Human activity constantly encounters challenges to its
varied forms of adaptations. Some large challenges arise regarding which of
different theories and major plans for practical activity regarding societal
development are closer to the truth of things and of greater wisdom to pursue.
These challenges arise as different scientific frameworks challenge us, or when
technological infra-structures produce large changes and shifts among various
sub-groups, or when belief systems and ideologies clash.
Other challenges to our practical and conceptual activities
are trivial such as understanding and navigating a web site, and these often
are challenges that can be repressed, ignored, or distorted so they do not
become problems. We find a temporary answer and move on, and we feel no need
nor do we care to investigate and find the solution.
Since problems drive problem-solving and the
development of change in matters small and large, it might be useful to examine
what general categories facing our human species might be. We find at least
four general categories that seem to capture the contemporary problems of
adaptations of our human species.
A. Practical Activity—First of all, we are a
singularly unusual social and technological species, and our daily, practical
activities of human interchange and interaction both with our material and
social/psychological environments raise challenges. As we communicate, work
together, exchange ideas and products, enjoy leisure activities we encounter
differences that don't fit with our methods of thought or action, and these
raise inconsequential or significant challenges either large or small. These
lead to temporary or more permanent disagreements, resistances, uncertainties,
as well as all manner of imagined and real problems we attempt to overcome one
way or another as we pursue our goal of practical success. These problems of
technical and technological success or failure primarily depend on working
things out at the level of practical problem solving processes even though this
practical problem solving is greatly enriched by conceptual understanding and
scientific knowledge of the problem. Scientific activity producing knowledge,
however, raises another general challenge.
B. Science and Knowledge—The remarkable
processes of abstracting patterns, rules and laws, methods, and causal
relationships from practical activities and then capturing knowledge in verbal
forms of representation shows us to be a most advanced and singular species.
Animal use tools and have developed remarkable techniques but they cannot
capture what they learn in a language so as to pass it on to their next
generation. Brains serve as remarkable a problem solving organ that promotes
the adaptation of activity to its environment.
But around 130,000 years ago, our species developed an
ability to accumulate culture and to share it with the next generations. We
like all animals strive to succeed in our practical activities but our species
then goes way beyond practical activity to attempt to reconstruct it in mental
activities which we partially represent by our languaging ability and thereby
enabling us to share store and share it.
These activities of thought by which we attempt to
reconstruct and represent reality raise the problem of what is true, or more
true, and what can be considered as knowledge, and what remains as belief as
yet unproven. The human development of knowledge of this second category
includes those formal and informal scientific processes that allow us to
develop shared methods for verifying what is true in our representational
activities by returning it to empirical reality so as to show its fit with
real, practical activity.
C. Development—But both the first and second
categories raise the third general problem: that of development itself. How exactly
does human technological and scientific activity develop over time such that we
have managed to produce advanced technology, science, and culture far beyond
any other species? If we take evolution of living systems as a fact, then this
development across time raises the problem of its sources and origins; it means
that no adaptation simply drops down ready-made on living species or on living
societies; there are no timeless, fixed, or a priori givens. Every discovery
or invention must depend on some prior development of a system out of which it
develops so that the search for some fixed foundations always reveals an
earlier still ‘foundation’ upon which the system appears to be based in a
never-ending regression.
This lack of one fixed and given foundation means life
cannot be conceived as a state of adaptation but must be understood as a
constant process of overtaking earlier adaptations by later forms of adaptation.
These are problem-solving processes of adaptation and their processes of abstraction
and reconstruction at higher levels remain constant and at work from the most primitive
forms of life to the most advanced forms of science. These processes remain
constant as a property of all life whereas the structures they produce and that
appear to evolve as results are not. Even the well adapted structures of
successful activity do not rest in some permanent and protected equilibrium but
raise new problems. We can always ask even of a practical activity, “exactly how
and why did we succeed?”
To “add development” then, means in thought and
investigation to add an understanding of the processes of genesis, evolution,
or development displayed as the changes between two states in the history of a
development. It means to search for the developmental processes by going back
over the history of the evolution of an adaptation so as to then examine the
change moving toward the current forms. The developmental processes appear most
clearly in the momentary activities of the developing child when she displays her
problem solving that changes in the next repetition of the activity, and when
she seems to be engaging in reflective thought across the repetitions. There on
display is the essential constructive mechanism at work producing the
development of human adaptation.
When the Founding Fathers asserted the existence of
‘Natural Rights’, they too demonstrated a certain point in the development of
the human species' development of ‘rights.’ but we cannot interview them and study
their active mental processes of development as they worked in their exchanges
and reflections to abstract and organized their conclusions in written documents.
These processes at work producing evolution and development operate largely
without conscious human awareness; they are extremely difficult to study,
abstract, and explain; and they leave behind only their results and end
products.
We can certainly observe and describe the stages in a
development but seeing development at work in activity and explaining how one
stage of activity or one structure of a species is transformed into another
richer, more advanced, better adapted form is extremely difficult unless we
have that activity actually before us and on display for our investigations.
Even attempting to express the problem of development is difficult. But this developmental
and evolutionary ability imminent in life to transcend itself means we do not
plan our own evolution and development at some conscious level of thought any
more than does any other species nor can we as yet even abstract and represent
it in our thought; however unlike other animals we can express our awe, respect,
and value for those constructive processes as we attempt to investigate them. Life
demands humble awe and not an arrogance of ignorance.
Thus, while we must include development as a fundamental
aspect of all living systems in contrast to the fixed relationships of the
physical world of material structures
, and while we may
realize it operates below the level of conscious thought, these processes of
life inexorably remain the very essence of the human development of our
species’ adaptation. Blocking these developmental processes produces all manner
of evil and harm.
D. Ideology and Evil, the Blockages of Development—
The blockages of ideology and belief lie at the heat of evil and immorality.
They produce harms and blockages to development that some more easily see as
evil, but never-the-less they unfortunately arise quite naturally due to their
own arrested developments. If
development stops and we see in this an inadequate form of human adaptation, it
is because we can compare it to what is possible so as to see how shallow is
its understanding and how weak are its simplistic, coercive methods of
achieving its own ends. An advanced form of thought and action can see lessor
forms of thought and action as ‘evil’ whereas within a more primitive structure
of thought, ‘evil’ actions can only be seen as ‘good’ and necessary; they are by
definition adaptive, normal, productive, and valuable relative to a point in
development.
Medieval societal organization appears to our modern form
of liberal understanding of societal development as if it were oppressive,
harmful, evil, and without value for people. However, something we view as
primitive and immoral in its consequence—the Spanish Inquisition for example—were
actually quite necessary and useful structures in maintaining the hierarchism
of Medieval societies which was believed to be the very essence of social
order, hope, and salvation. It was only when the later forms of liberalism
developed the possibilities of relationships of reciprocity and mutual
respect—unheard of in the hierarchical, unilateral relationships of the
Medieval Church-based societies—that human reflective thought could provide an
additional epistemic framework allowing comparisons between hierarchical and
liberal relationships.
Prior to the liberalisms that emerged during the Enlightenment,
there were almost no alternatives to oriented relationships of the religiously
imposed hierarchical social structures; throughout history, the advanced individual
leaders expressed principles that people who were captured in the grip of their
oriented thinking about relationships of subordination and devotion to higher
authorities of salvation, could not readily understand and adopt. Their
oriented forms of thought of necessity had to be taken as givens.
Hierarchicalism could not be taken as evil since the human species had not yet
the mental frameworks of liberal thought organizing mutually respectful relationships.
Only when liberalism began to appear did it generally become possible to see
and judge the evils of what we now easily observe as repression; we no longer
must use an undeveloped cognitive framework to generally organize societal
thought and activity had in forms of authoritarian hierarchal organizations.
Yet, today, that problem still remains, and we can see it among some subgroups
of older people who remain childlike in their thinking and who use childish demands
and coercive techniques as their problem solving method.
But there was a major historical exception to this general
social organization of authoritarian hierarchicalism. At the practical plane of
unreflective activity, the cooperative relationships inherent in interactions
of trade and invention operated quite freely throughout history even though the
human species at the time had not yet done the scientific work of abstraction
and representation of these forms of relationships. There were cooperative relationships
operating in unreflective practical activities but there was no general reflective
theory about cooperation. Thus the many childish older people today who freely
participate in cooperative social and economic exchanges remain locked into childish
ideological and egocentric frameworks simply because they have not yet
developed rational thought about the development of societal activities.
Today thoughtful adults participating in those developmental
processes of abstracting and reconstructing relationships of oppression and
hierarchicalism continue step-by-step to find ways to overcome each newly
recognized unilateral and unjust subordination. Thus, modern day evil is
increasingly recognized as activity intentionally directed to blocking
development. Stealing obviously deprives material agency from a person. That
blockage is easily labeled as evil. It is less obvious to see that the
imposition of fixed social roles might be immoral as well, or, as some have
asserted, that taxation to fund public broadcasting or solar panels, even by
majority consensus, might also be immoral.
But just as importantly, it means that between the plane of
successful technique operating as practical activity, and the plane of objective
investigation, rational thought, and abstraction operating as science, we can
see how ideology and belief impede and block the development of both practical
and scientific activity and stands between the plane of practical activity and
the plane of scientific knowledge. How ideology and belief arise and use their processes
of coercive imposition and suppression is the study of ‘evil’ that forms the
on-going challenge to the adaptation of our human species, and this fourth
general problem is therefore an integral aspect of each of the first three
problems of human adaptation.
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