I have decades of experience now in how our contemporary culture of intellectual understanding has little interest in finding Big Ideas to illuminate the Big Picture of what’s going on in the Human World. A great deal of intelligence is applied to the immediate and the concrete. Not so much attention to putting the pieces together to “see things whole.”
It turns out that not putting the pieces together can be costly.
I’ve argued that “Liberal America’s Contribution to this Catastrophic Victory of Fascism” has been its years-long failure to perceive a “Destructive Force” rising on the American right, with the consequent failure to fight against that Force when it was still relatively small and weak.
I’ve been working for more than half century on an integrated understanding of the forces at work in the human world.
As a result of that work, I saw the rising Fascist threat in the early 1990s, and saw it more vividly in 2004, since which time I’ve worked pretty much full time to sound the alarm. (I.e. to warn that American democracy was under serious threat— a threat that is now so nightmarishly realized with the powers of the presidency now being handed to Trump and the Trump Party).
That’s why I feel I can say, “It Turns Out, Having a ‘Big Picture’ Understanding Can Really Matter.”
You can’t hit what you can’t see, as they say in baseball. And a Big Picture understanding would have helped Liberal America — with its secular worldview — to see this Destructive Force sooner.
But it’s not just for this immediate American crisis that it is important to see the challenges facing us through a larger perspective on the forces at work in the human world. Yet our contemporary intellectual culture seems to have little “demand” for the integrative Big Picture understanding that has been my life’s work to develop, and my life’s mission to “sell.”
That integrative understanding began with a life-changing Big Idea that came to me in 1970. That idea was published in 1984 (by the University of California Press) as THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES: THE PROBLEM OF POWER IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION.
That book made (and substantiated) some very bold assertions that, if they were valid, would call for major changes in how we understand
- 1) our inherent nature as human beings,
- 2) why the history of humankind has been as tormented as it has been (these last ten millennia or so), and
- 3) the nature of the challenges that we must meet as a species if human civilization is to survive on this planet for the long haul, rather than end the human saga with our collective self-destruction.
That book made a bit of a splash in the 1980s. But what happened after that was something I hadn’t imagined possible. I had assumed that our intellectual culture would have felt that such bold assertions would either have to be refuted or accepted or at least grappled with to come to some judgment on whether it did or didn’t call for a new way of understanding the human story. But after that “splash,” the ideas of THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES were then — neither refuted nor accepted — basically just ignored.
(That led me to examine our intellectual culture, and I discovered that indeed — in these times — there is no integrative perspective that now plays much role in how people understand the human world. Nothing that has the influence that the Freudian or the Marxian perspectives had generations ago.)
Despite that apparent lack of a “market” for “seeing things whole,” I’ve felt driven to continue on the quest to “see things whole” that began with PARABLE. Over the past forty years, I’ve kept building upon that foundation — expanding its reach, elaborating its ramifications in other dimensions — with other books (like OUT OF WEAKNESS: HEALING THE WOUNDS THAT DRIVE US TO WAR, 1988; and WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST: THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCE AT WORK IN OUR WORLD— AND HOW WE CAN DEFEAT IT, 2015). And with a great many essays, and series of essays to lay out the integrative picture of what I’ve calling A BETTER HUMAN STORY).
All of which puts me in an awkward position.
- I do believe that this BETTER HUMAN STORY does hold water, that it’s sufficiently valid that it put those fundamental matters — our nature, our history, our challenges — in an importantly different light.
- And I do believe that — if that integrated picture of our situation got a sufficient foothold in the thinking of our civilization — it could have a beneficial impact on the human future.
What’s makes things awkward is that I realize how that sounds— grandiosity-wise. But I don’t come to those beliefs casually (beliefs that have survived more than a half-century of repeated re-evaluation). And believing that this BETTER HUMAN STORY could make a difference, how can I not do whatever I can to convey this BIG PICTURE understanding to other minds, to persuade people to check out for themselves whether this BETTER HUMAN STORY delivers on claims that it feels awkward to make.
I call the following video “What If It Could Be Proved, to Your Satisfaction…?” in the hope that if the validity and potential beneficial impact of this BETTER HUMAN STORY could be proved to your satisfaction, you’d want to know.
In that video, I sketch out — in a somewhat improvisational way -- some of the main points of this integrated, multi-dimensional way of understanding the story of our species.
And below the video-box, are listed some essays that lay out those major points in a more systematic and elaborated way.
“The Ugliness We See in Human History Is Not Human Nature Writ Large”
“The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil’”
“How Civilization Inevitably Gives Rise to a “Battle between Good and Evil”
“Realities that Emerge Through the Evolution of the Experiential Realm”
“What Is Revealed by the ‘Pure Case’ of the Consistently Destructive Actor”