The Great Transition

As we see our present interconnected global challenges of widespread environmental degradation, crippling poverty, social inequities, and unrestrained militarism, we know that the obstacles to the flourishing of life's ecosystems and to genuine sustainable development are considerable.

In the midst of these formidable challenges we are being called to the next stage of evolutionary history. For the evolutionary life impulse moves us forward from viewing ourselves as isolated individuals and competing nation states to realizing our collective presence as a species on the planet. The human community has the capacity now to realize our intrinsic unity in the midst of enormous diversity. And, most especially, it has the opportunity to see this unity as arising from the dynamics of the evolutionary process itself.

Our sense of the whole is emerging in a fresh way as we feel ourselves embraced by the evolutionary powers unfolding over time into forms of ever-greater complexity and consciousness. We are realizing too, that evolution moves forward with transitions, such as the movement from inorganic matter to organic life and from single celled organisms to plants and animals, that sweep through the evolutionary unfolding of the universe, the earth, and the human. All such transitions come at times of crisis, they involve tremendous cost, and they result in new forms of creativity. The central reality of our times is that we are in such a transition moment.

We are in a transition from an era dominated by competing nation states to one that is birthing a sustainable multicultural planetary civilization. This birth is beginning to take place within the context of our emerging understanding of the universe story. At the same time that we are discovering the story of evolution, we are also realizing that we are destroying the life systems of the planet.

The greatest discovery in the history of humanity is that of the birth and development of the universe. Four hundred years of modern science has culminated in our understanding of cosmic, biological, terrestrial, and human evolution. We can summarize this by saying that 13.7 billion years ago the universe began with a great explosion of light and elementary particles that, over time, complexified into giraffes, rosebuds, and humans.

We have learned not only the historical details of the mainline of this cosmic evolution; we have also acquired some understanding of the fundamental forces that brought about this evolution. These forces or processes are invisible to us and yet they shape so much of what takes place all around us. These are the forces of gravitation and electromagnetic interactions, as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces. By studying them in isolation in the laboratory, we have learned the details of these interactions, but, with our discovery of cosmic and biological evolution, we can now see these processes from the point of view of the large-scale universe.

We are, just now, coming to understand the processes of the universe primarily as self-organizing dynamics aimed at developing complex structures. This development always comes with a cost. We are now able to appreciate this from our deepening knowledge of evolution.

When the universe was very young, only a million years old, it consisted predominantly of hydrogen and helium atoms billowing out in great clouds that filled the universe from one end to the other. One can imagine such a scene unfolding for all eternity. But that was not to be.

While the clouds were hot they continued to expand, even though their gravitational attraction pulled them in the opposite direction. But as the atoms cooled sufficiently, they arrived at a state in which the gravitational attraction could overcome the thermal expansion. The cloud would now collapse under its own gravitational pull, everything being drawn into a point. But in this crisis situation of extreme temperatures, a surprising twist took place. At temperatures of 10 million degrees, hydrogen began fusing together to form helium. In this fusion process mass was converted into energy, so a new burst of energy appeared at the center of the cloud. A new system had emerged that would be called, billions of year later, a star.

Concerning this process of complexification, it is worth noting that a single atom cannot produce a star. Nor can a million atoms. It requires trillions of atoms, and when such a cloud of atoms reaches an extreme state of temperature there is the possibility of the emergence of a more complex system. This more complex system can avoid the destruction of total collapse, but there is a cost. The cost is the loss of hydrogen through its conversion into helium. Those hydrogen atoms are lost, being needed for the energy to stave off total collapse. But out of all this there is the creativity of bringing forth a new being. A star is composed of atoms but is so very different from an atom. A star has its life cycles: its birth, its development into maturity, and its death as it exhausts all its atoms for fusion.

These same dynamics of the universe are also at work in the evolution of life, biological and human. They show themselves most clearly in a moment of crisis.

Transformations in Human History

Just as we can see the great transitions in evolutionary history from smaller units to ones of larger complexity, so too can we identify some of the significant transition moments into greater complexity in human history. Our own period is experiencing such a major transition from that of separate nation states to a sustainable multicultural planetary civilization.

Twentieth century historians of world history have helped us take in the sweep of human presence on the planet—brief as it is in relation to evolutionary time. The first major transition occurs when nomadic hunter and gatherers, after 100,000 years, settled into more complex agricultural villages10,000 years ago. These villages cohered into more developed societies, which in turn gave birth to the great classical civilizations along the river valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow Rivers, some 5,000 years ago.

Our current transition to forming a planetary civilization began 2,000 years ago with the linking of the great Eurasian landmass through trade along the Silk Road. The Roman Empire and the Han Chinese Empire initiated this intricate exchange of ideas and goods. A further step toward the creation of planetary civilization emerged when these trading connections exploded from land routes to sea routes with the Columbian expansion out of Europe 500 years ago.

Our recent understanding of world history shows us that these interactions included a significant cost. In all of these exchanges there existed both a dialogue and a clash of civilizations. So too, in our own period, we are participating in the intensification of the transition toward planetary civilization. We find ourselves poised between persistent conflict and the hope of mutually beneficial exchange and dialogue among individuals and communities, and among different cultures and religions.

This creative process of historical exchange reached a new level of intensity several hundred years ago with the scientific and industrial revolutions. With the explosion of population, with our search for food and resources, and with increased industrial-technological power, our presence has become overbearing. As the February 2005 Millennium Ecosystems Assessment Report made abundantly clear, the planet is now being encircled by an industrial-technological juggernaut that is extinguishing the very foundations on which life depends.

Within the last 50 years the clash of humans, not only with each other but also with the planet, has become especially heightened. The widespread destruction of topsoil, pollution of air and water, and the loss of species, is beyond the capacity of the individual nation states to handle and of the Earth to absorb. The challenge now is to construct a responsive civilization that is truly planetary in its scope and sustainable in its functioning.

In looking at the historical record, the transition from smaller and disparate states to greater units required the provision of internal coherence and ecological stability. This was true, for instance, 2000 years ago in the early formation of China. The first emperor of China created economic, political, and cultural unity out of disparate ethnic groups. Economically, he standardized currency and weights and measurements. Politically, he instituted the civil service exam system, based on the Confucian classics, to insure that qualified and moral ministers would rule the country. This was the first such meritocracy of its kind and was much admired by the French Enlightenment thinkers. Culturally, Confucian humanism was linked to political rule in order to create a broad sense of Chinese identity across the vast geography and among the far-flung peoples of China. The transition from differentiated states to a unified civilization, from diverse ethnic groups to the Han Chinese people, was consciously crafted using human ingenuity and statecraft. The struggle to maintain the larger unity was threatened at times, yet this unity successfully continued for two millennia. This long-lived cohesion was also based on sustainable agriculture and irrigation practices, in addition to economic, political, and culture unity.

All of the great empires of human history faced similar challenges of creating larger and more complex units. This was accomplished through a sense of power and privilege, as well as with the dazzling spread of art and culture. The transition from the age of empires to the age of nation states has occurred in the blink on an eye—hardly 200 years since the French revolution and the emergence of nation states in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We are now entering a period that is beyond the nation state as a privileged unit, to the Earth community as a common destiny.

In our present post war period, we have a remarkable example of that movement from clashing states to a cooperative whole. Two world wars have resulted in the European Union (EU), in which the individual nation states of Europe are finding their way toward a larger common good in political and economic union. As imperfect as this may be, and as challenging as it still is to find cultural unity, it is an important illustration of what is happening on a larger planetary scale. Namely, we are at a moment in history when we can imagine that our common good as a species, rests on care for our common ground, the Earth. Ignited by collective purpose, the European Union is an illustration of how we are moving toward a larger unity, guided by a sense of shared destiny. Beyond world wars and the cold war, there beckons the sense of a larger planetary whole—an emerging, multiform, planetary civilization. It is in participating in this transition moment that we will fulfill our role as humans on behalf of future generations.