This is a book summary of A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber (Amazon):
🔒 Premium members have access to the companion post: Integral Psychology & Spirituality Synthesis: How to Develop Holistically (10+ Visuals)
Important Note:
- A key part of this book has been summarized in a different post: 20 Tenets of Integral Theory: An Intro to the Philosophical Principles of Ken Wilber
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in quotation marks is from the author unless otherwise stated.
- All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Book Summary Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below
Evolution, Pattern, & Progress
- Upper-Left Quadrant (I, Intentional)
- Upper-Right Quadrant (It, Behavioral)
- Lower-Left Quadrant (We, Cultural)
- Lower-Right Quadrant (Its, Social)
The Origin of Integral Theory: A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber (Book Summary)
Intro to A Brief History of Everything
“‘Integrative’ simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible—from the East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.”
- “A ‘theory of everything’ is just that: if we assume that all the world’s cultures have important but partial truths, then how would all of those truths fit together into a richly woven tapestry, a unity-in-diversity, a multicolored yet single rainbow?”
- “It deals with matter, life, mind, and spirit, and the evolutionary currents that seem to unite them all in a pattern that connects.”
Evolution, Pattern, & Progress
“The whole point of evolution: it always goes beyond what went before. It is always struggling to establish new limits, and then struggling just as hard to break them, to transcend them, to move beyond them into more encompassing and integrative and holistic modes.”
Evolution:
- “Evolution always transcends and includes, incorporates and goes beyond.”
- “The evolutionary process of transcend and include, unfold and enfold. Each emergence is a decentering, a transcendence.”
- “Evolution is best thought of as Spirit-in-action, God-in-the-making, where Spirit unfolds itself at every stage of development, thus manifesting more of itself, and realizing more of itself, at every unfolding. Spirit is not some particular stage, or some favorite ideology, or some specific god or goddess, but rather the entire process of unfolding itself, an infinite process that is completely present at every finite stage, but becomes more available to itself with every evolutionary opening.”
- “There seems to be a common evolutionary thread running from matter to life to mind. Certain common patterns, or laws, or habits keep repeating themselves in all those domains.”
Pattern:
- “The pattern embodies a creative drive to greater depth, greater consciousness, greater unfolding, and that unfolding ultimately unfolds into its own infinite ground in pure Emptiness.”
- “The continuous process of self-transcendence produces discontinuities, leaps, creative jumps. So there are both discontinuities in evolution—mind cannot be reduced to life, and life cannot be reduced to matter; and there are continuities—the common patterns that evolution takes in all these domains.”
- “In many of these developmental or evolutionary approaches, each worldview gives way to its successor because certain inherent limitations in the earlier worldview become apparent. This generates a great deal of disruption and chaos, so to speak, and the system, if it doesn’t simply collapse, escapes this chaos by evolving to a more highly organized pattern. These new and higher patterns solve or defuse the earlier problems, but then introduce their own recalcitrant problems and inherent limitations that cannot be solved on their own level—the same process of evolution we see in the other domains as well.”
Dialectic of Progress:
- “Every new emergent and transformative development brings a new demand and a new responsibility: the higher must be integrated with the lower. Transcend and include. And the greater the degree of development, the greater the burden of inclusion.”
- “The idea is that every stage of evolution eventually runs into its own inherent limitations, and these may act as triggers for the self-transcending drive. The inherent limitations create a type of turmoil, even chaos, and the system either breaks down (self-dissolution) or escapes this chaos by evolving to a higher degree of order (self-transcendence)—so-called order out of chaos. This new and higher order escapes the limitations of its predecessor, but then introduces its own limitations and problems that cannot be solved on its own level. In other words, there is a price to be paid for every evolutionary step forward. Old problems are solved or defused, only to introduce new and sometimes more complex difficulties.”
- “No epoch is finally privileged. We are all tomorrow’s food. The process continues. And Spirit is found in the process itself, not in any particular epoch or time or place.”
The Integral Vision
“In order to have a truly integral view, we want to take the very best of the ancient wisdom (namely, it was ‘all-level,’ stretching from body to mind to soul to spirit) and combine that with the very best of modernity (namely, it was ‘all-quadrant,’ differentiating the Big Three of I, we, it), and thus arrive at an all-level, all-quadrant vision.”
- “It’s not just that we have different levels—matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit—but that each of these manifests in four facets—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social.”
- “The first step of implementing a more integral vision is moving from a one-quadrant approach to an all-quadrant approach. The second step is to move from all-quadrant to all-level, all-quadrant.”
The Enlightenment (or Modern) Paradigm:
Also known as: the modern paradigm, the Newtonian, the Cartesian, the mechanistic, the mirror of nature, the reflection paradigm, the representation paradigm.
- “This is the idea that you have the self or the subject, on the one hand, and the empirical or sensory world, on the other, and all valid knowledge consists in making maps of the empirical world, the single and simple ‘pregiven’ world. And if the map is accurate, if it correctly represents, or corresponds with, the empirical world, then that is ‘truth.'”
- “The simplest way to state the problem with maps is: they leave out the mapmaker. What was being utterly ignored was the fact that the mapmaker might itself bring something to the picture!”
- “The dominant theme of the Enlightenment was this great ‘web of life’ conception, a great interlocking order of beings, each mutually interwoven with all others … This Enlightenment web-of-life conception was indeed holistic and interwoven, but it acknowledged only holarchies in the Right-Hand dimensions. It did not acknowledge the holarchies in the Left Hand on their own terms. It collapsed the interwoven I and we and it into a flatland system of just interwoven its.”
- “The fundamental Enlightenment paradigm reduced all I’s and all we’s to mere its. The mainstream Enlightenment thought that all of reality could be captured in it-language, which alone was supposed to be ‘really real.’ So it reduced the Big Three (I, we, it) to the big flat one of it-language. In other words, it reduced all of the Left-Hand dimensions to their Right-Hand correlates—subtle reductionism.”
- Subtle reductionism: “All Left-Hand aspects are reduced to their correlates in the Right Hand. The Right Hand has extensive functional fit and a systems view, so it appears that you are being very holistic and all-inclusive, but you have just gutted the interiors of the entire Kosmos, you have just perfectly ruined the lifeworld of all holons.”
- Gross reductionism: “Reduces every Right-Hand system to Right-Hand atoms.”
- “We don’t want to get caught in a holistic map of flatland. That holistic flatland map is the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm. That is subtle reductionism. That collapses the Left into the Right. That reduces all ‘I’s’ and ‘we’s’ to interwoven ‘its’; collapses all interior depths into exterior span; collapses all values into functional fit; reduces all translogical and all dialogical to monological. That is the great holistic web of interwoven its.”
- “Once you’ve committed that flatland reductionism, you start to think that the way to transform the world is to simply get everybody to agree with your monological map, forgetting the six or seven interior stages the mapmaker actually had to go through in order to get to this point where you can agree in the first place.”
The Post-Enlightenment (or Postmodern) Paradigm:
- “The great postmodern discovery was that neither the self nor the world is simply pregiven, but rather they exist in contexts and backgrounds that have a history, a development.”
- “The overall idea that worldviews develop is the great postmodern discovery.”
- “At each stage of development the world looks different because the world is different—and there is the great postmodern revelation.”
- “The subjective space is inseparable from the intersubjective space, and this is one of the great discoveries of the postmodern or post-Enlightenment movements.”
- “The mapmaker, the self, the thinking and knowing subject, is actually a product and a performance of that which it seeks to know and represent.”
- “There is little in the global or systems map about how this interior development in the mapmaker occurs. And yet that is by far the most important issue. So the global or systems map is actually of rather limited use—it’s just a Right-Hand map—and yet the crucial issue is the Left-Hand development: how to get individuals to develop up to the point where they can actually inhabit a global awareness in the first place.”
- “The subject is not some detached, isolated, pregiven, and fully formed little entity that simply parachutes to earth and then begins innocently ‘mapping’ what it sees lying around out there in the ‘real’ world, the ‘real’ territory, the pregiven world. Rather, the subject is situated in contexts and currents of its own development, its own history, its own evolution, and the ‘pictures’ it makes of ‘the world’ depend in large measure not so much on ‘the world’ as on this ‘history.'”
The Integration of Modern & Postmodern:
- “I have concentrated on an approach that attempts to honor and include the very best of premodernity (the Great Nest of Being), the best of modernity (the differentiation of the Big Three of I, we, it), and the best of postmodernity (the integration of the Big Three)—to arrive at a truly, ‘all-level, all-quadrant’ approach.”
- “Premodernity was all-level but not all-quadrant. Modernity was all-quadrant but not all-level (and that got even worse when the quadrants collapsed into flatland). Postmodernity, which set out to pick up the pieces and integrate the quadrants, instead fell into the intense gravitational field of flatland and ended up more fragmented than ever.”
- “We need to take into account the interior dimensions—we have to take into account the Left Hand and not just the Right Hand. We have to take into account linguistic and cultural backgrounds, methods of interpretation, the many stages of consciousness evolution, the intricate stages of moral development and decentering, the validity claims of truthfulness and sincerity and justness, holarchical degrees of depth, the hierarchy of expanding self-identity and methods of transcendence—all of those are Left-Hand dimensions, and none of those items is found on the monological and Right-Hand Gaia map!”
Where are we now, and what’s next?
- “We are at the point where the mental, rational, industrial worldview is running into the grave problems inherent in its own organization. We have run up against our own limitations. We have met the enemy, and of course it is us. The modern is struggling to give way to the postmodern.”
- “If modernity managed to differentiate I, we, and it on a widespread scale, it is up to postmodernity to integrate them. The very currents of evolution demand this differentiation and integration, and we today are on the cusp of that demand.”
- “The hypothesis is that modernity differentiated the Big Three (I, we, it), and postmodernity must find a way to integrate them. If that integration doesn’t occur, then the twenty tenets won’t mesh, evolution won’t purr, and some sort of massive and altogether unpleasant readjustment will very likely result. And the point is, you cannot integrate the Big Three in flatland.”
- “To transcend and include modernity—or rational-industrialization—would mean, for the transcend part, that we have to (1) be open to modes of consciousness that move beyond mere rationality, and (2) embed them in modes of techno-economic structures that move beyond industrialization. In other words, a change of consciousness embedded in a change of institutions. Either one alone will probably not work.”
- “It will actually involve a new worldview, set in a new techno-economic base, with a new mode of self-sense, possessing new behavioral patterns.”
- “A new center of gravity is slowly emerging—the vision-logic information society, with an existential or aperspectival worldview (Lower Left), set in a techno-economic base of digital information transfer (Lower Right), and a centauric self (Upper Left) that must integrate its matter and body and mind—integrate the physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere—if its behavior (Upper Right) is to functionally fit in the new worldspace.”
- “This transformation is being driven by a new techno-economic base (informational), but it also brings with it a new worldview, with a new mode of self and new intentional and behavioral patterns, set in a new cultural worldspace with new social institutions as anchors.”
- “A new form of society will have to evolve that integrates consciousness, culture, and nature, and thus finds room for art, morals, and science—for personal values, for collective wisdom, and for technical knowhow.”
The Culture Gap:
- “The ‘economic gap’ between rich and poor is bad enough, but much more crucial—and much more hidden—is the culture gap, the ‘values gap,’ the ‘depth gap,’ which is the gap between the depth offered as a potential by the culture, and those who can actually unfold that depth in their own case.”
- “The gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ refers not just to money but to consciousness, morals, depths.”
- “In a sense, the culture gap is not our real problem. The real problem is that we are not allowed to even think about the culture gap. And we are not allowed to think about the culture gap because we live in flatland. In flatland, we do not recognize degrees of consciousness and depth and value and worth. Everybody simply has the same depth, namely, zero. And since we recognize no depth in flatland, we can’t even begin to recognize the depth gap, the culture gap, the consciousness gap, which will therefore continue to wreak havoc on developed and ‘civilized’ countries, until this most crucial of all problems is first recognized, then framed in ways that allow us to begin to work with it.”
- “The greater the depth of a society, the greater the burden placed on the education and transformation of its citizens.”
The Twenty Tenets
A key part of this book has been summarized in another post: 20 Tenets of Integral Theory: An Intro to the Philosophical Principles of Ken Wilber
The Four Quadrants
“The four quadrants have a very simple foundation. These four types of holarchies are actually dealing with the inside and the outside of a holon, in both its individual and collective forms … The four quadrants are the interior and exterior of the individual and the collective … Every holon has these four aspects, these four quadrants.”
- “From virtually the inception of every major knowledge quest, East and West alike, the various approaches have fallen into one or another of these two great camps, interior versus exterior, Left versus Right. We find this in psychology (Freud vs. Watson), in sociology (Weber vs. Comte), in philosophy (Heidegger vs. Locke), in anthropology (Taylor vs. Lenski), in linguistics (hermeneutics vs. structuralism)—and even in theology (Augustine vs. Aquinas)!”
About the Left-Hand Quadrants:
- “The Left Hand is what the holon looks like from within (interior, consciousness, subjective).”
- “All Left-Hand paths involve interpretation (depth must be interpreted).”
- “The Left-Hand dimensions (the I and the we) can only be accessed by introspection and interpretation.”
- “The Left-Hand aspects, the interior dimensions, can only be accessed by communication and interpretation, by ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialogical’ approaches, which are not staring at exteriors but sharing of interiors. Not objective but intersubjective. Not surfaces but depths.”
- “Interpretation means, in the broadest sense, empathic resonance from within, as opposed to objective staring from without.”
- “The primary rule of interpretation is that all meaning is context-bound.”
- “The important point is that the context helps determine which interpretation is correct. And that context itself exists in yet further contexts, and so off we go in the ‘hermeneutic circle.’ The reason, of course, is that there are only holons, and holons are nested indefinitely: holons within holons, contexts within contexts, endlessly. So all meaning is context dependent, and contexts are boundless.”
- “Nested holons—contexts forever—simply means that we always need to be sensitive to background contexts in understanding meaning. And the more of these contexts we can take into account, then the richer our interpretations will be—all the way up, all the way down.”
- “The way we navigate in the Upper Left is by using the yardstick of truthfulness or sincerity or honesty or trustworthiness. This is not so much a matter of objective truth but of subjective truthfulness.”
About the Right-Hand Quadrants:
- “The Right Hand is what the same holon looks like from without (exterior, form, objective).”
- “All Right-Hand paths involve perception (surfaces can be seen).”
- “The Right Hand delivers itself up to perception and empiricism.”
- “Everything on the Right Hand are objects or exteriors that can be seen empirically, one way or another, with the senses or their extensions—microscopes, telescopes, photographic equipment, whatnot. They are all surfaces that can be seen. They all have simple location. You don’t have to talk to any of them. You just observe their objective behavior. You look at the behavior of atoms, or cells, or populations, or individuals, or societies, or ecosystems.”
- “Both the Upper-Right and Lower-Right quadrants contain the observable, empirical, exterior aspects of holons.”
- “The way we tend to navigate in the Right Hand is by using the yardstick of propositional truth—or simply ‘truth’ for short.”
Upper-Left Quadrant (I, Intentional): Interiors of Individuals (Human Development)
Upper Left includes: consciousness, subjectivity, self, self-expression (art and aesthetics), truthfulness, sincerity
I-Language:
- “I-language is your presence, your consciousness, your subjective awareness. Everything on the Upper Left is basically described in I-language, in the language of interior subjectivity. The subjective component of any holon is the I-component.”
- The Upper Left is how ‘I’ see the world.
- Art concerns the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the ‘I.’
- The Beautiful (subjective truth; the aesthetic dimension as perceived by each ‘I’).
The Cultural Background of the Individual:
- “The cultural community serves as an intrinsic background to any individual thoughts I might have. My thoughts do not just pop into my head out of nowhere; they pop into my head out of a cultural background, and however much I might move beyond this background, I can never simply escape it altogether, and I could never have developed thoughts in the first place without it.”
- “In short, my individual thoughts only exist against a vast background of cultural practices and languages and meanings, without which I could form virtually no individual thoughts at all.”
- “My supposedly ‘individual thought’ actually has at least these four facets, these four aspects—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social. And around the circle we go: the social system will have a strong influence on the cultural worldview, which will set limits to the individual thoughts that I can have, which will register in the brain physiology. And you can go around that circle in any direction you want. The quadrants are all interwoven. They are all mutually determining. They all cause, and are caused by, the other quadrants.”
- “It seems to be a package deal. Higher or deeper stages of consciousness development disclose deeper and wider patterns in self, in individual behavior, in culture, and in society—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social—all four quadrants.”
- “The subjective world is situated in an intersubjective space, a cultural space, and it is this intersubjective space that allows the subjective space to arise in the first place. Without this cultural background, my own individual thoughts would have no meaning at all. I wouldn’t even have the tools to interpret my own thoughts to myself. In fact, I wouldn’t even have developed thoughts, I would be ‘wolf boy.'”
- “The cultural center of gravity acts as a pacer of development—a magnet—pulling you up to the average expectable level of consciousness development. Beyond that, you’re on your own, and lots of luck, because now the magnet will try to drag you down—in both cases, you’re ‘outlawed.'”
Ladder, Climber, Fulcrums, View:
- Ladder (basic rungs of awareness; once they emerge they remain in existence as basic building blocks or holons of consciousness): “The ladder metaphor is useful because it indicates that the basic components of consciousness do emerge in fairly discrete stages, and if you destroy a lower rung, all the higher rungs go with it.”
- Climber (self; climber of the basic rungs): “The ladder is basically selfless—there is no inherent self-sense in any of its rungs. But the self appropriates these rungs, or identifies with them, and this generates various types of self-identity and various stages of self-growth, until the self falls off the ladder altogether in radical Emptiness … Not only are these basic levels growing and unfolding, but the self has to actually negotiate them, has to actually climb the developmental rungs of expanding awareness, and the self can take a bad step at any rung—and get very badly hurt.”
- Fulcrums (each step in the climb is a fulcrum; a 1-2-3 process): 1 (identify / fusion / embed): The self evolves or develops or steps up to the new level of awareness, and it identifies with that level, it is ‘one with’ that level. 2 (dis-identify / differentiation / transcend): It then begins to move beyond that level, or differentiate from it, or dis-identify with it, or transcend it. 3 (integrate / integration / include): It identifies with the new and higher level and centers itself there. The new rung is actually resting on the previous rungs, so they must be included and integrated in the overall expansion, and that integration or inclusion is the third and final subphase of the particular fulcrum.
- View (changing view of self and other at each stage including a different self-identity, self-need, moral sense): “At each rung in the developmental unfolding there is a different view of the world—a different view of self and of others—a different worldview. The world looks different—is different!—at each rung in the developmental unfolding. As we have constantly seen, different worldspaces, different worlds, come into being as consciousness evolves—there is not simply a pregiven world that is monologically reflected! … At each rung you get a different type of self-identity, a different type of self-need, and a different type of moral stance. All of these are aspects of the different worlds that unfold at each rung or level or sphere of awareness … The self will now reinterpret every single event of its previous life history from the perspective of the new worldview. It completely rewrites its history from within the new and higher paradigm.”
States vs Stages:
- “It’s one thing to tap into a higher level; quite another to actually live there!”
- “Individuals can have a spiritual experience—a peak experience or an altered state of consciousness—at almost any stage of their growth.”
- “Although a person can have a peak experience of a higher dimension, the person’s self still has to grow and develop and evolve in order to permanently accommodate to those higher or deeper dimensions, in order to turn an ‘altered state’ into a ‘permanent trait.’“
- “Spiritual experiences do not allow you to simply bypass the growth and development upon which enduring spiritual realization itself depends. Evolution can be accelerated, as Aurobindo said, but not fundamentally skipped over.”
- “Stages cannot be bypassed, any more than you can go from an atom to a cell and bypass molecules.”
- “‘States’ might be important, but ‘stages’ are even more important.”
Individual Human Development:
- “The overall direction of development in humans—the telos of human development—is toward less and less egocentric states.”
- “The archbattle in the universe is always: evolution versus egocentrism. The evolutionary drive to produce greater depth is synonymous with the drive to overcome egocentrism, to find wider and deeper wholes, to unfold greater and greater unions.”
- “Self-identity, needs, and moral response go from physiocentric to biocentric to egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, the platform for all higher and truly spiritual developments.”
- “The fact that all perspectives are relative does not mean that all perspectives are equal. That all perspectives are relative does not prevent some from being relatively better than others all the time! World centric is better than ethnocentric is better than egocentric, because each has more depth than its shallower predecessors.”
Upper-Right Quadrant (It, Behavioral): Exteriors of Individuals (e.g. the brain)
Upper Right includes: science, objective nature, empirical forms (the brain), propositional truth
It-Language:
- “It-language is objective, neutral, value-free surfaces. This is the standard language of the empirical, analytic, and systems sciences, from physics to biology to ecology to cybernetics to positivistic sociology to behaviorism to systems theory. In other words, it is monological. It is a monologue with surfaces, with ‘its.’ It-language describes objective exteriors and their interrelations, observable surfaces and patterns that can be seen with the senses or their instrumental extensions—whether those empirical surfaces are ‘inside’ you, like your brain or lungs, or ‘outside’ you, like ecosystems. Even information scurrying through channels can be described in it-language. Information, in fact, is defined as negative entropy, which is about as it-ish as you can get. Your presence is not required.”
- Science—empirical science—deals with objects, with ‘its,’ with empirical patterns.
- The True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or ‘its’).
Lower-Left Quadrant (We, Cultural): Interiors of Collectives (Humanity Development)
Lower Left includes: ethics, morals, worldviews, common context, culture, intersubjective meaning, mutual understanding, appropriateness, justness
We-Language:
- “We-language is the Lower Left, the cultural or intersubjective dimension.”
- “The Lower Left is how ‘we’ see it. It is the collective worldview that we of a particular time and place and culture inhabit.”
- Morals and ethics concern ‘we’ and our intersubjective world.
- The Good (intersubjective truth; morals; the ‘we’).
About Culture:
- “‘Cultural’ refers to the shared collective worldview.”
- “‘Cultural’ refers to all of the interior meanings and values and identities that we share with those of similar communities, whether it is a tribal community or a national community or a world community.”
- “By the culture or worldspace of holons, I simply mean a shared space of what they can respond to: quarks do not respond to all stimuli in the environment, because they register a very narrow range of what will have meaning to them, what will affect them. Quarks (and all holons) respond only to that which fits their worldspace: everything else is a foreign language, and they are outsiders. The study of what holons can respond to is the study of shared worldspaces. It’s the common world that all holons of a similar depth will respond to. That is their shared culture.”
About Worldviews:
- “They evolve from physical and vegetative and reptilian (‘uroboric’—of the serpent) and limbic-emotional (‘typhonic’), into more specifically hominid and then human forms: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, centauric (or existential), with possibly higher stages yet to come. These worldviews are correlated with the exterior forms of the social structures that support each of those worldviews.”
- “The general point is fairly simple: different stages of consciousness growth present a different view of the world. The world looks different—is different—at each stage. As new cognitive capacities unfold and evolve, the Kosmos looks at itself with different eyes, and it sees quite different things.”
- “It’s not that there is a single, pregiven world, and we simply look at it differently. Rather, as the Kosmos comes to know itself more fully, different worlds emerge.”
- “Different worldviews create different worlds, enact different worlds, they aren’t just the same world seen differently.”
- “The solution of the old problem is the creation of a new one—they come into being together, although the new problems usually surface only as the worldview approaches its own demise. This is the wonder, and this the nightmare, of worldviews.”
- “Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.”
Lower-Right Quadrant (Its, Social): Exteriors of Systems (Technological/Economic Development)
“The Lower Right is exteriors of systems; main validity claim is functional fit—how various holons fit together in the overall objective system … Major human stages: foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, and informational … I correlate the ‘mental’ worldviews with the ‘material’ modes of production at each stage of human evolution … So I’ll often refer to them conjointly as mythic-agrarian, or rational-industrial, and so on.”
About Social:
- “‘Social’ refers to the material base of the worldview.”
- “‘Social’ refers to all of the exterior, material, institutional forms of the community, from its techno-economic base to its architectural styles to its written codes to its population size.”
- “All cultural events have social correlates. These concrete social components include types of technology, forces of production (horticultural, agrarian, industrial, etc.), concrete institutions, written codes and patterns, geopolitical locations (towns, villages, states, etc.), and so on.”
- “These material, social, empirically observable components—the actual social system—are crucial in helping to determine the types of cultural worldview.”
Foraging (Hunting & Gathering):
- “Some people today eulogize the primal tribal societies because of their ‘ecological wisdom’ or their ‘reverence for nature’ or their ‘nonaggressive ways.’ But I don’t think the evidence supports any of those views in a sweeping and general fashion … The lack of means in foraging societies does not simply equate with the presence of wisdom.”
Horticultural (hoe or simple digging stick):
- “Where the ecomasculinists love the foraging societies, the ecofeminists are quite fond of horticultural, Great Mother societies.”
Agrarian (heavy, animal-drawn plow):
- “It was to women’s Darwinian advantage not to plow. And thus, with the introduction of the plow, a massive, absolutely massive shift in culture began … Because of the social relations that began to organize themselves around the basic forces of production—in this case, the plow—men then began to dominate the public sphere of government, education, religion, politics. And women dominated the private sphere of family, hearth, home. This division is often referred to as male production and female reproduction … Farming technology freed some men from production, but women were still largely tied to reproduction. This allowed a series of highly specialized classes to arise: men that could devote their time, not just to subsistence endeavors, but to extended cultural endeavors.”
Industrial:
- “Industrialization, for all of its horrors and all of its nightmarish secondary effects, was first and foremost a technological means to secure subsistence not from human muscle working on nature, but from machine power working on nature … The social structures had evolved, for the first time in history, to a point that physical strength did not overwhelmingly determine power in culture. Biology was no longer destiny when it came to gender roles.”
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