the one hand, there is what Socrates called “the improvement of one’s soul,” or what we loosely understand as personal growth, since the Greek word for “soul” is psyche, from which we get our psychology. On the other hand, there is the improvement of one’s society. Traditionally, this sort of Socratic knowledge was called wisdom. By contrast, in today’s universities “political philosophy” refers to an obscure subspecialty within the discipline of political science that focuses on the texts of the great philosophers of the past. It has lost its living connection to the primordial questions: “How should I live?” and “How should we all live together?” Part of my purpose is to recover this original search for meaning, what I call “the primal truth quest.” Everything we do — the failure and success of all our politics — depends on our grasp of this quest and the reliability of the understanding it produces.
The dangers we face today are compounded by the fact that we have never been more confused or more cynical about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful. We are daily inundated with vast quantities of information but lack the most basic shared understanding of how we should live together. Not only do we lack a shared vision but we are profoundly confused about the way we should search. Science provides only neutral tools. Religion, when based on strict obedience to the Holy Scriptures, remains blind and closed to the search. If we don’t know how to look, how will we recognize the truth of a vision of a better way?
Here is our central failing: We have created a political culture that has eliminated in principle the need for the individual to consider and take responsibility for the good of the whole. We have abandoned the truth quest in public life. Our system is set up so that economic and political decisions are made according to the conviction that if individuals, organizations, and nations follow self-interest, the “invisible hand of the market” will automatically convert selfishness into the best possible outcome for the largest number. This is reinforced by a prevailing intellectual culture of skepticism and scientific materialism, which assumes that “good” and “evil,” and “right” and “wrong” are entirely subjective matters for individual judgment. This sort of relativism has led to a global economic system that rewards a few individuals with grotesque quantities of wealth, rivaling the GDP of small nations, while a billion people go hungry. Never before has so much power over so many been concentrated in the hands of so few in the service of unashamed self-interest. All the while the collective frantic energy of globalized humanity continues to pollute and plunder the planet.
Our situation embodies a stark paradox. We stand on the edge of great danger and great opportunity, both closer to and yet farther than ever from fulfilling some of the most crucial conditions for an enlightened and liberated humanity. No period in history has had the benefit of the staggering vistas of modern cosmology — of how life evolved out of a planet that 4.5 billion years ago was a ball of molten rock. No previous generation has had such reliable detailed knowledge of the diversity of past human societies. This ongoing, exponentially expanding understanding of the human condition is now directly available to masses of ordinary human beings through the miracles of industrialization and electronic communication. The radical democratization of wisdom is a practical possibility for perhaps the first time since hunter-gatherers sat around the campfire every night sharing stories.
Yet emotionally we live in a smaller cosmological space than any previous society. Our daily routine keeps us urbanized and indoors as we go from home to car to office, from health club to shopping mall and back home. Asphalt and concrete bury wilderness, and our city lights blind us to the stars and galaxies. The “liberation technologies” of electronic communication can enlighten and mobilize masses of people, but they are shamelessly captured by commercial culture. The mass media of television, film, and radio are largely controlled by a few corporations who are as disinterested in the truth quest as they are interested is maximizing their profits through entertainment and advertising.
So we endlessly pursue self-interest and wind up feeling alone, meaningless cogs in the machinery of mass society, while congratulating ourselves on being the freest people in history. Globally, contradictions sharpen as we see a rise in murderous fundamentalism and the slow destruction of every traditional culture by consumerism. We are exhausting the resources of our planet and exhausting ourselves in the process. The philosopher Richard Tarnas summed up the paradox well: “The unprecedented outward expansiveness of modernity, its heroic confidence, contrasts starkly with an unprecedented inner impoverishment, uncertainty, alienation and confusion.”4
To find a way forward we need to know where we are and how we got here; we need to ask in the words of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin how the “spectaculum of modernity” became a “global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality.”5
“Big History” and the Fourth Revolution
Answering the big questions today requires the perspective of “big history” — the vastly expanded story of human emergence from an evolving earth. From this vantage point, we see that civilization’s 5,500-year written history is little more than a millionth of the history of the earth, and that the life of the earth is but a small fraction of the life of the universe.6
Twenty years ago, physicist and philosopher Peter Russell graphically demonstrated the power of big history’s capacity to illuminate our crisis. In his book White Hole in Time, Russell used what has since become an unintentionally ominous image to wake us up to the significance of our present moment in human evolution.7 He took for his scale what was then the iconic achievement of civilization — the world’s tallest building — the quarter-mile-high, 108-story World Trade Center. Against this, he imaginatively projected the 4.5 billion years of earth’s history. Street level, then, represents the formation of our planet, and the first living cells don’t appear until one-quarter the way up, on the 25th floor (about 3.5 billion years ago); plant life starts halfway up, around the 50th floor. Dinosaurs appear on the 104th floor, and mammals and the great apes arrive on the topmost, 108th floor, of the building. Homo erectus becomes fully upright only a few inches from the ceiling of the top floor. Already, 99.99 percent of the story of evolution has been told, and civilization has not yet begun. One-quarter inch from the ceiling, Homo sapiens replaces Neanderthals, and the first Paleolithic rock paintings appear. Modernity begins at less than the thickness of the coat of paint on the ceiling of the top floor of the quarter-mile-high structure.
Russell’s point is as simple as it is obvious and ignored: this exponential rate of evolutionary change in “informational complexity” is approaching a singularity — a leap into a radically different order of being.8 Wherever this takeoff point is, and whatever lies on the other side, we are getting there fast. Something dramatically different is about to happen. The apocalyptic possibilities of our moment are reinforced by the fact that we can no longer use Russell’s metaphor without seeing the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing into rubble.
The convergence of these two perspectives — a vastly expanded historical narrative on the one hand, and global destruction on the other — puts extraordinary pressure on our moment. It impels us to consider the possibility that we are poised on the edge of a planetary transformation: of either global catastrophe or some “leap in being” that averts disaster and ushers in something radically novel.
Looking back over the past two hundred thousand years of human existence, we can identify three increasingly sudden leaps in human self-understanding — three revolutionary discontinuities in our way of being — that are critical in understanding and responding to the uniqueness of our moment. The first was the original primal revolution — the relatively sudden appearance of self-reflective human consciousness in a lineage of upright primates foraging in an African wilderness, which occurred sometime between two hundred thousand and one hundred thousand years ago. The second was the agricultural revolution beginning around ten thousand years ago. The third was the industrial revolution, which had its roots in the sixteenth century and in the gradual convergence of three revolutions — scientific,
