War between societies can be a very bloody affair, with many soldiers and civilians killed. But if it’s inconclusive, it will not be a force of cultural group selection. This is a very important point: what makes war creative is not how many people are killed. What matters is the effect on cultural evolution. War is an evolutionary force of creation only when it results in some cultural traits outcompeting others.
"War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'." Well, not so fast. War spurs a lot of change (at a high cost, no doubt). It's also a source of evolutionary competition in the cultural realm--multi-level group selection.
With the notable exception of [Clare] Graves, developmental psychologists have not attempted to tie-in the psychological stages they recognize with the socio-cultural stages of human history. Although philosopher Jürgen Habermas has noted the “homologies” that can be found between historical and psychological worldviews, the intriguing parallels between personal and cultural development have not been carefully explored outside the confines of integral philosophy.
But inside integral philosophy, this topic is widely (and well) explored.
“Bacon was a bad scientist,” the sociologist of science Joseph Ben-David has argued, “and in many details he was not a very good philosopher either. There was little connection between the rise of new astronomy and mathematical physics and Baconian principles; experimentation without theory and collection of empirical knowledge had produced few scientific results.” Yet in his own era Bacon was revered and his work was widely influential (and today he is still adjudged a seminal figure in the emergence of science).
The desire Hitler and Mussolini met in millions of people was a simple one: to be free of the burden of giving meaning to their lives themselves, of fulfilling their hunger for “struggle and self-sacrifice,” for some greater purpose than the satisfaction of their own appetites, through their own efforts.
And John Eccles, who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work on the brain’s synapses, agreed with Swedenborg that the mind could not be reduced to some epiphenomenon of gray matter and argued, along with the philosopher Karl Popper, in favor of the irreducible reality of the Self. All these men were rigorous scientists, yet they all discovered that the most important things about human existence—consciousness, the mind, the self, free will—eluded even the most methodical investigation.
[Australian evolutionary theorist John] Stewart’s young mind was filled with significant twentieth-century figures like philosopher Karl Popper, spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, and also an individual who seems to inevitably surface as a formative influence in the lives of so many Evolutionaries—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Karl Popper again!
In almost every way [Horace] Greeley’s life defied the categories in which we’re used to thinking. He was a kind of American and a kind of journalist who no longer make sense. He combined elements of all four narratives [Packer's four group narratives in contemporary American society] and moved through their spheres without encountering high walls.
