our other differences and come together in a way that makes us feel more secure and strengthens our will to respond---such as during the Cold War.

To accommodate to the growth of human numbers here on Earth, our ancestors had to begin organizing into social groups or communes some 40,000 years ago, groups that had to be much larger than the hunting-gathering troops we were used to. Yet this growth in group size was not and could not have been the result of any sudden change in our small-group instinctive social nature. Instinct-changes would have had to involve the slow biological route and taken hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Instead, we evolved brain-speech center refinements in the tens of thousands of years preceding 40,000 years ago, refinements that brought verbal speech skills to modern levels and enabled them, us, to develop the first whole world-view (WV) and way-of-thinking belief system. That enabled us to step ahead in the mainstream from living in little hunting-gathering groups to being bonded into much larger, many people sized stationary settlements. These larger groups were able to send out (1) larger hunting parties after larger game, (2) separate gathering parties, (3) trade with other such groups, and (4) achieved a new level of living. Instead of dying before their thirtieth birthday, many of us then managed to live to be grandparents, that is, we lived long enough to teach skills to the young while their parents did the tool and weapon making and using . People then came to live longer, learn more, had art and music---and increase drastically in numbers.

The full development of the WV system began possibly as early as 70,000 years ago in South Africa but came to full fruition in Europe before 35,000 years ago. We arrived by creating a whole world-view (WV) and way-of-thinking belief system that was intimately fitted to our social instinctive nature. This first such WV system was shaped around the lore of hunting and trapping. It bonded us into the first of our long chronological mainstream societies, each one of which was based upon a different WV system. All following prehistory WV belief system were also built around a new technology; and each went though its own life cycle. Each benefited from the previous ones and, hence, each proportionately decreased the scientific inaccuracy of mainstream mankind's general world-view (WV). None, of course, achieved “the Truth” (see Appendix, item #12), but each achieved a more accurate understanding of ourselves and the world about us.

Social evolution involved our learning to use language and speech to bond us into larger communal groups and to expand group size without losing the security and sense of belonging-to-the-group that evolution has made us instinctively want and need. We still identify with small groups because it is our nature, but even so, we used WV systems to create “societies” into which we combine these smaller groups (platoons, school classes, orchestras, congregaions, etc.). The “societies” we formed are the largest of our groupings, the ones that bind all the smaller ones together and the only ones that have to have a complete and closed world-view (WV) and way-of-thinking to bind us into it. These WV systems are popularly called “religions.”

If they are called “religions,” why not refer to them as that? The reason is that we are bound into societies by something that is not even close to what dictionaries define as “religion.” World view systems serve a function, one that has nothing to do with “gods,” “ghosts,” “goblins” or “spirits” of any kind. People who lived in the WV system-bonded societies felt the same close-knit, sense of “oneness,” of belonging, and togetherness as they did in the hunting-gathering “family-troops” they had evolved in. Ideally, they still do, and that is the function that defines a WV system. The dictionary definition of “religion” only describes its ancient form. When something serves us, it needs to be defined as such. You would not define a “chair,” for example, as just “a frame supporting an elevated platform with legs and a back.” Most important is explaining what it does: “it is to sit on.”

World View systems are unique. In order to be a “mainstream (see Glossary) WV belief system,” it has to bond us into a society, and in order to do that, it has to be a WV that "conditions" or modifies the way we express or respond to our social nature (social instincts). The conditioning process comes partially through the parents and they, in turn, are shaped by the belief system. At the very same time, the WV system has to have been shaped by those very same social instincts. WV systems guide how all people interpret what goes on about them but in a way shaped by human nature.

What is it, however, that limits our WV systems? What is human nature?

Human nature is often described as being determined by our “genes,” or as being “hard wired.” A more direct, more accurate answer is that we are motivated by a mix of social instincts. References to human instincts may offend both the devout---as well as secular believers in “free will,” even Marxist scholars who believe we can be transformed to fit a communal, egalitarian way of life---but all animal matter has instincts. We only need to keep in mind that in mammals, such as we primates, we generally condition our social instincts in how they are to be expressed. What conditions our social instincts is our world-view (WV) and way-of-thinking belief systems. It is they that “condition” our long-evolved primate social instinct nature. In the next chapter, we will build up and and lay out our human social instinct repertoire.

Early in the last century, the use of “instinct” in reference to human motivation fell in bad repute. Psychologists were seeing and naming multiple, separate “instincts” from the way single instincts were differently conditioned. Because the role of conditioning was not yet well understood, they were coming up with such “instincts” as “compassion,” “patriotism,” “love of ceremony,” “religiousness” and “creativity.” Instead of using the “conditioning” concept to then reform the way the “instinct” term was used, academics just stopped using the word at all when dealing with human motivation. By this and a myriad other such subtle but petty ways, science has been subverted. Chosen, as usual, was the easy path to avoiding offense to the religious-secular heritage of ideals and values, the ones that hold modern society and our civilization together. The result has been to obscure the interplay between conditioning, instinct, and WV systems, and in that way, holding us back from understanding the human social evolutionary process.

If instead, we decide to deal objectively with human ideology, will that put us on a socially destructive path? In other words, is it possible to do harm by making social science, or any science, more accurate? Perhaps, in answer, we might say that modern society is already in such trouble that the time has arrived when we should, anyway, be thinking about an alternative world-view (WV) and way-of-thinking. When reforms fail over and over again, it is time to at least begin to think instead of replacement . . .

Beginning in the next chapter, we are faced with the grand mass of social science data. It will all have to be re-interpreted objectively in order to remove most if not all of old-religious, secular and Marxist misinterpreting. In some cases, we will have to go right to the latest data. In others, we merely have to re-interpret the social theorists' interpreting of their data. To do all that accurately and objectively, we will follow here a three-fold strategy: (1) be familiar with all twenty-one of the Appendix listed stratagems used in social science rationalizing so they can be avoided, (2) be familiar with the Glossary in order to be sure each important term is used consistently only in the same single way, and (3) using the two terms, “society” and “World View” (“religion”) functionally---that is, of society being the bond of WV systems (“religions”). Observing these standards will enable us to re-interpret the mass of mis-interpreted data accurately and objectively, and to, for the first time, make the process of human social evolution (as distinct from Social Darwinism) clear and understandable.

                                           from the table of contents

                                                                   PART 1 ---- PREHISTORY

one --- NATURAL SELECTION

two --- OUR BASIC BEHAVIOR

three --- THE PRECURSOR SOCIETY

four --- THE FIRST WORLD-VIEW SYSTEM

five --- THE PATRIARCHAL-MATRILINEAL WV SYSTEMS

six --- THE FIRST PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY

seven --- THE REVOLUTIONARY WV SYSTEM (MESOPOTAMIA & EGYPT)

                                                                  PART 2 ---- HISTORY

eight --- CIVILIZATION

nine --- HINDU SOCIETY

ten --- SHANG CHINESE SOCIETYzPM

twelve --- CHRISTENDOM

thirteen--- ISLAM

                                                                  PART 3 ---- PRESENT

fourteen-- MODERN BARBARIAN WV SYSTEMS

fifteen --- SOCIAL EVOLUTION

sixteen --- PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

seventeen- A LIKENESS OF THE NEXT WV SYSTEM