Spirit in Action

Evolution's Purpose - Science, Spirituality, & Philosophy

Steve McIntosh is author of Evolution's Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins, an insightful & carefully reasoned study of the big WHY driving creation. With a worldview peering beyond the beliefs & practices of traditionalists, modernists, & post-modernists, Steve leads us to an outlook which promises dramatic improvement, inner & outer, for our culture & world.

Broadcast on:: 06 Oct 2013
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ We've got some deep and intriguing thought ahead for today's Spirit in Action, the kind of thought that can radically transform the world. We'll be talking with Steve McIntosh, author of a new book, Evolution's Purpose, an integral interpretation of the scientific story of our origins. Evolution has been at the focus of a battle between some segments of our population, with elements of traditional fundamentalism seeking to force the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in the classroom, and with some secular forces objecting to anything other than mechanistic determinism. Steve McIntosh explores with careful reasoning and insight the new story, alternative arising in the last decades. A scientifically faithful perspective with room for reflection on the big question of why, and how is it possible for spiritual possibilities? In addition to his writing and Olympic class bicycle racing, Steve McIntosh practiced several years as a lawyer, and he founded the company Now and Zen. Originally from California, he's called Colorado Home for some time now, and he joins us today by phone from Boulder, Colorado. Steve, I'm very pleased to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thanks, Mark. It's a pleasure to be with you. Welcome to Olympic class bicycling. Were you also into surfing since you came from California? You don't know. As a young man, a lot of my friends were drawn to the ocean, but I was always drawn to the mountains. The mountains were where I really felt that my spiritual home was, and so the sports of backpacking and mountaineering and mountain cycling and road cycling all kind of fed my hunger for mountain beauty. I'm trying to explore a little bit of your personal evolution, because evolution is the topic that's on the table for today, particularly your book, Evolution's Purpose. You start from California, you do law school over in Virginia, evidently, and you settle in Colorado. So there's must be some kind of personal evolution that's going with this. Does it recapitulate these stages of evolution that you're talking about either personally or societally that we go through? Well, to a degree, sure. I mean, I can't say that my life's story is a perfect recapitulation of the evolution of human history. But, you know, I can definitely notice stages of development, you know, in myself, in my consciousness, and that these stages of development have a loose correspondence to the stages of development of human history. That's one of the tenets of integral philosophy. Evolution's purpose talks about evolution and this development from many, many points of view. So we're not going to be able to cover all of those today. But one of the things that I wonder about is your time as a lawyer. I mean, you went through law school, you worked for a major firm. Where does that fit in your evolutionary purpose? Is that a help or a hindrance, or what did that bring to your eventual? I think perhaps maybe now we could consider you a philosophical author. Sure, you know, going to law school and the intellectual development that resulted from that, discipline in thinking and arguing, discipline in writing, you know, learning how to be an extremely clear writer and being able to take difficult concepts and make them accessible. Those are things I learned in the course of my legal career, although I never intended to really be a lawyer as a profession. I went to business school as an undergraduate and learned that in order to be an entrepreneur, in order to really have the ability to be creative within the economy, which was something that I was studying as an undergraduate business student. I realized that I needed credibility. And law school offered credibility and it was also intellectually interesting for its own sake. And so I found myself wanting to get a graduate degree that would have some professional potential, but that would also allow me to be flexible. And then after graduating from law school, I couldn't resist taking a job at a big firm. You know, I did well in school, so I was recruited by the big firms. And so I wanted to kind of cash in on the education a little bit and pay back the loans. So I practiced law for about three years, but I was definitely not interested in doing that, you know, for the rest of my life. It was just part of the stepping stone in my professional development. I noticed a little bit of a parallel in some of my work. You know, I've worked with computers and software for a few decades, but one of the things that was a passion of mine in high school in college was debate in forensics. In particular, this debate, this honing of the mind, I think that you speak of that you also got through law. Halfway through college, I stopped participating in debate because, amongst other things, I decided that while it was expanding my mind, it gave me empowerment to move forward. And this is all related to evolution. It killed my soul. It taught me to be able to argue about anything regardless whether I agreed with it or disagreed with it and said that that wasn't what was important, what was important was winning. Does that have any parallels with what you gained as insights along the way, and does this have anything to do with evolution's purpose? Yeah, first of all, for me, the foundational spiritual practices by which I work on my own spiritual development as well as how I help to develop my writing and my philosophy and my work in the larger integral philosophy movement has to do with the practice of the beautiful, the true, and the good. Each of these primary values, if you will, lend themselves to a particular kind of practice. And while there's overlap and these values are forms of each other and their highest spiritual expressions, when it comes to the practice of the truth, there is a certain amount of discernment. And discernment sometimes only comes about by pruning away that which is less true, that these values are both relative and absolute, in the sense that they're both and neither. They're directions of evolution, if you will. So what the truth is is something that's evolving, and as human consciousness evolves, our ability to recognize truth expands. That's one of the markers or the gauges of the evolution of consciousness, is a widening appreciation of that which is beautiful, true, and good. So when it comes to a truth practice, that has many ways that someone can practice truth. They're spiritual truth, scientific truth, philosophical truth. And all of them involve discovery, discernment, thought, consideration. But when it comes to philosophy, perhaps particularly, philosophy throughout history has proceeded through argument. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's a winner or a loser that has to be like a legal trial or some kind of aggressive verbal violence. But discernment does involve sort of pushing off against that which is less true or that which is false. And so that does involve a parsing and being able to recognize what a good argument is. Being able to be open to not have so much cultural cognition that there's no argument that will persuade you of truth. For example, you know, fundamentalists in a sort of a mythic level of religion, they're so identified with their dogma. You can see this in almost every form of religion, that there's no argument. There's nothing that could convince them because they're going to rationalize their way back to their belief system no matter what happens. And you can see the same thing with materialist fundamentalists, right? I mean, pick up a copy of the New York Times and the cultural heroes according to that segment of the society are these new atheists. And they have as much of a problem with cultural cognition as it's called inability to kind of see beyond their worldview the earlier levels of fundamentalism have. So in some ways, you know, arguments can be effective in helping people to see truth. Arguments can be effective in improving a particular discourse by showing parts of it that are less true. And so I think there is a role for philosophical argument, especially if it's done in the spirit of truth than the spirit of trying to seek a higher understanding. And so in my book, I argue that evolution does have a spiritual message. It's such a large and expansive, it's the truest thing we know. In other words, evolution is not happening in the universe. The universe is evolution, if you will. And as we've come through both science and history to experience a larger, more integrated understanding of this evolutionary process, this has really opened our eyes to a vast new form of truth. And there's so much truth there, factual, scientific truth, but there's also spiritual truth. And so that's the focus of the book, is the spiritual truth that can be gleaned and used from this creation story of our age, which is certainly more than science. It's really a foundation of every worldview since modernism. And beginning to see these spiritual truths that are inherent in evolution, I think can lead directly to a more evolved world, which is the purpose in writing this book. You know, you talked about the traditional, and you talked about the scientific age, the modern age, if you will. You didn't mention postmodernism, and I'm sure we'll get around to discussing the stage that you see happening after it, which includes this whole integral philosophy outlook, this evolutionary outlook on things. One of the things that I think we need to make clear up front is that some people are going to object to some portions of all of this, as you mentioned with the fundamentalists, if you mention something that doesn't match with their creeds, with their structure, it's unsettling to them. Why do we have to go unsettle people? What is it about emergence and what we've learned about this new story of the unfolding of the universe that makes it imperative that we move forward? Well, let me say first that I think one of the mores or the proposed cultural sensibilities that goes along with this developmental integral view is that people have a right to be who they are, that although the world needs to evolve, although we have global problems that require a cultural evolution, at least among some portions of the population, it's okay to be a traditionalist, it's okay to be a modernist, or a postmodernist, or whatever your cultural identity, there are important beauties and enduring values that go with that perspective. In order to be able to reclaim a vertical dimension of development where we recognize some forms of consciousness and culture are more evolved than others, we have to also hold an opposite pole as we do that. In other words, the only way to be moral and recognize higher levels of evolution is also to recognize the inherent morality of each stage, the inherent okayness, if you will, of every cultural segment that exists in the world today, right? So even though we're all alive here in 2012, not all of us live in the same time in history, if you will, the evolution of consciousness and culture on this planet is spread out over the last 5,000 years of history. And in some ways, every stage of culture is emerging to, reacting to problems, bringing solutions that correspond to a given set of life conditions. And in some ways, that particular form of culture is most appropriate for those life conditions. And until those life conditions can be changed or ameliorated, until those problems can be effectively solved, trying to impose different forms of culture can actually lead to regression. So it's very important for people to know that the evolutionary worldview doesn't require or expect or want to impose an obligation on the rest of human culture to evolve or become postmodern or beyond, while the evolution of consciousness is ultimately a good thing, we also want to respect everyone for who they are and where they are. I suspect that most listeners to this program are of either modernist or postmodernist bent. I would like to make clear what there is about evolution, what it's taught us, what this emergence and the other lessons that have told us that there's a further truth that we can perhaps glean, I think as you say, beyond a strict scientific interpretation of the universe, that evolution happens by random chance, it survives, it goes on. Why is that not enough? What is there about emergence and the results of seeing that in the universe that make it important to open our eyes and move a little bit forward? Sure, I appreciate that excellent question and that's important as we get started here. When I say evolution, I'm talking about something more than Darwin's discovery of descent with modification in biological species, although it certainly is that. Science and history, human knowledge has come to expand in the last few decades whereby we understand that everything in the universe is subject to evolution. That time and space and matter and energy began with a distinct and dramatic beginning, 13.7 billion years ago, with a big bang. While those scientists debate different aspects of the big bang, it's really a well-established scientific fact at this point that's been validated with four different pillars of evidence, if you will. The universe really is, at least the universe we live in, is 13.7 billion years old. That's not that much older, not that many more times older than the Earth itself. This was sort of a shattering discovery that really became confirmed in the 1960s and which were still kind of digesting as a culture, the fact that it's not just biological species that emerged. We can see the universe unfolding from the beginning. At the beginning, there was the big bang and the debris of the big bang, which was the hydrogen atoms and a little bit of helium, the most simple form of matter that we can imagine was all there was. But gradually, something more kept coming from something less, emergence in this realm of what we call cosmological evolution, evolution of matter. Gradually through the first generation stars and second generation stars and supernovas, we see both on a micro scale with the atoms and the elements at a macro scale, with galaxies and stars and eventually planets, that there's this gradual unfolding and that unfolding evinces a sequence of emergence whereby the accomplishments of earlier levels are taken up and used by higher levels. Even before life, we can see how at first there's only atoms. At first there's only the basics of physics. But then there emerges a chemistry. From atoms we go to molecules and molecules transcend and include atoms. The molecules emerge. There's something more from something less. They form a building block, a water, for example. It forms a building block, which is an essential accomplishment, which is then taken up and used. So we have the big bang. Although science and physics explains the cosmological evolution as a sort of entropic unfolding of the natural tendencies of matter to complexify, the big bang itself is still a complete mystery. What caused that or how that came into being is beyond the explanatory powers of science at the moment. And then we witness here on this planet, and most likely elsewhere throughout the universe, a kind of a second big bang, another sort of unexplained, amazing emergence. It transcends the entire realm of material evolution. Life can't be reduced to matter. The emergence of life creates a kind of a new dimension of evolution, in which a new kind of development takes place. And this emergence, the main thing that separates the simplest forms of life, from, if you will, the most complex forms of matter, is that with life emerges rather more miraculous appearance of agency, or the power of choice. The famous biologist Lynn Martellis defined life as matter that chooses. Even that, the choices of those primitive life forms, you know, genetically predetermined and instinctual in so many ways, they still can't be reduced to something physical. The agency is almost like a new law of physics, if you will. It's a new thing that enters the universe, and it's what makes the evolution of life possible. Life is like a river that runs uphill, you know, unlike the evolution of matter, which kind of is a downhill reaction in a sense. Life becomes a new form that can overcome entropy and can complexify and events the sequence of emergencies that build on themselves, right? So, you know, first we see the simplest form of prokaryotes, the simplest form of amoebas. And then there emerges the miraculous ability of eukaryotes to have sexual reproduction. And then there emerges vertebrates. I mean, there's a sequence, the sequence of life's emergence. One of the characteristics of this emergent process is that, again, something more keeps coming from something less. And every time something more comes, it takes up and uses the accomplishments of what came before. So we see life, in a sense, through its sequence of emergencies overall, taking up and using the accomplishments of the previous level of evolution, cosmological evolution, without a planet, without a sun, without water, without all of the elements that make life possible in an underlying physical substrate, life is building on those. And then, you know, after billions of years of the evolution of life, there emerges what we might term a third big bang, a kind of another miraculous, if you will, emergence that creates a new category of evolution that evolves at a faster pace and uses different methods of development. Just like life can't be reduced to matter, the psychosocial evolution of humanity, the evolution of consciousness and culture represents a new domain of development. The evidence, of course, is our global civilization, and this conversation we're having right now is made possible by the fact that we live in this domain of human culture and society, which is an evolutionary achievement, you know, staggering proportions. The argument that human cultural evolution is real evolution, right? The fact that these different, distinctly different, you know, the evolution of human life and culture, the evolution of biological life, the evolution of the universe, these are all different kinds of development. But what ties them together and makes them all forms of real evolution is the fact that we see this sequence of emergence where there's something more, keeps coming from something less, keeps taking up and using the accomplishments. So we know, for example, our bodies are made out of atoms, right, the simplest forms of matter, and these atoms are transcended by our molecules, which are transcended by ourselves, which are transcended by our organs and our bodies, and we have these mammalian bodies. And even though our bodies may not be that different from the bodies of other complex mammals, our minds, our consciousness, elevated by cultural evolution, standing on the shoulders of our ancestors, you know, for thousands of years, we've transcended our biological evolution. It's this new category. And, you know, just like life is matter that chooses, life is distinguished from matter by its inherent purpose, what I'll call kind of first-order purpose. The main thing that distinguishes human consciousness from other forms of animal consciousness is that we not only have purposes to survive and reproduce like other animals, but we have sort of a second-order purpose. We have purposes for our purposes. We have a freedom of choice regarding the impetus and urges that we want to act on and those that we want to resist. The human needs, unlike animal needs, really can never be satisfied, because as soon as one set of needs or one level of values is satisfied, the interesting thing about human consciousness is that we awaken to another level of needs. So as soon as we satisfy our need for hunger and shelter, then we realize we have the needs for social and organization and status. You can even trace, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Many of our listeners will be familiar with that as a way of understanding that human needs continue to expand and new ways to define self-actualization, if you will, emerges as human culture becomes more complex. From the very beginning, you know, from whatever it was 200,000 years ago, humans have been trying to improve their conditions. Unlike biological evolution, which kind of proceeds inexorably through random mutation and environmental selection, human cultural evolution only proceeds when humans try to make the world a better place when they try to improve their conditions. And when we look at human history, we can see that the way that humans have improved their conditions most dramatically is by improving their definition of improvement itself. In other words, what counts as better, what counts as an improved condition, is usually framed by the worldview of a culture. So at the tribal level, there's a well-defined set of what it means to live a good life, you know, and what's beautiful and what the truth about the universe is. But as culture emerges into more complex forms of social organization, the definition of what is beautiful, true, and good becomes more complex. So for example, we can see this in the level of morality in terms of those who are considered worthy of moral consideration. You know, at the tribal level, you know, although there are certainly exceptions to everything I'm saying, but we can see in general that those worthy of moral consideration at that level of human cultural development are people who are within the tribe, mostly people who are blood kin, and those who are of a different tribe or of a different kinship are often seen as the enemy. And one of the major ways that the traditional religious cultures advance beyond that stage is that they're able to draw the circle of moral consideration wide or embraced so that different tribes can be brought together under the same religion. So those who are worthy of moral consideration at that stage of development become those who ascribe to the same faith. And again, those who don't ascribe to that faith are often seen as infidels and, you know, not worthy of the same consideration. But, you know, we move from sort of ego-centric to ethnocentric, and even though this sort of ethnocentric sense of morality is something we condemn today, we can see that in the course of human history at one time it was an important achievement. Then beyond tracing this line of development within morality, we can see that when democracy emerges and the status of nation-states starts to transcend traditional religious culture, we can see that those worthy of moral consideration are of the same nation as we are. You know, we can even see this today with, you know, people, you know, Americans are, you know, we should give jobs to Americans and not to the Chinese because Americans are worthy of more moral consideration because they're part of our countrymen. You know, and that's not necessarily wrong. It's just a level of moral development where you transcend, you can have a nation with different religions, and, you know, everybody who is of that nationality is to some degree worthy of a greater moral consideration. And then we move beyond that where we no longer consider those within a particular nation to be more worthy than people who live in different countries. We see that we have a more world-centric morality whereby all sentient beings deserve moral consideration, indeed equal moral consideration. And we can trace this, that the most staunch value relativists will argue that this direction of more inclusive moral embrace is not the evolution of culture in a positive direction. We could likewise trace the development of truth, right, from magical to mythical to rational and to increasing levels of holistic understanding. So humans evolve their consciousness and culture, not only by technology, not only by institutions and social organizations, but by their worldview itself, by their values, you know, human nature does evolve. It does change. People do become more moral, even while they're setbacks and regressions and, you know, people who were not as evolved within a given society. I mean, you know, I could go on describing the justification for cleaning the human culture evolves, but the guy to let you ask the next question. For our listeners, again, I want to remind you, we're speaking with Steve McIntosh. His new book is Evolution's Purpose, an integral interpretation of the scientific story of our origins. He did a good job right there. I think Steve of outlining some of the foundational beliefs that lead to this deep thought you're doing. I want to mention that the book is not what I consider a light reading. This deals with as bigger questions and much bigger, but it deals with them systematically and with careful analysis. Evolution's purpose is something that does get answered in this book. The question may be, for some people, is why? What is this going to change about us if we understand this? What's the next leap we take? Sure. Well, there's multiple reasons for motivating me to write the book. One is that this movement of the evolutionary worldview or integral philosophy. It's a new form of understanding, a new sort of rigorous appreciation of the evolution of consciousness culture, which is, in a sense, emerging out of progressive culture. It's merging out of a context of progressive spirituality, and it is indeed a spiritual philosophy of evolution, but it tries to transcend some of the shortcomings of the contemporary discourse of progressive spirituality by, again, being more philosophically rigorous while also being applicable and hopefully relatively accessible. And by understanding that, in a sense, when we look at the problems of the world, almost any problem we can identify could, in a sense, be solved or significantly ameliorated. If the consciousness of the people who are either creating the problem or failing to prevent the problem, if the consciousness could be evolved, then the problem could be solved. Whether it's environmental degradation or nuclear proliferation or hunger, poverty, disease, almost any problem can be understood at least partially as a problem of consciousness. And therefore, if we can understand how consciousness evolves, why it can be stuck, why it can stagnate, why it can regress, but how it can be helped and stimulated in its evolution, we can begin to feel more empowered about our ability to make the world a better place. And when we understand, with greater detail, this whole phenomenon of the evolution of consciousness and culture, we realize that it's an interior evolution as well as an exterior evolution. We need to look at it from a purely physical point of view, although it has certainly a physical reality that we need to deal with. But being able to open up the interiors of consciousness and culture and bring a new understanding to them is the promise of this interval worldview, this interval philosophy. The analogy is that when the modernist worldview emerged in the Enlightenment through the science and philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, one of the main benefits that came out of that for humanity was the advent of scientific medicine. The scientific worldview eventually led to a very sophisticated form of scientific medical practice guided by science that gained new powers over the human body and was able to cure diseases and do surgeries. We all appreciate the incredible way that living in a world where we have scientific medicine has benefited us. And I think that one of the promises of interval philosophy is that it can do for, in a sense, our interiors what scientific medicine has done for our bodies. It can give us the power to heal disease, historical disease, it can give us the power to raise consciousness for the people who are willing to have their conditions improved. So being part of this movement for over a decade now, I realized that there are many people who are trying to apply interval philosophy in all these different categories. And those are all worthy efforts and I've done some of that myself. But I also realized that the core of the philosophy itself, this kind of deeper understanding of evolution was really one of the things that have advanced this philosophy. So for example, throughout the 20th century philosophers and thinkers who recognized that evolution did have a spiritual message that these thinkers and founders of interval philosophy have made their most progress in developing the philosophy by looking into the deeper reaches of evolution. We can cite Ollie Bergson, the great French philosopher of evolution. And of course, he inspired Pierre Desjardins, who was another giant of interval philosophy. He really brought forward a incredible vision of the spiritual implications of the scientific story of evolution. We can see the work of Alfred North Whitehead, another significant cornerstone of the integral understanding. And I can also mention John Gebser and Ken Wilbur as a layer of proponents and those who've developed this. And so, humbly trying to follow in the footsteps of these greats, I recognized that one of the best ways that I could contribute to the canon of interval philosophy was to focus on core of it, which is this spiritual message of evolution. So that's what sort of motivated me to write the book. The last long chapter is an application. The title of the chapter is the promise of a new evolutionary worldview. And that explains how this deeper understanding of evolution can lead to a frame of reality, a worldview that can take in a larger purview of values. It's definition of improvement, as I said before, is itself improved, because it can reach back in history that the entire course of human cultural development forms, if you will, a kind of an internal cultural ecosystem. Where every stage of development has both important values, which are necessary for the ongoing foundational functionality of this internal ecosystem, as well as evolutionary scaffolding, or things that were valuable at one time, but have now become pathologies and hindrances. And so, the ability that took carry forward the best while pruning away the worst of every stage of cultural development on whose shoulders were standing, so to speak. That's a very important ability that none of the existing mainstream, you know, large demographic worldviews that we could identify, for example, in America are able to do. Right now, we can see that the American political system is in some ways reeling from the stagnation caused by the culture war, culture war that exists between the traditional, the modernist, and the post-modern worldview. The American society divided between these, and you don't need sociological research to prove it. I mean, there's plenty of it. All you have to do is turn on the evening's newscast, and you can see the effects of the culture war in terms of our inability to form political will to solve important problems, which, you know, are increasingly threatening us. So, this evolutionary perspective brings its evolution, if you will, to the culture by being able to better include and better integrate all these different worldviews. You know, we're not trying to vanquish modernism. We're not trying to vanquish traditionalism. We're trying to carry forward the evolutionary achievements of those worldviews without having to regress to their level of development in the process. And of course, you know, we could spend the next two hours unpacking that and explaining how that's the case, but that's part of the answer. The other answer is that I've really come to see evolution itself, you know, the details of it, the structure of it, the way it progresses as an unmistakable spiritual teaching. It's like an incredible revelation of spiritual truth. And so just by writing the book and immersing myself in it over the past three years, it's led to my own spiritual development, if you allow me to claim such. And, you know, I've been greatly benefited by appreciating the larger purposes of the universe, which are, you know, really there to be seen within evolution properly understood. Well, I've got about 20 questions that I just am burning to ask you. But first, I'd better remind our listeners that they're listening to spirit in action. And I'm your host, Mark helps me for this Northern Spirit Radio production website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. And on that site, there's seven years of archives you can listen to download. You can get us via iTunes and other places as well. On our site, you can find links to our guests like to Steve McIntosh, whose book is just come out. It's Evolution's Purpose, an integral interpretation of the scientific story of our origins. It's deep thinking. It's important thinking. And I think it points away for us very much matching the objectives of spirit in action. So you just talked about a wealth of things, Steve. I'm going to grab a couple little threads out of there, and I'd like a little bit of response from you on these. You mentioned about how materialism has really cared for our bodies well, that by understanding and rigorously approaching, for instance, medicine with our scientific, modernist understanding, we've done very good for ourselves. The thought that popped into my mind right away is, yeah, but we're kind of sick in our souls. We're sick in our spirit. Even in the very developed world, I think we have a much higher rate of suicide, for instance, than in less scientifically developed parts of the world. Is this true? Is that we're sick in our souls and our spirits in some way that this is being fed by postmodernism or the evolutionary worldview? Well, I certainly would frame it as saying that our culture could certainly use greater spiritual leadership than being provided by either traditional forms of mythic religion or the progressive forms of what used to be called New Age spirituality. While this is serving into the spiritual needs of many, I'd say the majority of our society is seeking for a spiritual understanding that transcends the limitations of those different forms that we find in our culture. And that one of the goals of evolution's purpose is to help bring forward an evolutionary form of spirituality. It's not a new belief system. It's not a new form of religion, if you will. It's more of a level of understanding whereby all the different types of religion, all the different lines of development that we see in spirituality, that those can evolve themselves. Indeed, they have evolved and they have continuity through these levels of development that we can see that there's a level that's emerging now that can move beyond the shortcomings of mythic traditional forms and progressive pluralistic forms. And in the book, I explain what I mean by evolutionary spirituality and how it does have a promise to help spirituality become better integrated into our understanding as a society and help improve things like science and medicine and education and media without becoming a monolithic form belief system that the people feel pressure to subscribe to. And evolutionary spirituality is a wonderful thing. Now, let me answer your question another way, though. When it comes to the sickness of the heart, part of the way that the evolutionary worldview explains that is that within the evolution of human culture, there's a phenomenon. It's kind of an indestructible polarity that occurs at every level. It's what's known as the dialectic of progress and pathology. The dialectic, it's a complex philosophical concept. And it can be simplified with the familiar thesis and synthesis and synthesis that most people heard about. And, you know, some claim that's a kind of a vulgarization of the dialectic. But again, in the book, I explain this pattern of evolutionary development and try to give it a nuanced understanding. But for purposes of our interview, we can see one of the ways that this pattern manifests is that with every new development, with the emergence of every historically significant new worldview, that worldview brings with it in its emergence the power to solve problems that the previous level of cultural development didn't have. But woven together with those very powers directly associated with the elements of progress that each worldview achieves are pathologies, which are directly related. You know, every new solution creates a new round of problems, which then requires further cultural evolution to address that level of problems. So, for example, one of the things that when traditional religious civilization, you know, we're identifying that as a worldview, the traditional worldview, and it exists in, we can see it in Christianity and in Islam and Judaism and Hinduism, Buddhism, you know, Confucianism. They all, even though they're all distinct and they're all original in their own way, they're also very similar in terms of they all have a kind of a feudal form of government and that they all have the spiritual teachings of the particular tradition as the sort of primary definition of truth. Understood from a sociological perspective, there's a lot of similarities when the traditional stage of development. And one of the things the traditional stage does when it emerges in a society and it helps achieve the evolution from a kind of a previous stage where it is characterized by warlords and random violence and chaos, the traditional worldview brings order, it brings law, it brings stability, it brings in a relative peace compared to the previous stage. But along with all of these achievements, it also brings a kind of an oppression, an rigid form of class structure whereby people are born into a class and there's little opportunity for them to grow beyond that. So these problems, problems of feudalism and oppression and relative ignorance and corruption that we can see at the traditional stage, these problems in a sense are remedied by the emergence of modernism, the emergence of science, the emergence of democracy, the emergence of relative freedom. This makes significant progress, this isn't just my value judgment, the majority of the world, people who live in pre-modern, pre-democratic societies, they're striving to achieve a middle class lifestyle, they're striving to achieve a democratic system of rights and freedoms. We may take these things for granted, but they're still representing improvement for those who haven't achieved that level of civilization. But of course, with modernism, those very achievements, those very diggities that go with the emergence of the modernist worldview carry with them problems which threaten humanity like never before. For example, environmental degradation and nuclear proliferation and unrestrained globalization where there's no form of regulation or global agreements that can keep globalization from just running roughshod over existing cultures and exploiting people. Globalization could be a good thing, but it needs a higher level of morality than is currently being offered by modernism by itself. So in terms of the sickness, the sickness is that the shadow of the incomplete that is seen at every stage of development, with every step forward in progress, if you will, we see a step forward in pathology, a step forward in the dire nature of the problems that go with that form of progress. And so this calls upon us to evolve further rather than imagining that the way forward lies in a kind of a return to some pre-modern, localized agrarian economy, I think a more realistic hope for the future of humanity is forced to evolve beyond modernism in a way that not only transcends but also includes all of the important developments of modernism. Doing that in some ways is the challenge of our age. So rather than look at our society as simply thick, which many postmodernists are want to do, rather than just be an antithesis and to reject our civilizations' achievements, we can be more sophisticated in our analysis and not be pulled. Dialectic creates strong currents. So if we see this dialect of progress and pathology within modernism, one current is to focus exclusively on the pathology, and just to see modernism as the worst thing that's ever happened in the world. Another is to sort of try to become an apologist for modernism and just try to emphasize the positive and to really try to ignore gloss over these horrific disasters which has been wrought by modernism. But if you can avoid being pulled into either side and can have, if you will, a dialectical epistemology, an evolutionary way of knowing that can begin to see that both these things are true at the same time, and by managing this indestructible polarity, by using it as a portal for a higher synthesis, by helping to use the problems and the pressures that we face at this time in history, as a form of energy that can propel us into a new stage of evolution, not all of us, it's not going to be a miraculous great awakening, but it can be an incremental emergence as has happened throughout. It can almost be like a second enlightenment where we can move beyond the pathologies of modernism, while still standing on the shoulders of all the achievements of our ancestors. One of the things that I still am not completely sold by, although you had a lot of good documentation history on it, is why the three values that you choose to highlight and which were highlighted back in ancient Greece were truth, beauty, and good. Some of this has to do with objective, subjective scales, beauty, what's beautiful for one is not beautiful for another, why those three values? Do you want to take a shot at that? Sure. Ultimately, when we were talking about the ontological quality of the universe, of being of the universe and what's truly valuable about it, we find that the terms we use overflow with more meaning that they could hold. In other words, we're using language, it's finite language, it's human language, it has a historical context, and therefore you can only take it so far, you can only put so much weight on it. Nevertheless, if we can recognize that while, on the one hand, evolution is certainly not human linear, it's not an upward escalator to the good. From some angles, the evolution of consciousness and culture looks like a sprawling bush with no main trunk or obvious tip, it's just emerging and developing in all kinds of directions, some of which are good, and some of which are perhaps not so good. Nevertheless, humans are striving to improve their conditions. The philosopher Iris Murdoch, one of her breakthroughs, was appreciating that that urge to improve conditions, this striving for evolution itself, has a magnetic center, that there is a kind of a plumb line to perfection, if you will. If we're trying to perfect conditions, then while we don't want to conceive in an overly linear fashion, we don't want to just be completely relative about it either. If we're going to see that there is a plumb line of perfection and that there is a sort of a gravity of values, we need a term that we can apply that can help form our agreement about what this thing is, what this magnetic center is. There's lots of words that we might use. For example, love is certainly an excellent concept and a good word which would do well. What are we trying to do? We're trying to increase love. We want to make the world a more loving place that God is love, and that if the direction of perfection were to be defined by one word love might be a likely candidate. Another one might be happiness. In other words, pursuit of happiness is what we're supposed to be about as Americans according to our Declaration of Independence. And yet, love can name something bad. Happiness can be purely narcissistic. These words have limitations. No word we're going to choose is going to be ideal. But Iris Murdoch in a pretty persuasive little essay called The Sovereignty of the Good, she argues that the word good or the concept of goodness is the best word we can use to name this magnetic center toward which all values are moving. And so admitting that goodness is not ideal and that one could argue with it just like you could argue with the word love or the word happiness in the book propose that we use the word goodness in our growing philosophical agreement as a way of appreciating and again, perfection's plum line, the direct line to a more evolved world, even while we're quick to point out that we're not talking about a unilinear concept of evolution. So as soon as we settle on the word goodness, as soon as we think, okay, we want to make things better. We want to improve the human condition. That's what cultural evolution is all about. So therefore, better improvement, you know, good is the word that's at the root of those concepts. But as soon as we settle on that word, we recognize that goodness in a sense has its own dialectical quality. You know, that which is good is usually only defined by that which is bad. We can't really see higher goodness until we actually kind of can sense what's wrong about current conditions so that goodness is perched on the edge of chaos. It's always, we always have to have further development because as soon as we make things good, according to one definition, we find that we haven't gotten all the way. You know, there's more goodness yet to become. That's why it's not an object. That's why it can't be defined in a kind of a concrete way that makes it stand still and behave like an object. It's a direction of evolution and our ability to understand what is good continues to evolve as our consciousness continues to evolve. That's a very good answer for it. And I think people have to absorb that. And that's going to be a hard step for a scientific materialist to encompass because it's not a simple objective truth. And so I think that we'll move that forward. Again, if people read evolution's purpose, an integral interpretation of scientific story of our origins, they'll get a very careful and close analysis and historically and rigorously in today's science of where that goes. I do have a couple of their questions to ask you before we run out of time here. Sure. Can I just interrupt you for just a second and just add two little things? One, I want the listeners to know that I'm not advocating intelligent design. That is, you know, I'm not creationist and, you know, I talk about intelligent design and its problems in the book. So I want people to know that that's not where I'm coming from. And the other thing I just wanted to quickly add is that this idea of goodness, as soon as we begin to understand it, we recognize that the beauty and truth are values that go with it. That we can't understand goodness in its synthetic quality without understanding, you know, the thesis and antithesis that go with the system. And that's why the beautiful, the true and the good, I use them as a rubric to begin to describe this ontological quality of the universe. Again, that's the can of worms, so maybe we can go to your next question. Well, one last thing before we have to let you go, Steve, and that is something about your own spiritual journey. I want to encapsulate this with how you've evolved through your life. How did you grow up religiously, spiritually? Where did you go? Where are you now? You want to just briefly sketch what that looks like? Sure. My father was an atheist, you know, pretty kind of militant atheist. And although he'd been raised path like he was an Australian, he had completely rejected all forms of religion. And, you know, as many in his generation, you know, embraced science as the sort of the healthy form of what was really true about the world. And he wanted to push off against the mythic religion, seeing it as the source of much of the strife and trouble and suffering of the world. Now, my mother was more agnostic. She was English, but she wanted me to be baptized for more ethnic reasons. So I was baptized as a piscopalian, but I was never raised in that tradition. You know, I didn't have any kind of religious education, or I was not religious growing up. Then in the early '70s, as a young teenager, I was drawn into the counterculture. You know, this is sort of, I was a little bit late coming into the '60s. I was born in 1960. But by 1972 and 1973, you know, I was very interested, growing up in Los Angeles, very interested in what was going on at the time, which was this emergent new form of culture, that especially in music and the lifestyle was very attractive to me. And about that time, it was also, as the '60s were beginning to fade, what we now recognized as a progressive spirituality was really beginning to come into its own. The reclaiming of the spiritual wisdom of the East, you know, of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the recognition of all kinds of esoteric forms of spirituality and shamanism. All these different spiritual forms were reclaimed by a culture of spiritual pluralism that was interested in spirit, even though it was moving beyond ethnic allegiances to traditional forms of religion. And so what we used to call the New Age, and now not the term of derision, right, but it wasn't just, you know, crystals and channeling, that as progressive spirituality was sophisticated and intellectual in many of its areas, and intellectual form of progressive spirituality was something that attracted me, and I continued to read and pursue and practice that. One of the additional ways that I was my own spirituality developed was through nature. You know, the writing of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, you know, the nature mystics who really saw in nature, you know, an important revelation of spiritual truth, as something that's been, you know, guiding light in my own spiritual journey throughout my life. I've tried to go to as many wilderness destinations and, you know, natural sacred spots, if you will, you know, throughout my life. And that continues as an important practice of being in nature and benefited by the spiritual experience that one can have in those settings. And so in my life, in my evolution, I never really became part of any particular spiritual tradition. You know, I don't identify myself with any particular form of organized religion. But I have found that in my travels that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth have really spoken to me, you know, most deeply, although I recognize the truth of many different spiritual teachers, even though those teachings can sometimes be in conflict, this revelation of the spiritual family and the loving nature of the Creator and what it means to be a spiritual being, I find the most spiritually fragrant teaching of that truth to be in the life, you know, the actions and the words of Jesus. So even though I don't identify myself as a Christian proper, I will allow that I'm a follower of Jesus in my own way. And, you know, I'm trying to be an advocate of this evolutionary stage of spirituality that retains the pluralism of progressive spirituality, but can go beyond the relativism by reclaiming comparative excellence and understanding of the different forms of spirituality, which, you know, are contributing to our deeper understanding of the spiritual nature of the universe. You know, the one thing that you didn't include in that list that I was expecting was something about Buddhism or Zen Buddhism particularly, because otherwise, why did you choose the name now and Zen for your company that you started? Well, let me say that I would have great respect for Buddhism. I studied the bit, you know, I've had meditation practices at different times in my life. The Zen aesthetic as it emerged after additional Japanese culture has always been one of the most attractive art forms that I continue to love. So I'm a great respecter, appreciator, and sometime practitioner of Buddhism, and I'm, you know, I love the insights of Zen, but that hasn't been, you know, my direct spiritual path. Calling the company that I have been involved with for the founder of, for the past decade and more, had a lot to do with the cultural use of the term Zen, especially in the mid-90s. Zen had, in a sense, two meanings. One, of course, was a traditional form of Japanese Buddhism. But another name, another use of the term was as a kind of a non-denominational sort of spiritual but not religious understanding. The philosopher Robert Persig, his book in the 1970s, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, really was, you know, it was about platonic philosophy, it had very little to do with Zen. But it helped make that term useful as a way of talking about spirituality that was not particularly associated with any tradition. And because, as a business person, you have to take advantage of words and cultural agreements as they exist, you can't just make up things as, you know, it's more difficult. We found that people resonated with words Zen as a way of describing what we were doing, and that is creating products which were artifacts of progressive spiritual culture. So, you know, Zen won all the focus groups and think most of the people could use our products and understand our company, know that we're not trying to, you know, appropriately exploit Zen Buddhism as a religion, but we're acknowledging that that term, I think for the good, for the most part, you know, has had a dual meaning in our culture, and one of its meanings is that this more general sense of something being spiritual but not religious. So, that's the history of our use of that term. I'm glad you cleared that one up for me. And I'm so glad that you could be here today to share about your book. Again, we've been speaking with Steve McIntosh, his website is Steve McIntosh.com. You can find out about his book, Evolution's Purpose, an integral interpretation of the scientific story of our origins. It's a great, systematic, deep analysis and thought of why we exist and what we can do with that. He's not going to give you all the answers, but he's certainly leading you in a direction that I'm sure is fruitful for our world. And I thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you, Mark. Again, it was a pleasure to speak with you today. And for those listening today, I want to mention that there are some bonus parts of this interview posted on northernspiritradio.org because Steve had too much value to fit into one measly hour. Check out the excerpts on Steve's interview to hear his thoughts about consciousness in animals and scientific materialism and its metaphysics. All that, again, on northernspiritradio.org. I look forward to seeing you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.