The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road-the evolution of a slow learner

6. Human Beings, Their Surrounding Environment and Human Development

51 6. Human Beings,Their Surrounding Environment and Human Development This paper was never published but was presented at an international meeting in Dublin in 1970 on the state of society at the time. It was attended by a diverse group, including economists, sociologists, community workers, etc. This paper was my first attempt to look at the direction I felt small, personal, human communities might evolve into in the future. This is a theme I revisit in some of the later papers in this collection. TEILHARD de Chardin gave us a vision of the perfection of mankind, of the gradual and painful emergence of consciousness and reflection in the world. For the first time he showed us a direction in evolution, he put before us the concept of humans as the most elaborate synthesis yet achieved by the evolutionary process and their gradual but relentless progress towards perfection, their personal and spiritual growth leading to unification of all mankind in love. Over and over again in The Phenomenon of Man he stresses this aspect of synthesis: ‘First the molecules of carbon compounds with their thousands of atoms symmetrically grouped; next the cell which, within a very small volume, contains thousands of molecules linked in a complicated system; then the Metazoa in which the cell is no more than an almost infinitessimal element; and later the manifold attempts made sporadically by the Metazoa to enter into symbiosis and raise themselves to a higher biological condition . And now as a germanization of planetary dimensions comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres not to confuse and to neutralize them but to re-enforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.’ Or again, when speaking of humans: ‘they represent individually and socially the most synthesized state under which the stuff of the universe is available to us.’ The Writings of Ivor Browne 52 Yet barely fifteen years after de Chardin’s death this wonderful message of hope giving meaning to the universe seems to be thrust back into his teeth, for although the technological and scientific progress he predicted has been more than realized, the personality of the human being has shown little evidence of change for the better. Indeed there is mounting evidence to suggest a change in the opposite direction. In the past twenty years we have witnessed as part of the vast urban explosion and industrial growth the breakdown of many of our inner cities – the very heart of our civilization – into something near total anarchy, an emergence of the impersonal and of individuals showing a failure of any standards of ethics and behaviour without parallel in recorded history or, for that matter, in any contemporary, so-called, ‘primitive’ society. To find an equivalent level of mores and behaviour we would probably have to go back to the first emergence of the human being as a hunter ape from the forests 50,000 years ago and we might not find it even then. Surely to find such a rapid deterioration in our social and civilized values, even if this is not very widespread as yet, must make us pause and wonder: is it merely a coincidence that we see this happening in the midst of the full flowering of capitalism, with the growth of huge impersonal bureaucracies? Whether these take the form of the state capitalism of Russia or the huge industrial complexes and ever-growing civil service bureaucracy in our own countries is immaterial, for these apparent alternatives are but the two faces of the same monster – the dehumanized technology to which we are all increasingly subject. Of course, de Chardin always saw clearly that the upward progress of humans towards perfection which he envisaged was in no sense inevitable and that humans could refuse to follow their true direction and to accept the responsibilities of increasing consciousness – could refuse to travel along the pathway of ever greater self-realization and fulfilment. He always saw the possibility of human beings going down a blind alley, of their submerging themselves again in the impersonal and turning their back on reflective awareness. This would not be the first time that evolution had turned down a blind alley; it happened with the great reptiles, with the beehive and ant-heap. Interestingly enough, what is happening to our civilization at the present time seems strangely reminiscent of the beehive type of development in evolution. I refer here to the [18.226.187...