On Revolution, Part 2

When my son was in middle school he was assigned to read Romeo and Juliet. As I was helping him with his homework I suddenly found myself explaining what it meant for a woman to be ruined. In his world, thanks to the efforts of feminists over decades, a woman isn’t ruined if she has sex “before wedlock”. Have you ever had the experience, when you suddenly realize that your understanding of something has dramatically changed and you no longer believe what you once did?

In the shift between one understanding of reality and another, a fundamental change of awareness occurs. An epiphany has a before and an after. First you believe something. Then you can’t believe what you used to believe. How many things do you tell your kids about the way things used to be that they find hard to believe. For example, we once took smoking on airplanes and in restaurants totally for granted and did not even question it - until someone did and now its hard to believe that we once thought it was ok.

An epiphany is an experience of sudden and striking realization. Another way to describe an event where one becomes aware of an aspect of reality that one had not previously noted is revolution. The word revolution has so many subtleties and connotations, but the general sense is of topsy turvy, things turning upside down. There’s a feeling of suddenness about it. A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the underlying assumptions that we have about the world, an epiphany experienced by a group or society. And many of the paradigm shifts we are currently experiencing started with the Scientific Revolution.

Since the Copernicus discovered heliocentric structure of our solar system, commonly regarded as the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, there have been many scientific discoveries that have led to fundamental changes in human understanding of reality. One of the most recent, Darwin’s discovery of the Theory of Evolution, has been one of the most revolutionary to our sense of identity. By shifting our understanding of our origins and place in the natural world. it has profoundly affected the human sense of self. Before Darwin, most humans thought they were a being uniquely created by a deity, separate from nature and the animal kingdom.

Throughout history humans looked to external sources for a sense of stability and belonging. Religion provided definite explanations for the universe, a clear moral code, purpose and meaning. Society and culture gave people a strong sense of identity and direction, collective narratives and social roles. Before the 19th Century, identity was defined by endurable categories like gender, family lineage and class, and was a clearly understood place in a fixed chain of being. Tribesmen in 500 BC or medieval peasants had very different ideas about their place in the universe than we do. Our sense of self importance, personal freedom, and relationships depend to a large degree on when and where we were born.

The development of the modern worldview since 1700 has been a complex evolution shaped by radical shifts in human thought, science and society. Humanity’s sense of identity has transformed significantly, moving from fixed pre-ordained status to a fluid self constructed concept. Thomas Kuhn argued, in his pivotal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, that science does not progress via a line or accumulation of new knowledge but undergoes periodic revolutions, known as paradigm shifts. Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Nile Eldridge extrapolated this concept to the analogous idea of punctuated equilibrium in the field of evolutionary biology.

In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium is the idea that most of a species existence in spent in a period of relative stability with infrequent rapid bursts of change, usually caused by dramatic changes in their environment. Punctuated equilibrium can help us understand the process of change in complex social systems, as well. Critical Juncture Theory focuses on large, rapid, discontinuous changes and the long-term effect of these changes. The theory proposes that most social systems exist in an extended period of stasis, which may be punctuated by sudden shifts leading to radical change. Critical junctures are turning points that alter the course of evolution of some entity (e.g., a species, a society).

From the perspective of a single lifetime, Copernicus’ discovery that the Earth is not the center of the universe is a long long time ago. The world back then was a very different place. But part of the reason why it seems so long ago is because of the changes the Scientific Revolution has caused to our understanding of our relationship with the world, including with each other. All of our expectations, all of our understanding about how the world and how we fit into the big picture has been transformed by the journey humanity has been on since the early 16th century, a mere 400 years ago.

When we think of revolutions, we think of a quick and dramatic upheaval. But they are never instantaneously. In political revolutions, ruling governments go through a period of destabilization while the opposition gathers power and influence. In an individual’s life, a moment of revelation can lead to decades of transformation. Because we’re in it, it’s hard for us to understand what we’re seeing as the unfolding a period of rapid change in human cultural evolution. It’s already been several hundred years, which with our life spans, feel like a long time. But in the sense of evolution, not much time has passed. And generally speaking, humans are very conservative of their culture, we have many strategies to maintain our cultural stability.

At each stage of scientific discovery and awareness, humans have gained a more detailed awareness of our selves and our species. nature and our connection to it. Apparently the truth that is unfolding appears to be something that Native Americans already knew: our deep interconnection with the natural world. As the bounds of European culture have been challenged and examined in greater and greater depth, we are realizing what it truly means to be human. We can adopt a reality and nature based culture because of the scientific method, which allows us to step outside our natural biases and enables us to ask better questions. We no longer have to accept something someone in authority says just because they say it. We require proof, logic, reason.

Being aware that we are currently living through a major paradigm shift in our understanding of our species and its place in the ecology of the Earth can give us hope. We are becoming consciously aware of something that every one of Earth’s beings instinctually understands, but we humans with our peacock’s tail of creative intelligence have to create an elaborate story about. The story we have told ourselves about ourselves (the most interesting story of all) has been pretty fantastical over the millennia, we really just make stuff up a lot of the time. But beneath all of our stories, there is an element of deep understanding. We understand humans pretty darn well, that’s why ancient stories, like myths, make so much sense to us.