Transforming Civilization: Gods, God, Emergence, and Transcendence.

By Michael P Byron

The course of human history from the dawning of agriculture in the Near East about ten thousand years ago, to the present, can be understood as embodying the progressive development of ever more complex political economies. Developing this complexity has required coordinating the actions of ever larger groups of humans together for collective purposes. After 10,000 years of this process of political and economic complexification, civilization now finds itself confronting fundamental crises of survival due to peak oil, global climate change, and political and economic failures to deal with these crises. Given this reality, an understanding of the dynamics of this process, using systems theory offers considerable insight into our history. Furthermore, it offers insights into what we must do in the here and now to ensure that civilization can transform itself to survive and thrive in the face of these ever intensifying challenges.

Most accounts of ancient societies present them as being centered upon their unique pantheon of gods and goddesses. Across the planet, the rise of civilization is centered upon the rise of that civilization’s gods. The center of each civilization is the place where its gods were worshipped. The unification of a cultural region into a unified political body required the unification of the pantheon of gods for that civilization. The story of civilization is the story of civilization’s gods.

For example, at the dawn of history, by about 3200 BCE, ancient Sumeria possessed a common language and culture shared between diverse, often warring, city-states. In conjunction with a common pantheon of major gods, each city state had its own unique patron deity. The massive ziggurat near the center of each of these city-states was dedicated to this patron god. For example, in Lagash the patron deity was Ningirsu. In nearby Uruk it was Inanna. Not only were these cities physically built around the temple of their patron god, so also was their political economy organized around the cult of this god as well. The cult of the chief god, in conjunction with those of the lesser gods, unified the city’s population.

Following the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in about 3,000 BCE, a composite pantheon of gods and goddesses for all Egypt was established which provided the basis for Egypt’s unity and cohesion for 3,000 years.
The different agricultural regions of China developed a variety of gods. These came to be merged into a unified pantheon during the Shang Dynasty beginning about 1750 BCE. This pantheon of gods included Le Kun god of thunder, Kuan Ti, god of war, Kwan Yin, goddess of mercy and compassion, and many others. With this religious unification came the political unification of China over the next millennium.
I could go on and on and on.

Looking at this relationship from the perspective of systems theory offers considerable explanatory utility. A system is any group of elements which interact with one another in such a manner as to give the group on interacting elements a group identity. Systems possess three fundamental characteristics:

1) interconnectedness

2) boundedness

3) emergence

Every element in a system is connected to, and so is affected by, every other element in that system. Every system possesses a boundary, which distinguishes the area that is inside of a system and the area which lies outside of it. The system’s boundary can be either open or closed to this surrounding environment, either allowing movement through it or closing the system off from outside influence. Systems can be either simple, in that they follow invariant, deterministic behaviors, or they can be complex in that their behavior at any future moment is not knowable.

Finally, systems possess group properties which cannot be attributed to the composite influences of their elements. Emergence is a true scientific miracle of nature. Consider the simple system formed by two hydrogen atoms combined with one of oxygen into a molecule of water.  This molecule possesses the group property of, call it, “wetness”. Wetness cannot be reduced to the individual properties of its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Consider also a single neuron. It is not aware of anything. Yet billions of these neurons combined together into your brain—a complex system—possesses consciousness and self-identity. These cannot be attributed to its constituent neurons. Rather, consciousness is an emergent property of complexly interconnected neurons.  As these neurons are made of ordinary atoms, consciousness is an emergent property of matter, complexly arranged.

With emergence, the whole is greater than the sum of the system’s constituent parts. Understanding this critical concept is the key to understanding the central role of gods in the emergence and subsequent development of human civilization towards increasing complexity. It is also key to understanding what we must do now to preserve civilization at this moment of supreme crisis.

Organizing early agrarian societies required regulating and coordinating the behaviors of large groups of people who were not directly related. Family hierarchies were not adequate for this purpose. However, if everyone in a geographic community would not only speak the same language, but also worship the same gods, organizational problems could be resolved. If the gods represented sacred Authority, and all members of a community acknowledged this sacred Authority, then earthly Representatives of these gods—Priests and or Kings, could command everyone in Their name.  A unified political economy could then emerge.

What seems to have escaped attention is WHY this basic organizational method was universally adopted planet-wide from Mexico to Mesopotamia. This is because the universal worship of a common religious pantheon enhanced organization and cooperation, and integrated these communities into much more closely coupled, more intricately arranged political-economic systems. This integration had the effect of allowing these communities to manifest emergent properties. The net capabilities and production of the whole was significantly greater than the sum of its constituent parts.

This seemingly miraculous emergence of wealth and capabilities, seemingly from nowhere was attributed to the intervention of the god. In a real sense, these gods actually existed. They were the emergent properties of the human political economies organized around their worship. They were the “value added” due to emergence.
Thus in times of war, famine, or other challenges to the society, its members would pray ever more fervently to their gods for deliverance. The effect of this would be to cause their political-economic system to become even more tightly integrated. This increased integration would, in turn, enhance the emergent properties of their system. This consequent enhancement of ability greatly increased the likelihood of their successfully dealing with challenges. Thus societies which were organized around these self-created gods were more likely to prosper over time than those that were not so organized, or those that were not so adept at this type of organization. Some gods thus proved to be more “powerful” (reflecting better social organization) than did others.
 
As societies changed over time, their overall capabilities changed commensurately. Thus the relative power of the gods waxed and waned across long periods of time. This waxing and waning of the power of gods mirrored more or less exactly the waxing and waning of the human states and empires associated with these gods.
This basic polytheistic organizational paradigm was challenged by the emergence of belief in a single God. Montheism seems initially to have been a belief that for a given people there was only one god, although a variety of other gods might still exist for other peoples. The Hebrews of the later 2nd millennium BCE appear to have adopted a belief in a single god for their tribes. This god replaced various gods of war, rain, thunder and so on. Possibly this was derived from the heretical Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton’s worship of the sun god, Aten, as the sole god of Egypt.

The advantage of one god over a multiplicity of gods is better organization of the people. Worshipping multiple gods prevents the total mobilization of all people in furtherance of a common agenda, as they are focused on worshipping different gods—some worshipping a rain god, others a fertility god, still others a war god and so forth. Combining all of these gods together into a single all-powerful god eliminated this distraction from the focused efforts of the entire group. With all members of the community worshipping the same god at all times for all needs during all occasions, a community can generate a more highly organized political economy with greater emergent properties than could an equivalent community with a pantheon of gods.

Initially this development was resisted. Social inertia is a powerful force. However, across centuries, the new organizational method proved to be effective in amplifying the power of a small group of monotheists beyond what would otherwise be possible for such a group under a polytheistic organization.

Jewish organized guerilla resistance drove the polytheistic Romans out of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the 120’s CE. Upon assuming power Emperor Hadrian was eager to redraw the eastern border of the Empire to acknowledge this reality.

Encouraged by that success, the Judeans launched a vast war of rebellion against polytheistic Rome. This war, the Second Jewish Revolt agains Rome (the first Jewish revolt fought between 66-70 C.E. resulted in the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple), was fought in Judea between 132-135 CE. Defeating it required Roman Emperor Hadrian to deploy seventeen legions—nearly the entire deployable Roman army for the whole vast empire—to prevail against the rebellious Judeans.

The Jewish concept of god was not a practical organizing principle for the multinational Roman Empire, due to its tribal origins as well as the requirement for male circumcision—something that only the most zealous adult males would contemplate. However, an offshoot of Judaism—Christianity—as interpreted by Paul, had all of the ingredients necessary to become a new imperial religion. Beginning in the 2nd century CE the orthodox or “Catholic” faction of this religion organized itself empire-wide. Besides consolidating the new religion, this organization was used to drive all other forms of the religion, such as Gnosticism, towards extinction.

In the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE—betweens the reigns of Commodus and Aurelian (180 CE—275 CE)—the Empire nearly collapsed. Beset by political and economic chaos within, and barbarian incursions from without, the Empire very nearly imploded during this chaotic century. During these dark decades, Roman citizens were frequently left destitute and defenseless. Praying to the old gods was perceived to accomplish nothing. During these decades Christianity increased its following from perhaps 5% of the Empire’s population, to over 50%. After the failure of the Roman imperial bureaucracy to crush the rival empire-wide organization of the Church during the reign of Diocletian (284-305 CE) Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in 313 CE simply recognized established reality in establishing Christianity as the de facto religion of the Empire.

The enhanced systemic efficiencies arising from possessing a common, unified God, allowed the declining empire to resist its impending decay for a further century and a half in the west. In the east the Empire would endure into the late Middle Ages. 

The meteoric rise of Islam in the 7th century CE was centered on an even more simplified vision of Deity than Christianity with its Trinity: “There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is His prophet.” God was One—period. With such a clear central organizing principle, Islam organized Arabian pastoralists so efficiently that the new system surged across half the world within a single century.

In the centuries that followed, the clear superiority of a single god as the organizing principle of human political economies allowed for Christian and Islamic empires to cover most of the planet. Polytheism became a minor relic of past ages. Even Hinduism now increasingly stressed that all of its gods were but manifestations of a single Supreme God.

Based on Christianity and augmented by the power of Reason and the technological amplification of power unleashed by science and technology, European Empires have swept all other human systems before them in the past five centuries. Protestant Christianity proved best able to harness Reason to the agenda of maximizing power and wealth. As a consequence, the Catholic Empires of Spain and Portugal faded before the rising Protestant Empires of the Dutch, and most powerfully, the British.
 
Quietly, God faded away as the primary organizing principle of these societies, while a belief that human Reason was all, and was capable of achieving any goal, supplanted it. A global economy based upon unending growth was inaugurated. For five centuries continued growth was possible as new, as yet unexploited lands and resources were discovered, colonized and exploited. Increasingly powerful technologies coupled with the growing use of hydrocarbon energy—coal, then petroleum, and natural gas—fueled this growth. Nationalism became the secular organizing principle of these new industrial societies.

As people came to expect ever growing material affluence, they handed over control, incrementally, of their lives, of their governments, to the agents of wealth production—corporations. As resource and energy constraints began to inhibit growth, one final organizational “efficiency” was possible: To consolidate all existent national based political economies into a global one—globalization. This allowed for increased efficiencies of scale. This is because the amount of emergence possible for a single, large, tightly integrated system is greater than the sum of the emergence of multiple regional (national) systems which are tightly coupled internally but loosely coupled to one another.

At this point, which is where humanity finds itself today, several problems are apparent:

1) Corporations exist to funnel wealth not to the entire political economy, but to the few who own their stock, and/or those who direct their activities—the “corporate elite.”

2) As this is not in the interest of the majority of the people, government (a thing “of the people”) must be subverted by these corporations in order to prevent interference with the wealth transfer to the corporate elite.

3) Once power over government is attained it must be used to suppress, or buy out, smaller rival corporations, and innovative new start-up corporations, as these threaten to stop the wealth transfer to the now established corporate elites. Capitalism’s inherent dynamics cause the demise of the so-called “free market.”

4) Religion must be used to keep the majority of citizens who have been disempowered under control. Nationalism can be used as well to motivate subjects in various parts of the now global corporate Empire to hate and fear each other. This is simply “divide and rule” in its modern guise. National borders are also useful to wealth extraction because capital can move anywhere planet-wide, while labor is geographically constrained by their national borders. This leads to a race to the bottom as workers confined to different countries compete to attract capital to provide them with jobs. Ever lower wages are the inevitable result of this asymmetry in the mobility of capital and labor.

If this were the sum of our difficulties, the solution would be clear enough: Revolution to regain human control over our political economy from our corporate masters. However, things are far worse than this:

1) The existing world political economy is “hard-wired” for endless growth, as much as possible, as rapidly as possible. It incorporates 15th century assumptions about the limitlessness of nature, and about the inability of human actions to have any significant consequences upon nature.

2) Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, wealth production has been based upon ever-growing exploitation of hydrocarbon energy. Our world corporate political economy is based upon the assumption that these hydrocarbon resources are effectively limitless.

But all of the above assumptions are false.

1) Nature is now fully exploited. These are no new lands to conquer and exploit.

2) Our wealth generating activities are overwhelming the self-regulating capabilities of our biosphere. This is occurring very rapidly. Effective breakdown of these regulatory systems leading to climate chaos, flooding, drought, famine, disease and pestilence, is already underway and is accelerating.

3) We have used about half of the oil that is available to us. Peaks in coal and natural gas are not far away. No new technology exists to replace oil—not biofuels, hydrogen, or nuclear fission—nothing. And we are out of time. Demand for energy is increasing rapidly, supply must soon decrease. An economy built on endless growth must then collapse as growth becomes impossible due to energy constraints.

Overall, we are trapped within a political and economic system which is global in its extent, and that is hard-wired to accelerate all of us into cataclysmic chaos in the near future. We do not control this system any longer. Ultimately, no one now controls it. It cannot be “fixed” and it cannot be stopped. This means that revolution—where this means the violent or non-violent—overthrow of an existing government, and its replacement by new leadership, is insufficient. We must replace one entire organizational paradigm of humanity with another. We must do so quickly, else we shall probably perish, along with most of humanity, and indeed most of our biosphere.

How to accomplish this task? Looking back across history, let’s recall that as groups of people accomplished ever greater integration into an all-embracing system, the total resources and capabilities of their political economy increased commensurately. Creation of gods facilitated this end, beginning ten or so millennia ago.
Several millennia ago, monotheism was conceived. It demonstrated even greater systemic organizing properties—more emergence—than did polytheism. Several centuries ago, the power of applied human reason was integrated into the resulting political-economic organizational systems of Europe’s Imperial nations. Powered by hydrocarbon energy beginning in the late 1700’s, this system swept the planet. Unnoticed by most, the resulting human system was progressively hijacked by non-human profit maximizing entities—the corporations.  Still, overall systemic emergent properties grew throughout this process.

The more tightly coupled human systems are, the more efficient they are at producing emergence—the basis of all wealth and comfort. History has demonstrated this. The application of human reason to consciously develop and direct our political and economic system was potentially a good thing leading to freedom from want for all.
However our goals, wealth maximization in the shortest possible time for a few fortunate individuals, at the expense of all else—including the biosphere—and all others, were not good. It has been said: “…a bad tree does not bear good fruit.” And now we are reaping the bitter fruits of our folly. What to do?

What we must do is to first change ourselves.  We need to literally disillusion ourselves—to strip the illusions away from ourselves—that our existing system has a future, or that its endless chimerical cornucopia of consumer goods are desirable. Then we must embrace change. Everyone has differing talents, aptitudes, interests, skills, and so on. No one person can solve all of our problems, however by focusing on some aspect of our problems, based upon our interests, aptitudes, and abilities, and by working cooperatively with others both near and far in a loose association which operates at all levels from local to planet wide, we can begin the process of creating a new system. As soon as possible, as much as possible, we must disengage from the old system, even as we build the new one.

Major infrastructural components of the old system can be redirected from old to new—universities, agricultural research centers, high technology research, farm land, and so on. A global movement composed of all individuals and groups seeking fundamental change must be allowed to emerge. The more it emerges, the faster it emerges, the faster the process of subverting the old system can proceed.

Not a shot needs to be fired in anger to accomplish this agenda. No secret cabal need be formed. We just need an understanding of the dead-end nature of our present world system along with a dawning vision of a new order.

How would such a new order differ fundamentally from the past? All attempts at systemic reform, throughout all of history, have centered upon distributional justice. This is the idea that a political economy must be fair for all. That all people must have equality of opportunity, along with access to fundamental support services from the community when these are needed. Because extremes of wealth and poverty are antithetical to such a system, these must be prevented from occurring. All people must have an equal say in determining the overall policies of their political economy.

In addition to this, all must understand that the human system is nested into the larger biospheric one upon which we depend for our very existence. We are an integral part of this biosphere, thus our human systemic actions can not be allowed to harm or degrade this surrounding system.  When we are able to cherish and respect all other humans—indeed all other living entities—while appreciating the beauty of the whole, within which we have a meaningful role, then we will have arrived as members of an ecologically sustainable, humane, civilization. Such a civilizational system is maximally emergent.

All future ages are contingent upon our actions in the here and now. When we see our emergent human system as part of the unfolding development of life and consciousness across the Universe, then our human centered notions of religion will come to integrate into the cosmos-wide processes which manifest as life and self-awareness. On that day, our species’ long historical journey from gods to god will lead us to God and to our “Kingdom on Earth and in the Heavens.” And the meek shall indeed have inherited the Earth.
Time is short—it is now or never. The time of Total Revolution—of Total Transformation—is at hand!