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There is much talk today about globalization. As Ken Wilber’s explains in his          Theory for Everything, today’s societies are not all in the same stage of development.

This article goes back to the earliest development of societies. How did societies come about? What are societies really based on? And perhaps more important; where are societies heading?

What kind of global society are we heading for? 

Since the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals, the vast majority of Middle Eastern people have lived in agricultural villages or in tent camps of nomadic paternalists.[i] Some of the world’s people remained gatherer-hunters. Other human societies relied heavily on fishing. Others elected farming at various scales of intensiveness, still others chose animal herding. As hunting techniques developed, no doubt people began to move seasonally to accompany migratory species. This included invasion, attack and subjugation of other human beings. Alone among the beings who have arisen on earth, we have evolved into virtually total dependence upon not our nature but our nurture. We have lost the comfortable shifting experiential balance between the two that makes for healthy functioning beings in the world. We have chosen instead to gamble our future and the planet’s on ideas. It has been suggested that the fall from Grace was the agricultural revolution. The expulsion from the garden was the consequence of us having taken up gardening.[ii] It is possible to see our accumulated ideas, our ways of entertaining them, and our usual unquestioning dependence on both as together constituting an artificial replacement part, a fabricated prosthetic device.[iii] Our covenant with God/Allah to be the caretakers of this world has been taken up as one of ruler and ruled, of superiority and inferiority.

Nature has been the first one to be harnessed, imprisoned, after that the conquest to other countries, to do the same there, was a small step, as well as the submission of the humans living there. The human “animal” as such, has become a committed and confirmed specialist in learning, teaching and applying techniques. In human societies, ways of being (wildness, oneness) have been supplanted by ways of doing. The human specialty is storable, retrievable, transmissible technique.[iv] Human domestication is, nearly enough, a synonym for civilization. We are evolved domesticates, the products of our own biological and cultural history. All based upon the illusion of superiority. As time passed by it were the Jews who formed communities which combined belief and worship with the civil administration of law, education and charity. They did however not have a hierarchical ecclesiastical organization, but were linked together by informal ties to, and respect for the great academies of learning. Though different in orientation, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity held in common that they were transcendental. They held that beyond the world of this life there is a higher world, the realm of the divine, to be attained either through ethical action or through faith in God.[v]Both the organized Christian churches and the decentralized Jewish communities were precedents for the later organization of Muslim religious associations.[vi]In these, family lineage, clientele, and ethnic communities continued, despite historical change, to be the building blocks of society.[vii]

New conceptions of personal worth and social status and new social relationships were fostered in this more complex society.[viii] Society suffered from economical competition, social conflict, and moral confusion. The Quran would condemn the displacements of tribal virtues by the ambition, greed, arrogance, and hedonism of the new rich.[ix]  Adaptability of some kind is no doubt important for all species, certainly for birds and mammals, but it is especially important for those who are highly social-those who live in cohesively knit societies. Learning is even more important for those “animals” which live in socially cooperative societies.[x].Our responses to Nature (everything alive we are connected with but not human) are not only inherent in us, but are also products of our socialization and other learning experiences. We fear and are fascinated, celebrate and desecrate, commune and consume, deify en defile, exalt and even worship nature. These kind of mixed feelings about both nature and the quality of “wildness” are deeply embedded in human cultures and perhaps especially in our own.[xi] Romers Rule, as it has become, holds that “the initial survival value of a favorable innovation is conservative, in that it renders possible the maintenance of a traditional way of life in the face of changed circumstances”. [xii] The Quran, viewed as an historical document, shows how Mohammed’s vision developed in direct response to concrete circumstances. He was a judge rather than a legislator, a counselor rather than a theorist.[xiii] Urbanization, economic change, and the formation of a new and powerful empire and the new elites of the city and empire gave birth to new forms of Islamic religious and imperial culture.  

In a state of nature, the glue that binds is compliance. This ancient “compulsion to comply” is no invention of our own, it is inherent in our biology. It is the basic prerequisite for any social order, and we do not carry it in our cultures but in our genes. It is not taught or learned. It is there.[xiv]But whatever the species, beyond a certain level of density, the inherent compulsion to comply breaks down, and violence can erupt. The migration of humans through the ages to less populated areas is an example for that, as well as the conquering of other already populated areas in order to expand our territory. By the unification of the former Sasasian and Byzantine parts of the Middle East into one policy, political and strategic barriers to trade were removed, and the foundations for a major economical revival were laid.[xv] The compulsion to comply had been overwhelmed by numbers on more or less permanent sites. The solution, gradually arrived at, was institutional hierarchical governance. The one way downward flow of externally imposed order, slowly but inexorably, replaced lateral mutuality. The best domesticates must not have a mind, or a will, of its own. Dependence is virtually absolute. In return we get “security”.  Nowadays it is the corporation which holds some resemblance to the medieval clan or fiefdom. The chief officer is the leader or warlord. The board of directors is the advisory counsel. The chief appoints the assistants, the executives and the managers. These are the officers of the clan. The workers are the foot soldiers. The warlord plots the corporate strategy and the officers and soldiers implement it. The objective is to win wars, to increase market share and to enlarge the assets of the warlord and the company.[xvi]  

Human attacks on other humans involve the phenomenon which has been termed, pseudo speciation.[xvii] Kain and Abel are said to have committed that first sin, which induced the writers of the Old Testament to warn us against such a thing. In the history of human culture this remarkable behavior (which is called pathological if a wild predatory animal does it) has become institutionalized.[xviii] When we can see another human being as not being of our species, then it is a short step to perceiving another social class, or another culture, or another human race, as another species, in which case the usual intra-specific modes of behavior are suspended, and inter-specific modes may kick in. The device is often used on a grand scale in time of war when the enemy is portrayed as non-or subhuman so that the necessary atrocities may be committed without inhibition. It is also useful within totalitarian societies or any others in the categorization of groups towards whom aggression may be contemplated. Pseudo-speciation has always sustained the practice of human slavery, just as specie -ism has always justified animal slavery. The device appears to have been in widespread use throughout the age of intercontinental conquest and colonial imperialism, and continues, only faintly disguised, in the age of multinational mercantile imperialism.[xix]

The crucial fact in the declining of the Muslim regimes was the rising power of Europe. They were developing an unprecedented technological inventiveness and an unrivaled capacity to generate economic wealth and military power. This ideology rests upon a dualistic image of the relationship between human beings and other natural phenomena. Its stance is human chauvinist, its program is Baconian conquest; its means is Cartesian rationality; its instruments are science and technology. It is human imperialism in its most highly developed form.  

Gnostic theosophy teaches that the world is one, and that all things participate in the chain of being, the continuous hierarchy of existence extending from God to the spiritual world to the lowliest beings. By contemplating the cosmos, we become one with the cosmos.[xx] Reshad Feild[xxi] describes it as the focus of attention from centric space (I), to peripheral space, a spiral leading to the center, where the object is to unite these two viewpoints. Rumi says, “I died from mineral-ism and changed into the vegetative state. I died from the vegetative state and became an animal. I died from animal-ism and became human: Why, then, should I fear? When have I become less by dying? At the next stage I shall die from the human form, so that I may soar and lift up my head amongst the angels; Than I will be freed from being an angel: everything is perishing except His face. Once more I shall be sacrificed and die…I shall become that which enters not into the imagination. Then I shall become non-existence: Non-existence said to me…Verily, unto Him shall wee return.”  (Modified and adapted from Nicholson’s translation, Mathnawi, Book III pp 218-219)[xxii]  All ideologies develop through a process of multidimensional mutualistic interaction and relationships.[xxiii] The ideology of the industrial –growth economy ethos of the North transcends political persuasion. Both “left” and “right” subscribe to it and are subsumed by it. The product and its promotion are administered by the multinational technocratic elite. The goal is wealth.[xxiv]The modern multinational imperialism is engaged in the creation of mass-consumption markets in its own-image. It is based on the following assumptions:

·        the preferred humanist interpretation of the palaeontological record of organic evolution-the destination being  Us

·        the preferred industrial trial/mercantile interpretation of the history of intercontinental expansionism-the destination: world-wide “development”

·        The preferred “civilized” interpretation of the history of science and technology- the destination: one predictable and controllable world.

Darwin’s view about natural selection and the struggle for existence has contributed much to our present way of looking at the world[xxv]. You may thus see competition/aggressiveness as “natural” and an ineradicable part of human nature which needs no further explanation, or while still seeing it as “natural”, you choose to see the human animal as having transcended brute Nature by means of our moral and ethical systems. For that second view, awareness (wildness in its purest form) is involved, and that awareness is shared across the collective participating consciousness of the population concerned. Freely willing immersion in both group and community self is a prerequisite for the individual experience of the whole. Awareness of the whole self is emotional, not rational. It is an event, not a construction. It is experienced, not known. It is lived, not abstracted. It is received, not perceived. It is a gift, not an accomplishment. Magnificently performed great music may occasionally induce it in some of us.[xxvi] Some of us are similarly transported by the spring song of the birds, the Zikr of the Sufis, the sound of the ocean. The overwhelming impression conveyed by a hunting lioness is total awareness.[xxvii] Far en deep beyond the shifting clouds of memory, sometime, one was “wild”.[xxviii] This wildness this awareness, the dissolution of the ego-centered self is a state of mind which Julian Jaynes in his book the development of bicameral mind describes as the state of the human mind before “the fall”. There was oneness, now there is individuality. That the awareness, this wildness is still present in today’s humans can be seen within the stories of the Mystics of all times, when they describe their Union with God, but even more recently in movies like The Fight Club, with Brad Pitt, or Instinct with Dennis Hopper. I believe that in spite of our cultural conditioning and domesticated ideological dependence, as living beings we still have simultaneous access, if we will it, to all four stages of self-consciousness: individual, group, community, planetary. In theory at least, we all retain the capacity for wildness. In practice, we cling limpet like to the ideology of dualism, we deny the virtues of wildness and we deny its accessibility to us.[xxix] In Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard diagnoses the failure of self-development in society as the cause of our environmental destructiveness. Erick Fromm (1956) in The Art of Loving lucidly discussed man’s separation from nature as the origin of anxieties.….man….has emerged from the animal kingdom, from instinctive adaptation,….he has transcended nature-although he never leaves it; he is part of it-and yet torn away from nature, he cannot return to it; once thrown out of paradise-the state of his original oneness with nature…Man can only go forward by developing his reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one, instead of the pre-human harmony which is irretrievably lost (p 5).[xxx]  The person emerges in a genetic calendar by stages, with time critical constrains and needs, so that instinct and experience act in concert. The mature adult is a late stage in this lifelong series of overlapping and interlocking events: not linear but spiral, resonating between disjunction and unity, but moving, so that each new cycle enlarges the previous one.[xxxi] Shepard observes that the development process consists of three bonding events at three matrices. Following each bonding event the individual cuts loose from that matrix towards autonomy, then swings back to bond to the next.

For the child who has bonded with and thus become non-human Nature, and who retains that capacity to retrieve that self-identity through adulthood, the willful, deliberate, and conscious wounding of nature is impossible, because that would be self-mutilation. For the child denied that experience (The second matrix), however, the mutilation of Nature maybe wrought without the slightest inhibition. It is only natural to that child to reshape Nature, as the child itself has been deformed, towards the manifest density of the technological imperative.[xxxiii]Virtually everything we see, hear, smell, touch and taste nowadays is of our own making. The bonding with nature becomes less and less available to our children and thus the possibility to become “whole”. If not whole, they become sick because of the degradation of the environment. Air pollution is one of the major causes of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The contamination of food by chemical substances has increased the risk to health from food sources. The contamination of oceans, rivers, and lakes continues unabated in many parts of the world. Noise pollution has increased the stress levels of those exposed to it.[xxxiv] The first circle of the Javanese world-view regards the outer world as an homogeneous space where individuals live and in which one’s well-being (slamet) is secured when everything is in harmony. Society and nature are the environments in which Javanese children find themselves. Through society man is mediated to nature. From this social environment he learns that nature constitutes not only a threat, but also provides blessings and happiness, upon which their entire existence depends. Society, nature, and the world of spirits are the numinous space that conditions the self-experience of the Javanese.[xxxv] The supreme faith in the human reason, called humanism, rejects other mythologies of power, including the power of God, the power of supernatural forces, and even the undirected power of nature in league with blind chance. The first two don’t exist according to humanism, the last can, with effort, be mastered. If the human enterprise can be shown not to enjoy primacy over all other things, not deeming it necessarily, then there could be positive consequences for all concerned.[xxxvi] Rights must in this be seen for what they are: artificially institutionalized technical surrogates for naturally evolved mutualistic, participatory compliance and reciprocity. Rights are prostheses for “rightness”. Rights are legal and political tools, as Nelson Mandela stated.[xxxvii] In human interspecies behavior one can see a being estranged from its roots and its natural context committing the most improbable and aberrant acts under the self-justification provided by its own obsessive narcissism. The same impulse, possibility is latent in the child, but must not be nourished and thus released through intimate experience, including bonding with Nature. Each level of reality is a theophany of the divine names, which is brought into being by the self-consciousness of a higher level which, becoming conscious, generates another state of spiritual being. Because each thing in the world is an analogy of the spiritual reality, by understanding the symbolism of this reality we may pass from this world to the spiritual world beyond.[xxxviii] This is essential to mature individuation, which in turn evolves personal bonding to the cosmos, with the full spiritual development that it implies. We will always need ideology, it is the fullness and the maturity of development of that ideology that counts. 

Other voices are there to be heard. A wise and gentle man by the name of Stan Rowe has put it in this way:

In the crunch…the ecosphere (Nature) ought to be valued above people on the basis of precedence in time, evolutionary creativity and diversity and the complexity of a higher level of organization. Conceivably, for example, present human population, expanded in size by technology, has become an active evil, exceeding the sustainable limit, overwhelming the planetary environment. The ultimate crimes against the environment, crimes that also threaten the human enterprise, are fecundity and exploitive economic growth, both encouraged by the homocentric philosophy.[xxxix]

Only the access to our own nature (awareness, wildness, oneness) allows us then to seek a structure of ideas and believes that will build not on future (abstract) desires and expectations, but on past (experienced) qualities of active bonding and participation. The experience is wildness: a state of being in which one is an autonomous organism, yet bounded and subsidiary to the greater whole. I mean the dissolution of the ego-centered self, as when one was melted into black earthy humus, laced with green, on a forest floor. Look at the child gently holding an unfledged young bird that has fallen from its nest. Look at that child’s eyes. The sweet bondage of wildness is recoverable.[xl] Alongside the scholars of hadith, law and theology, mystics and ascetics carried another form of quest for religious fulfillment. While the legalists and the theologians concentrated upon finding out the rules which God had commanded to govern everyday life and sought a rational understanding of their beliefs, the mystics attempted to acquire an immediate and personal experience of God’s reality. In religious terms this is a quest for unity with the divine being; in humanistic terms it is an effort to overcome the divided self, to realize the truths by which life must be lived, and to attain wholeness of being. Islamic mysticism “originated” in the spiritual aspirations and religious practices of the Prophet Mohammed, his companions and their successors.[xli] There are many exercises in Sufism concerning, the Nafs (nafs-e ammareh-commanding self), such as making the 5 senses your friends, awakening the subtle centers, chakra’s, within oneself. All of that is basically evidence that one is partly inwardly not in touch with oneself. Sufism’s pragmatic program of spiritual and moral developments was accompanied by a quest for intellectual insight. Sufis also cultivated a metaphysical, theosophical, and philosophical concept of the divine reality, the creation of the material world, the place of human being in the universe created by God, and a theory of the correspondence of the essential reality of man’s nature with that of the divine being. They posited a transcendent God, but one whose spiritual radiance or emanation was implanted in all beings. This implantation however within humans, is obscured, overcome sometimes by the material and worldly side of human beings.[xlii] Anthropologists have observed that in human societies in which possessions are held in common, competition, dominance, aggression, and all the other manifestations of the invisible hand are unknown.[xliii]The psychological dimension is equally interesting.[xliv]Both indicate that competition is not innate to us, but learned. Both offer cooperation as its opposite, holding that the human species is the most cooperative of all primates. In any case cooperation may be seen as second, narrower level of behavior within the wider phenomenon of compliance. The compliant model of natural reality which I have ventured to construct in this essay rests on the notion of “at-one-ship”, a state of being which the naturalist is able to infer from the behavior of wild non-human social groups and multi-species communities. In spite of persistent denial by the cultural prosthesis (we are “different”), human beings still share that fundamental quality. Among domesticates, we are one of only two species to whom self-awareness beyond the individual appears to remain available. We retain the compulsion to comply.[xlv] 

In the words of Hafez[xlvi]

Thought and opinion have no place in the world of the true Sufis; For to be self-centered and opinioned is a transgression on our way. In the circle of destiny, we are but a dot made by the compass. Our contemplation is our grace, and Your command our reference.

Conclusion:

Here we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, little has changed, society-the world as a whole, still suffers from economical competition and social conflict. Not only have we hardly been able to stimulate, hilm, aql and islam, we also have not been able to revert the ongoing exploitation of our natural environment. The chances of us thus become, whole, at-one-ment, declining every day. Judgment day is no doubt just around the corner. If not induced by God (since he is the most Compassionate, most Merciful) undoubtfully man, behaving like a superior being, will put it upon himself. In this review I have tried to make clear that there are alternative forms of social affiliation, not based upon organizational coherence, not based upon economical growth, but based upon informal communication, linked through that and through respect for the Law. There is, collective participation of “the population” concerned, because we still retain the compulsion to comply. These alternative forms have survived the ages opposing governments, now opposing multinational mercantile imperialism. Whether it will be possible for them to change the direction of “history” to be made, I don’t know. Today we have to look at the world from the 4^th stage of self-consciousness, we have to overcome the illusion of Superiority (intra-species and interspecies level) and the illusion of Need. For if possessions are held in common there is enough of everything for everybody. Religious insight IS the basis for political action, it says more heart, not more matter, it says being before and beyond producing. This should be the basis of a unified world counsel, which object would not be to rule the world, but to protect those principles, not to suppress, but to free all sentient beings in their quest for Unity with the Divine Being. So finally looking from Unity to the diversity, God will be able to reveal his treasure to ALL

“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known so I created the world that I might be known.”