Conscious Choice: Culture, Complexity, and Evolution

July 1996

Culture, Complexity, and Evolution

Thoughts About Civil Society

by Jim Kenney

How could anyone be hopeful about our planetary future?

Violence seems to be the song of our age. Altruism is in decline, or so it would appear. Moral outrages abound. Check the papers; check the newswires; listen as the radio voices recount the latest horrors. Rwanda, Chechnya, Bosnia, Algeria, Montana . . . genocide, racial and ethnic intolerance, churches in flame, new articulations of hate, helplessness, hopelessness, and despair.

And then, of course, there is the calamitous downward plunge of the Earth’s ecosystems. Species kill-off, habitat elimination, global warming, ozone disintegration...the systematic destruction of the water, the air, and the land. We know, if we have attended to the awful news, that we have arrived at the brink.

How indeed does one find the ground of hope today? Isn’t it true that ours is in so many ways the worst of times? Isn’t it obvious that the human condition is irremediable? Isn’t it time to repair to the fortresses...to circle the wagons? Shouldn’t we now, finally, throw up our hands in despair and surrender to the inevitable? Isn’t it time to quit?

The not so obvious answer is "No." It’s neither the time to despair nor the time to quit. It’s the time to exult and to get to work. It’s time now to acknowledge the outrages which surround us and still to recognize and even to cherish the sense of moral outrage which such outrages have produced. If the chaos of our age had given rise only to a general lassitude, we might despair. If the all too apparent decay of those institutions, customs, and conventions on which we have come to rely had yielded only a planetary malaise, we might well surrender. But, you know, that’s just not the case.

We have the good fortune to live in an age of consternation and increasing complexity. On every side is critique...in particular, critique of our guiding institutions: the nation-states, the corporations, the schools and universities, the media, and the religions. The critique, of course, is largely unfocused, but we share — planetarily — the sense that something should and could have been done differently. The complexity of modern (or, perhaps, postmodern) life is without historical parallel. That very complexity is the source of much of our current moral anguish and yet, perhaps, it is the wellspring from which the next stage of cultural and moral evolution — if you will, the next paradigm — may even now be emerging.

The general critique is still in its infancy. The awareness of increasing complexity is just now dawning. And that’s where civil society comes into play.

The concept of civil society is both old and new. It’s old enough in the sense that western constitutional democracies have intentionally supported it; and it’s new as a hot topic in emergent democracies around the world. "Civil society" has come to mean the network of voluntary, non-governmental associations and institutions — clubs, professional organizations, educational and religious institutions, cultural organizations, advocacy groups, etc. — which mediate between the power of the state and the rights of individuals and which help to shape the mindset of a society. It is, one can argue, the fertile soil in which constitutional democracy takes root. In what has already been hailed (perhaps prematurely) as the "post-totalitarian age," the creation and nurturing of civil society may well emerge as the most vital political theme and transformative activity of the late-20th century.

In the early 19th century, the French philosopher Alexis De Tocqueville observed that "civil society arose most strongly in America because of the historical absence of aristocratic intermediaries. The citizens learned the value of association by necessity." In other words, they learned that governments do not easily or naturally extend rights to their citizens. Even in a democracy, those rights must be struggled for — as is attested by the long and painful history of movements on behalf of African-Americans, women, workers, and the poor. Similarly, Americans discovered (and some would suggest that many have since forgotten) that value-definition is not the business of government. With the virtual disappearance of the aristocracy after the American revolution, the task of identifying the fundamental values and vision of the American people fell to a welter of newly emerging and disparate institutions which came together in the first modern civil social order.

Take a moment to consider modern American civil society. It makes room for Greenpeace, the KKK, the ACLU, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Aryan Movement, the Anti-Defamation League, the Christian Coalition, the Islamic Society of North America, and this magazine. It’s the schools, colleges, and universities, churches, temples, and mosques, humanist and atheist groups, art cooperatives, farmers’ organizations, inner city development groups, and countless other associations of the sort encountered in this issue. The list could — and should — go on and on. It is, in any case, a messy business. And ironically, civil society seems to function best when the range of opinions and the grounds for conflict between and among ideas are most numerous. Predictably, as civil society is broadened and deepened, the calls for curtailment of the discussion or for curtailment of the discussants multiply. It’s a temptation which a healthy culture will resist at all costs.

But that brings us back to the consternation which gives our age its essential hope. And back to our first question: How could anyone be hopeful about our planetary future? Consternation and complexity are, or should be, sources of hope. And somehow, the health of the civil-social conversation is essential to the realization of that hope. The health of the public conversation in any society depends on that society’s commitment to the conversation itself. Does a given society support its own internal dialogue or does it stifle it? Does that society give vent to critique? Does it give voice to moral consternation? Does it know how to listen as alternative courses are presented, discussed, and debated? That’s the real issue.

Genuine, creative participation in civil society — as opposed to mere venting, grandstanding, or rhetorical posturing — requires assent to a simple-sounding but enormously complex and profound idea: that culture itself is now the arena of an evolutionary process parallel to the biological process which gave rise to life and to consciousness.

If some modern theorists — including Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine and the late Dr. Eric Jantsch (one of the premier theoretical biologists of recent times) — are correct, evolution moves with some "determination" in the direction of more complex orders. These thinkers (and others on the cutting edge of modern "chaos" or "complexity" theory) argue that one of the most fundamental of evolutionary processes — or drives — is the tendency for "open systems" (systems which engage in the exchange of energy and information with their surrounding environments) to move steadily to higher and higher orders of complexity. Open systems of this sort include: the human brain, human relationships, cities, and culture. And, beyond doubt, the open system most essential to culture and most relevant to this discussion and to the overarching theme of this issue of Conscious Choice is civil society itself.

If the ascent to higher and higher levels of internal complexity is fundamental to open systems and to the evolutionary processes which drive them, there are perhaps grounds for hope in the midst of our incredible postmodern confusion, crisis of belief, and general angst.

It is important to realize that civil society is never complete. It is a process rather than an entity. It is the space between individuals and the state, but the character of the institutions which fill that space is constantly in flux. Thus, the chief task of democratic culture is to broaden the scope of civil society and to deepen its pluralistic exchange of ideas.

Whatever else may be said about the democratic system, one thing is clear: its life blood is rich and untrammeled discourse, the public conversation about values, ethics, vision, and possibilities. Full participation in the political life of a nation or a planet demands more than the exercise of the right to vote. It requires enthusiastic involvement in the civil society. The general tendency of cultural evolution is toward greater complexity. Greater complexity, simply put, means putting life, politics, economics, and social concerns into larger and larger containers. Every moment of moral growth, every cultural evolutionary step, every instance of personal deepening involves finding some larger container. The reactionaries and fundamentalists among us specialize in creating smaller containers. It’s our task to push back the walls and to enlarge the parameters of the conversation. And however powerful the evolutionary tendency toward "bigger containers," there is simply no guarantee that the process can continue without the enthusiastic commitment and energetic participation of all of us who choose to believe that evolution has not sung its last note.

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