Sometimes you read a sentence that stops you in your tracks. Great writing takes the reader beyond words, and generates a moment of beauty and insight.
I came across such a sentence while reading H.G. Wells The Outline of History. Wells was of course best known for his science fiction works, a pioneer in the genre with such books as The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds.
But his magnum opus, in my view, is the two-volume The Outline of History. In it we gain a window into Wells’ capacious mind, and his concern for the patterns, pathologies and potentialities of humankind since before the beginning of civilization.
The sentence that stopped me is this:
“There appears life struggling towards consciousness, gathering power, accumulating will, through millions of years and through countless billions of individual lives, until it reaches the tragic confusions and perplexities of the world today, so full of fear and yet so full of promise and opportunity.”
The Outline of History was written after World War I, in 1918-19, and revised in 1930. Though the phrase “accumulating will” gives me pause, the sweep of the sentence ripples through one, and feels pertinent and prescient.
The question of culture, and cultural change has been one of the themes of this column. A bromide that talking heads on cable TV have been echoing of late is “culture eats policy for lunch.” It means that underlying conditions always trump politics and policies.
H.G. Wells The Outline of History attempts to go even further than particular cultures however, and discern the shape and trajectory of human history taken as a whole.
As inscrutable as cultures are, they come and go, but human history marches on. But where is it marching from, and towards what is it marching? And if life is “struggling toward consciousness,” why are so many humans regressing in consciousness, becoming more not less egocentric?
Just as the age of nations, much less empires, is over (despite Putin and Trump‘s futile and desperate attempts to resurrect it), so too the ages of distinct cultures belongs to history. Yet because of a failure of perception and imagination, people are clinging to the remnants of cultures, with their useless traditions, irrelevant religions and divisive identifications.
In the west, liberals adhere to the past in the name of “diversity.” And even conservatives who haven’t bought into the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and aren’t indulging in conspiracy fantasies and bottomless grievance, go along with egregiously polarizing Christian nationalism.
If culture in the anthropological sense of the word is history, what will take its place? As much as authoritarian nations like China and Russia are loath to admit it, American culture has been and continues to be a globalizing culture. So as the United States rapidly declines as we approach the 250th anniversary of its birth, something has to give.
Traditional cultures have become fragmentary burdens from the past, hamstringing the human being and humanity just when the emergence of AI and gene editing compel an unprecedented awakening of intelligence. Can a new kind of culture, never seen before in human history, emerge?
The new culture will not be based on tradition, or memory or even knowledge (the domains of AI), but on awareness, insight and right relationship between humankind and nature, and between human beings. I don’t know when such a global culture will emerge, but I’m certain it has to emerge if humanity is to survive and thrive.
So what will allow a completely new kind of culture to be created? Obviously, it will not just spring forth organically and willy-nilly from the present trends in art, civil society and academia, much less politics.
And though it has become de rigueur to put faith in science and technology, AI and gene editing have been created by science. And science cannot give us the intelligence to use them wisely.
Nietzche got much wrong — for example, as one biographer put it, “his war against tenderness was an attempt to exorcise a virtue which had led to a bitter deception and a wound that never healed.“
But he got one thing right, which he put in the words of Zarathustra: “Man is something that shall be surpassed…What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a transition and a destruction.”
Nietzche recoiled from direct perception of beauty, which flows from undirected attention and effortless stillness, believing it to be unmanly. But that is our salvation, and it’s no longer the luxury of contemplatives.
Beauty is the wellspring of the insight and intelligence that human beings urgently need to ignite within in order to remain inwardly alive, navigate the reefs and shoals of the present age, and create a new kind of culture for the future of humanity.
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
