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The History of Human Development

Robert Campbell
October 2003
General

Historically, cultures have had a strong tendency to become ends unto themselves, often seeking supremacy over others in some way. It is only necessary to look at the tragedy of mindless conflict for the past few thousand years to confirm this. Even the current conflict in Iraq is no different in kind for either side involved. There is no culture on Earth that is not guilty of promoting its self-interest over others in some way. Any yet we need cultures, and we need to develop them in constructive ways. At this point in history, with the world shrinking so quickly due to instant communications, it seems clear that all cultures should relate to the global community in a constructive way, while still preserving positive aspects of their cultural traditions. This is not happening as well as it should. The constant bombardment of media advertising, thoughtless movies, commercialism, and the general erosion of traditional values is eating away at our very foundations. Even though many of us have never had it so good in material ways, there is an ominous sense of uncertainty about the future that is growing day by day. Nobody knows what new calamity might happen tomorrow. How then are we to relate socially to the world in a positive way through our various cultural orientations? Is there a global ethic to follow that is common to us all? Is there an overriding pattern to guide us?

No evolving pattern is apparent from the short-sighted perspective that we normally take of human history. But if we stretch the window to span thousands of years back into the roots of humanity, then we begin to get come indication of a moving finger pointing the way.

Early Spirit Cultures

The fossil evidence indicates that early human beings first evolved in Africa and that there have been successive migrations out of Africa over the past million years, colonizing Asia and Europe. These early spirit cultures all shared similar beliefs in spirits that animate the natural world. It was only since the last ice-age, about 15,000 years ago, that human beings first reached the western hemisphere. They originated in Asia, migrating across a land bridge to America, and they brought with them the spiritual beliefs of East Asia. Prior to that, the western half of the planet was populated only with animals. Half the world had never seen a human foot print in several million years of hominid evolution. This is strange indeed. It seems that a global theme had already begun. However tenuously, it hinted at humanity’s social development being linked to physical events on the planet. The intuitive half of man’s brain was attuned to animist spirits, while only animals occupied half of the planet until the end of the last ice-age. Was there a connection between the staged migrations that populated the planet and the staged development of the human mind?

Early Civilizations

While the Native Americans were migrating through the Americas and adjusting their spiritual beliefs to a new land, in a new way, events began to take a different turn in Africa, Europe and Asia. A few thousand years after the last ice-age, the land began to dry out in broad bands around the planet, roughly twenty to thirty degrees north and south of the equator. Large areas of savanna in these semi-tropical zones had supported huge herds of animals and the human populations that depended upon them. As they continued to dry out, they eventually turned into the most arid of deserts. Humans were forced into more concentrated settlements in major river valleys. Four major areas of concentrated settlement began to take place as follows: the Nile Valley in Egypt, The Golden Crescent surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley in present day Pakistan, and the Yellow River in China. Concentrated settlements brought with them the development of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the first written scripts, systems of sacred mathematics, and major building works, together with a major shift away from a nomadic way of life.

This brought about complex systems of writing and early works of literature. The human mind expanded. People began to search deeper into fundamental questions about the universe, far beyond the simpler musings of earlier spirit cultures. Spiritual beliefs began to evolve with a cosmic theme. All of these events were consistent with a major step in humanity's further social development, associated with the left hemisphere of the brain. Meanwhile humanity's earlier spirit culture traditions were preserved safely apart by the Native Americans, while human development moved up a level on the other side of the world.

Vedic Knowledge Spread by the Persian Empire

It has been a two-step pattern, each new step having a thrust from the one before as preserved on the other side of the world. It appears this kind of resonance in the biosphere of the planet has been employed in humanity's social and cultural growth. The pattern continued to unfold. Major social developments took place in the Indus Valley some four thousand five hundred years ago that erected planned cities and brought with it a spiritual and literary tradition that eventually became known as the Vedic period. The Vedic writings that come down to us today explore the nature of meaning, human values, and an intelligent transcendent reality associated with the cosmic order. The cosmic order became known as the Rta and was related to the concept of a supreme creative intelligence accessible to man. Later, with the emergence of the Hindu religion, the cosmic order became known as the dharma. The Hindu religion emerged out of the Vedic tradition, after the ancient cities of Harappo and Mahenjo Daro fell into decline and Indo-European Arayans migrated into the area from central Asia. There were successive waves of migrations and invasions through which the Arayans established an empire that linked the Indus Valley to the Eastern Mediterranean as a single political entity. Known as the Persian Empire, it served as a pipeline for the transmission of ideas westward that had germinated in the Vedic tradition. Many of these ideas found fertile soil in ancient Greece, giving rise to the Golden Age of Greece. These ideas were also tempered by ideas of Ancient Egypt that had developed along similar beliefs in a cosmic order known as Maat, associated with divinity. Greek thought arose from the ruins of these ancient cultures that had survived for two thousand years. There were thus links to both Africa and Asia.

Two Focal Points Germinating Ideas East and West

Two focal major points thus became important for the development of cultural and spiritual ideas that grew and spread, one in the area of the Eastern Mediterranean, and one in the Indus Valley. About the same time, securely isolated from the rest of the world by the Himalayan Mountains, the spiritual beliefs in China began to develop beyond their shamanist origins. The development of the Taoist tradition took place without significant influence from outside, due to the rigors of travel. And yet Taoism was also concerned with the nature of the cosmic order as a supremely intelligent process, just as the Rta and the dharma were in the Indus Valley and as Maat was in Egypt. The Tao provided an intuitive basis for coping with nature in a spiritually harmonious way.

This approach of the Far East was facilitated by the structure of the Sino-Tibetan languages. This family of languages lacks tenses to verbs, together with many articles and conjunctions that link things up in a flow through time and space. Thought is not harnessed to physical causes in a linear flow of time in the same way that it is in the Indo-European languages. The Sino-Tibetan languages are more attuned to intuitive processes that bring things together holistically. They are more attuned to right brain intuition than to left-brain logic. So it appears once again that physical events on the planet, going back to the development of language over hundreds of thousands of years, had worked to facilitate humanity’s social development in a patterned way that influenced the specialized functions of the human brain. The plan and the purpose may have gone all the way back to the formation of the mountain ranges some sixty-five million years ago, when plate tectonics pasted the sub-continent of India onto Asia and built the Himalayan massif.

Vedic Ideas Re-Translated via Ancient Greece

Ideas in the Golden Age of Greece developed around two divergent perspectives of reality. The early Greek philosophers explored ideas much in the same spirit as in the Vedic tradition, with a cosmological focus guided by divine teleology. This belief in a transcendent reality reached its zenith with the Socratic dialogues of Plato and in his Theory of Forms. According to this theory all specific things that exist are known and identified in relation to universal archetypes that determine their kind. For instance, a particular leaf is known only in relation to a universal archetypal leaf that determines and defines its form. He believed these transcendent universals to be real, lending a mystical theme to Plato's beliefs. Plato's outstanding pupil, Aristotle, believed that the essence of a thing resided concretely within the thing itself and that there was no universal archetype with a mystical transcendent reality that determined its nature. Having fragmented the universe in this way it had to be put back together again. So, he introduced the idea of causality that links things together in space and time. At the same time he believed that there was a teleological principle at work that determined the essence of the thing, so there were ambiguous elements in his argument. Nevertheless, his rejection of Plato's Theory of Forms marked a turning point in western philosophy that coincided with a major turning point in humanity's social affairs. Aristotle was teacher to Alexander the Great, and it was Alexander who conquered the Persian Empire and established a Greek Empire that again joined the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley in reverse direction. These two important focal points of humanity's cultural development had thus channeled Eastern influences first, only to be balanced later by Western influences. Although Alexander died shortly after his conquest, the Greek Empire survived in fragmented form for a couple of centuries, just as the Persian Empire had done. Greek advances further eastward were halted by a newly united India.

Movements East and West from the Two Focal Points of History

During the time of the Persian Empire another major event took place near the opposite end of the Himalayan massif from the Indus Valley. Siddhartha Gautama rejected his princely privileges to seek enlightenment and he began the Buddhist religion. The silk route to China opened through the Indus Valley about the same time that Rome was gaining ascendancy over Greece, although Greek cities remained in the Indus Valley region. It is significant that Buddhism began making inroads into China about this time, as did Greek art, while Greek philosophy was left at the doorstep. The rational concepts of the Indo-European languages did not lend themselves to the Sino-Tibetan intuition, while Buddhism found some common ground with the Taoist tradition and never moved into the west. Meanwhile the essentials of Greek thought appealed to the regimented Roman mind and Greek philosophy was transplanted westward alongside the Christian message. For over a thousand years Buddhism continued its slow progression through China, Tibet, and Japan, while Christianity and the essentials of Greek thought incubated in the western mind. There were thus two movements that quietly took place during this period, one westward from the focal point at the East Mediterranean, and one eastward from the Indus Valley. The rational left hemisphere of the human mind was being educated to Western developments in the Indo-European language tradition in Europe, while the intuitive right hemisphere was being educated to Eastern developments in the Sino-Tibetan language tradition of the Far East.

The Renaissance Driven by Islam and the Mongolian Hoards

In 630 AD, the prophet Mohammed established the Muslim religion and the caliphs that succeeded him set out to establish a theocratic world empire. Their conquests swept across North Africa, Spain, parts of Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, India, and Indonesia. The might of Islam threatened to dominate the entire world until an unlikely event occurred. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, a middle-aged blacksmith in Mongolia jumped upon a horse and set out on a mission of conquest himself. Known to the world as Genghis Khan, he established an empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean all the way into Eastern Europe. His conquests crushed the power of Islam and stopped its advance. But as a tribal nomad from an aboriginal spirit culture, he believed in religious freedom and had no rigid belief system to impose. These violent events that swept across Asia played no small part in sweeping away with them social conventions that had stagnated throughout much of the world, especially in feudal Europe. Europe had been seriously threatened, first by Islam, then by the Mongolian hoards. Virtually helpless, they had been delivered by a mere stroke of good fortune. It was as if the swift and decisive spirit culture conquest of Genghis Khan from the intuitive right-brain side of the planet had provided the energy that fueled the renaissance in Europe and propelled it forward. The left-brain rational intellect of Europe was awakened from a slumber that had incubated the fundamentals of linear thought formulated in ancient Greece fifteen hundred years before. The Western mind seemed to catch fire with the spirit of invention. About this time many of Aristotle’s writings were rediscovered from Arabic sources, lending more fuel to the fire. Events were seen to have causal origins in time and space. Radical new developments took place in art, music, science and literature. The floodgates had burst into a flurry of activity that ignited a spirit of discovery in every direction. And that spirit of discovery took to the seas. The colonial period began and more fuel was added to the fire with the rediscovery of the Americas. The seeds of these events had been sown in the Indus Valley thousands of years in advance to burst forth upon the world during this time.

The Renaissance and Western Colonialism

The colonial period generated great wealth and power for comparatively small European nations. European influence became far flung around the globe, with access to virtually inexhaustible resources. Competitive interests between nations also fueled the industrial revolution, since technical advances bestowed great competitive advantage. As great wealth poured in from the Americas, Africa, and Asia, there was free time for a large class of people to devote to the arts and sciences. The Renaissance Man was broadly educated in virtually every field of knowledge at the time, with a strong appreciation of the origins of western thought in Ancient Greece. Aristotle’s laws of causality, operative in space and time, provided a paradigm for understanding how physical events were determined by natural laws. These ideas had already become second nature in the culture, especially since they were consistent with the structure of the Indo-European languages, tending to link spatial events up in a flow through time. The work of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, and Descartes, became synthesized by Isaac Newton into universal laws of motion that established a firm basis for modern science.

Once begun there was no stopping it. Science began to peek into every corner of human experience, and even religion itself became the object of scientific criticism. Christianity as established under Roman Catholicism had already faced schisms and more came with the Reformation and the Protestant movements. These schisms opened a crack for Darwin’s theory of evolution to gain a strong foothold, and the very existence of an intelligent cosmic order came under attack. As colonial empires spread, the aboriginal spirit cultures of the world came under severe pressures. The several thousand tribal languages of Africa came under European domination that by the same stroke integrated them into some fifty nations that could relate to the modern world. During this period of tortuous assimilation, the slave trade exploited free labor at enormous human cost and transported African populations to parts of Europe and especially to the Americas. For the first time Sub-Saharan Africa, where humanity was born, felt the onslaughts of cultural developments in the rest of the world. The effects in the Americas were even worse. The Native Americans were first decimated by Western diseases, and the waves of settlers that followed displaced them completely. Life for the few who remain has been altered forever.

Eastern Entrenchment

Meanwhile, during the 14th century, a Buddhist monk drove the last Mongol Emperor from China and established the Ming Dynasty. There were sharp contrasts with developments in the West. Trade and industry were controlled because of Confucian beliefs that held them morally questionable, and the increasing bureaucracy strengthened the power of the official Mandarin caste. China reacted to increasing advances from Europe, Japanese pirates and the Mongolian tribes with increasing isolationism. The Great Wall was extended 2,450 kilometers, however sea routes were also extended as far as Africa and they encouraged Chinese emigration into South East Asia. European trade became limited to the port of Macao, however the Jesuit missionaries gained a degree of favor through their mathematical and technical skills. Scientific diagnosis of medical conditions was advanced and acupuncture developed.

Japan during this period suffered a civil war that lasted 150 years. The state almost disintegrated during a social transformation that saw the old clans replaced with new. The Samurai warrior caste of Japanese knights arose with lofty ideals and there were movements to protect Japanese cultural and spiritual accomplishments. The introduction of firearms from the west soon replaced the bow and arrow. Jesuit missions were established in southern Japan in 1549, and were later encouraged for a short while to weaken the position of Buddhist monk-warriors. As chancellor in 1582 the statesman Hideyoshi Toyotomi reorganized the central administration and later annexed Korea. His successor was defeated and the Tokugawa Shogunate lasted until 1867. In 1638, an uprising resulted in the annihilation of the Christians, and all Japanese ports were closed to the West until 1854, a period of more than two hundred years.

Humanity's Development Structured by Related Events in Global Cultures

Despite the complexity of global events throughout this colonial period, and whether they were right or wrong, it is obvious that while the West was expanding its influence in every sphere, that the East, especially the Far East, was undergoing a period of entrenchment. While the spirit cultures of the Americas were being decimated, those of Asia were entrenched in self-preservation, and the most ancient spirit cultures of Africa were being introduced to Christianity and Islam, even while being exploited unmercifully. All the while the African nation states were taking shape in a way that would allow them to relate to a global community in the years ahead, something that Africa could likely not have accomplished alone. The pattern of all these events points again to the self-similar structure of humanity’s social development. The music of our ancient heart is rooted in Sub-Saharan Africa. We can all feel it in our bones, just visiting there. These emotional spiritual roots have taken on a cosmic flair in the East, facilitated by the movement of Buddhism eastward from a focal point in the Indus Valley. Ideas first considered in the Vedic tradition and in Ancient Egypt germinated thedevelopment of Greek thought at the second focal point at the Eastern Mediterranean. This influence eventually spread throughout the West. So here we have the correlates of humanity’s emotional heart in Africa being tempered by right-brain intuition in the East and left-brain linear thought in the West. At this point, however, these three arenas of human experience have received mutually separate development. There is still no global perspective that can show how they relate creatively to complement one another. They remain isolated in association with the three primary races of humanity, with degrees of mixing between them.

The Globalization of Thought by Economic Interests and Technological Innovation

The steady technological development of travel and communications brought with it more conflict that culminated in two World Wars, and several lesser major wars. During this time the colonial empires began to weaken and break up. As they did the new socialist ideology of Karl Marx caught the imagination of the Asian mind, at least sufficiently to establish totalitarian nations. The world thus became divided between western capitalism and eastern communism following the First World War. The creative development of the human mind had become externalized, seeking egalitarian wholeness in eastern totalitarian states, and the privatization of wealth and power in capitalist states. God was pronounced dead according to the theories of Darwin, Freud, Marx and others who gained a wide hearing. Even though some of the most important contributors to science had been profoundly religious men, the further development of science produced a view that became exclusively materialistic.

The cosmic order suddenly has no divine connection. Nor does the cosmos engender intelligence in any way. The teleological principle of antiquity fell into disrepute. The entire universe has come into being without plan or purpose from absolutely nothing, in an unimaginable Big Bang that began about 15 billion years ago. And the evolutionary process on the planet is governed solely by accidental random mutations, a rare few of which can bestow a survival advantage. This process of natural selection and survival of the fittest determines the genetic basis of our being without intelligent direction. While it is true that most of the world still does not believe this basic assessment of our being, mainstream science openly advocates it. And mainstream science has developed hand in hand with economic interests on a global scale. Multinational corporations now guide human economic progress and the social consequences that go with it. The materialistic worldview that science advocates thus provides a convenient justification for maximizing the bottom line on the corporate balance sheet, without social responsibility to the cultures within which they function. Human thought is being systematically globalized in the rapidly shrinking world of technological innovation, and this is happening in a way that erodes our sense of humanity and social conscience.

The Need for a New Paradigm of Cultural Development

If one thing is clear from a brief review of human history, it should be that we need a better view of how we can relate more constructively toward one another in the global community. No concocted ideology, such as capitalism or its opposite communism can hope to accomplish this. As human individuals we expect personal freedoms in a socially appropriate way, and nations have much the same expectations. A free market economy does not have to impose an ideology such as capitalism to exist, nor does it have to be free of practical regulatory measures. In fact so-called free markets are becoming overburdened with regulations in some respects, while multinational corporations grow in their bureaucratic capacity to cope with them. They do this without modifying their basic philosophy of how to conduct business. In many ways they exploit the customer, the employee, and even the stockholder, to enhance their wealth without social responsibility, and often at the cost of the natural environment. They play one nation off against the other for profit. They move their manufacturing plants and other operations to exploit lower wage rates and improve their position in the global economy. They employ temporary labor to avoid long-term commitments to employees. They milk profits for corporate takeovers that provide no constructive social or economic advantage and often end in total waste years after a short-lived stock market bonanza. Not all of these measures are always bad, but they frequently are, and the whole world is becoming cynical about the ultimate outcome of corporate globalization, the instability of financial markets, and the social consequences involved.

The important point here is that something very fundamental has happened in the world. Historical events up to this point have focused separately on three arenas of human development, one emotionally spiritual in Africa associated with our human roots, one right-brain with a cosmic spiritual flavor in the East, and one left-brain with a linear technological flavor in the West. These three distinctions lose their separate global focus with the multinational corporation. Huge conglomerates are directing events in every nation on Earth. All three aspects of human development are involved in their operation, one emotionally rooted that assesses performance in the marketplace, one right-brain and intuitive that develops the potential of new ideas, and one left-brain that organizes our technical commitment to production in a logical way. The three distinctions are still there, but they have been internalized by the corporate structure. They remain significant in every nation on Earth but overriding corporate objectives fail to recognize the social importance of their historical development on the planet. A new corporate paradigm is needed that renders the creative process transparent, as an expression of the cosmic order. The three arenas of human development need recognition by the human mind. The three arenas are themselves manifestations of the cosmic order through which we evolve socially and spiritually. We are thus living through a major evolutionary event by becoming aware of our own continuing evolution as human beings.

Corporations Can be Vehicles of Human Social and Spiritual Development

By recognizing the basics of structure implicit in the cosmic order, corporations can structure themselves to take advantage of our human creative capacity, in their own best interests. They can thus become vehicles to facilitate our social and spiritual development within the context of any cultural tradition. This can best be achieved by translating cultural development in a global historical context. In this way we can look back at our long trek out of the jungle of conflict. We can see where we have been and we can better appreciate our long struggle to relate to one another in ways that do not involve the dominance of one culture over another. The wealth of human experience is indebted to our diverse traditions, and they can become instruments to better foster our creative potential constructively. Only through our diverse cultures can we contribute to our collective humanity in positive ways and learn from one another. Corporations can be the catalyst to make this happen through the simple device of structuring themselves to make the creative process transparent. This is in their own best interests. There are only six domains of activity in any company and they work in polar pairs to provide insight into the three dimensions of development, namely right-brain potential, left-brain commitment, and emotional brain performance. These three focal points of human development are implicit in the structure of any company, just as they are in every human being, and just as they have been in the historical development of our species on the planet.