CHAPTER ONE: MILLENNIUM REFLECTIONS

The millennium´s a Christian one, and blooped at that. If the blooper hadn´t been made, it would now be 2003. Whatever, although there are many other calendars still extant it´s now the main one for much of the world.

This is a paper about what can be meant by someone saying “I know something to be the truth”, and about orienting approximations and what use they can be in attempting to understand complex situations. To find some “orienting approximations” for this paper, and to mark the millennium, let´s begin by going back to an episode a few hours before the crucifixion of the man who´s birth our calendar mis-marks.

Mediaeval theologians used to rejoice in the observation that when Pontius Pilate asked “what is truth”, the answer was contained in an anagram in Latin of the words he uttered. The letters in “quid est veritas” can be rearranged to form “vir est qui adest” - “it is the man before thee”(Curl, 1995, p.11).

If the Christians are right, that Jesus Christ, Son of God, was truth, then it was by no means the first or the last time that truth has been crucified in the name of expediency - whether political/social expediency, as in the case of Pilate, or economic, or environmental, or academic (truth vs tenure, for eg; or truth vs test results). We all do it, to ourselves and to others - commit little lies, little thefts, and pretend it doesn´t matter, and we are all wrong.

So, let´s try again to answer Pilate´s question: what is truth? How do we discriminate what is true from what is untrue? Is humankind any better equipped to provide an answer now, at the end of the second millennium, than we were at the beginning of the first? Jesus did not give a reply to Pilate. Why? Pilate´s question was in response to Jesus´s statement that:

“My kingdom is not of this world. To this end I was born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”

(John, 18.37)

According to Jesus, we should be closer to the truth by now, because He promised to:

“Pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever. . . the Spirit of truth.”

(John 14.17)

So Jesus states quite explicitly that he came to bear witness to the truth, and that there is a Comforter, the Spirit of truth. That the Kingdom of God is the kingdom of truth is very strongly implied. So when Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount, “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6, 33), he may equally well have said, “seek ye first truth and righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you”.

For those of you who are concerned that you are about to receive a Christian sermon - don´t be. I have not been a churchgoer for almost thirty years now. I do not accept any religion´s dogma -Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, whatever - as all true or false. As Thomas Jefferson said:

“In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. . . Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being” (Letter to William Short, April 13, 1820).

I agree with Jefferson, and with Gershwin that “the things that you´re liable to read in the Bible ain´t necessarily so”. Yet we are supposed to regard all of the gospel as gospel truth by dogmatists! And if you think I should be condemned for disagreeing with that, or for saying what I am about to say - then, as Jesus said “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7.1). To which I would add Judge not beyond thy understanding.

Now, does that mean the same thing? Does “judge not” mean that the US college students who were unable to condemn human sacrifice or the Holocaust, “or indeed make any moral judgement whatever” (The Wilson Quarterly, 1998, p.12), were somehow being good Christians? Which one of us is within another´s full understanding? Which one of us is not within another´s partial understanding? Whatever answer you give to those questions - how do you know? Where have those answers come from? And when Jefferson was distinguishing “passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence” from those of “so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture” - how did he know the difference? Could a twenty year old? A two year old? A dog? How come I can know the difference?

I am submitting that attempting to answer Pilate´s question contains, or implies, answers to all those questions too. Darting back about 400 years BPQ (before Pilate´s question), it was said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens because he knew that he did not know. Socrates said that the world is full of opinions, but completely empty of knowledge! Is that true still? Well, we have lots such wise people in academia these days, as pointed out with such passion and eloquence by Sari Wastell three weeks ago in her talk Understanding the Rage of the Headhunter - covering positivism, postmodernism, cultural relativism, functionalism, hermeneutics, structuralism, social structuralism, et al. So, I agree with Sari that the short answer is - we don´t know for sure. My long answer is given in the form of a monograph called “Knowledge and the Knower: Complexity and the Self” - an expanded version of a paper I gave at Waterford about three years ago - and in this paper. Hergen Junge has hard copies of both, and Knowledge and the Knower is also posted on the net at:

So I´m not going to repeat myself here (too much), but build upon that instead (but in a way that this paper can still be read ‘stand-alone´).

Now, let´s pop forward 1,000 years APQ, and see if we could have given an answer then, see if it was different from now, and see if, maybe, we can be said to know more truth than we did then after all. In keeping with the Christian themes introduced, but being aware of their ethnocentrism, let´s look at Europe at that time.

Over a thousand years ago, Europe appears to have been, even by the standards of the time, mostly a provincial, barbaric, backwater. There had been massive declines in population during the Dark Ages from the time of the Roman Empire, with plagues, wars and other calamities reducing the population to about 14-17 million inhabitants during the 7th and 8th centuries. But by the turn into this millennium, things had improved considerably. Under the Holy Roman Empire (and other uniting forces permitting a modicum of peace and organisation), Europe´s population had grown to about 20-40 million. Even so, the light of civilisation shone just as well or far more brightly elsewhere - in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, the Palas, Solanki, Cholas, Chandelas and Khmers et al in South Asia, the early Sung Dynasty of China, and elsewhere - in general, a strong case could be made that Europe was a backwater, and Asia the centre.

All but maybe a few Europeans of that time knew that the world was flat; that the Garden of Eden and the creation of the world were only a countable number of generations ago; that there were Ptolemaic spheres up there, grinding the rest of creation around this Earth, with the expelled, flawed, sinful but nonetheless redeemable summit of God´s creation, man, basking at the centre of God´s attention. Diseases and other woes were caused by demons, perpetrating agonies upon us so hideous that a loving God could not possibly have visited them upon the innocent, so they had to be guilty of sin! Yet still, those torments were insignificant compared to the torments of the hell hereafter that awaited those sinners unrepentant in this life. Justice was often reliant upon “divine intervention” - trial by ordeal, for example. Satan and his hordes were everywhere. Superstition was everywhere. People knew that their superstitions were real with such conviction that they would kill for them without a second thought. Those daring to be different became toast. By current standards, it must have been largely a world of little span or depth; a musty, fetid, phobic, ignorant place.

Yet still, the human spirit could soar! And it did, through these last thousand years, despite so much. Early this millennium, the great cathedrals of Europe were constructed. The embers of the Greco-Roman world, which had been kept warm in Christian monasteries, were fanned back to life by the Franks - ferenghi - bringing back the classical legacy from the Arabs. Back into Europe it came from the Knights Templars, from Italian and other traders from the East, and through Spain in the South. Then came the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, many of the evils of totalitarianism reigning then imploding in this appalling, brutal, wonderful century, and here we are.

Where is here? It´s a world vast beyond our imaginative capacity! The doors have been flung open, and blinding light is streaming in from everywhere: too dazzling for some, but exhilarating for others. Let´s take a tiny tour.

Instead of a world thought to have begun about 6,000 years ago, we have a visible Universe thought to be about 10-20 billion years old, and a planet about 4.5 billion years old, and life beginning on it over three billion years ago. And what expanses we have gained in our perception of time, we have gained many-fold in the other three dimensions. Using the dictum of the Sophist Protagoras from the fifth century B.C. - “man is the measure of all things” - let´s measure ourselves against the size of the planets etc in those “Ptolemaic spheres”, and go down to the tiniest objects as well:

We have found the world has many levels - “a wedding cake of layers” (Johnson, p.140) - a level of organisation at superstrings (maybe); a higher one at fermions (quarks and leptons [leptons are electrons and neutrinos]); a higher one at protons, etc; a higher one at atoms; a higher one at molecules; and higher ones still at life. Matter appears to be organised harmonically and symmetrically. One of the most exciting frontiers of science is discovering what could be the lowest level of the Universe, comprising the tiniest things, but which may have massive surprises in store: superstrings.

As it´s not in your syllabus, and as it´s a example for the Theory of Knowledge of a highly exciting process of discovery going on right now, let´s pause briefly here before moving on.

The two greatest theories of early and mid twentieth century physics are relativity - particularly general relativity, the science of the very big - and quantum physics, the science of the very small. The problem is, despite having incredibly precise correlations with reality, they are seemingly completely incompatible. They just don´t speak to each other. Einstein couldn´t believe what the quantum physicists were telling him - he said “God doesn´t play dice”! Quantum physics and relativity must have met at the Big Bang - can we get a theory of everything (TOE) by looking into the Universe´s beginning? Stephen Hawking´s best-seller, A Brief History of Time, was on that topic.

Enter the late twentieth century; enter chaos theory and its development, complexity theory - the proto-science of properties that emerge from complexity; enter genetic engineering and a host of new frontiers in a sunburst of new disciplines, and enter superstring theory, looking deeper into matter than ever attempted before, to try to reconcile quantum physics and relativity. Wrong! Enter superstring theories! An embarrassment of riches. Five of them, each with something relevant to say! They were termed Type I, Type II A, Type II B, Heterotic-E, and Heterotic-O.

After much work, it looked as though each of them could be visualised as one of the five arms of a starfish, the integrated ‘starfish´ being a theory not yet articulated. Later, a sixth arm had to be added, called 11-Dimensional Supergravity.

This six-pointed star is a model of our current understanding of something we are working towards called M-theory - which posits 11 dimensions - 10 space, one time, all but three of those space dimensions being ‘curled up´ in our Universe, which may have exploded from a ‘Planck nugget´ in another Universe. These extra, unused dimensions are posited to be curled up within multidimensional shapes, the models being used in the current modelling of superstring theory being “Calabi-Yau shapes”. Each such shape has a ‘mate´, with ‘holes´ of the same number of ‘odd´ as the other has ‘even´, or vice versa. Different shapes would engender different universes.

By the end of his book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking was talking of no big bang. And now Brian Greene, in The Elegant Universe, posits that superstring theory gives our Universe and everything in it an absolute limit for getting small - just as relativity has for light speed. That´s very tiny - a Planck length is even shorter than my temper - but now they´re talking of a ‘big bounce´, no longer of a ‘big bang´ (all of my explanation of Superstring theory in this paper is taken from Greene´s book).

Yet in many ways, the universe of string theory is even more amazing than we had struggled to conceptualise with relativity and quantum physics. For example, again just as relativity doesn´t say that there´s nothing faster than the speed of light, but that one can´t go from slower than to faster than the speed of light, so superstring theory says that nothing this side of the Planck length -including our universe - can get any smaller than it. More: Greene states that at this level there is no way to distinguish between radii that are inversely related to one another. The bizarre possibility then emerges that there is a reciprocal Universe the other side of our ‘creator´ superstring´s Planck length. This Universe would be of incredible tininess when measured by the ‘rulers´ of our universe, but as the ‘rulers´ of length are proportionately shrunk there, no-one, once there, would notice the difference! Moreover, as ours gets bigger, it gets smaller. Ours has a radius of 10 to the sixty-one times the Planck length, so the radius of that reciprocal Universe would be ten to the minus sixty-one!

So the ‘rubberiness´ of space first noted by Einstein´s re gravity (with mass ‘bending´ space) continues into superstring theory (incidentally, there´s a great quote by John Wheeler´s about gravity in this book: mass grips space by telling it how to curve, space grips mass by telling it how to move). So we have a ‘bouncy´, mirror symmetrical, mathematically elegant universe! But the theory is still at its early stages - we´re nibbling at its frontiers.

Still, it´s a long way further down the path Pythagoras set out upon, but in many ways the same path. For example, in superstring theory, “all particles are a reflection of the way strings can vibrate”, “all four forces are directly associated with principles of symmetry” - qualities of matter arise from:

“essential and tangible aspects of the geometry of the universe. Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature´s building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.” “Chapter 6; Nothing but Music: the Essentials of Superstring Theory. . . With the discovery of superstring theory, musical metaphors take on a startling reality, for the theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the cosmos. The winds of change . . . gust through an aeolian universe” (Greene).

Reports from the other extreme of the Universe in terms of size draw a similar conclusion:

“Using techniques drawn from the analysis of music, astronomers have been studying how galaxies form into progressively larger groupings. . .These studies are not the first use of harmonic analysis in the history of astronomy. It was originally Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. who applied musical analysis to the motion of the sun, moon, stars and planets. He believed that the celestial bodies were holes in a set of crystal spheres through which shone the celestial light. The motions of these spheres, he reasoned, must produce sounds. Their distances and their speeds must be in the same ratios as musical harmonies. This was the first ‘music of the spheres.´

“In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, before formulating his famous laws of celestial motion, believed that the orbits of the planets could be described in terms of heavenly spheres ascribed between the five perfect Pythagorean solids. He reasoned that the harmonious ratios of music might be derived from these solids, and thus he argued for a fundamental relation between the orbits of the planets and these harmonies. This was the second music of the spheres.

“Today our notion of harmonic analysis is quite different. It is based on analysing the harmonic components of random distributions, and the sound is more like the gush of a waterfall than that of divine instruments. Although this modern endeavor may seem neither as pleasing nor as spiritual as those of the past, the concept of an isotropic universe wedded with an understanding of random fields now allows us once again to hear the music of the spheres.”

(Scientific American, 1999, p.45)

The Universe looks different according to the scale you look at it. “Up to some scale, thought to be around 100 million light years, these progressively larger structures form a fractal pattern - that is, they are equivalently clumpy on every scale. But between this scale and the size of the observable Universe, the clumpiness gives way to near uniformity” (ibid., p.41).

So we´ve briefly looked at how far we´ve extended the frontiers of space and time since the last millennium. Also at the frontiers of physics, there´s the astonishing idea of multiverses - but I think I´ve sufficiently driven the point home about the differences between our physical-come-mental spaces and those of Europe of 1,000 years ago. But as well as greater breadth of understanding, we also have greater depth available to us. We have come to a much deeper and richer understanding of far more complex and significant matters than superstrings, fermions, protons, etc, atoms and molecules - matters of life, of DNA (the genome project et al.). And if we took a scale of depth as organised complexity rather than size (there are atoms in molecules, but not molecules in atoms, and so on), man would be once again atop the known (material) Universe, just as we were a thousand years ago! (albeit rather more precariously balanced, now knowing that there´s lots of room in the Universe for beings of intelligences far greater than our own to have evolved.)

Reports from this other known extreme of the Universe (in terms of organised complexity) draw a similar conclusion: “The theoretical neuroscientist Bill Calvin has some fascinating ideas concerning Darwinian evolution going on within our brains, manifesting in a manner he considers best communicated by musico-mathematical analogies - “Such a pattern is like a little tune . . . a hexagonal mosaic is like a plainchant choir, singing in the lockstep of a Gregorian chant. . . [competing ideas] as “dueling choirs”(Calvin, 1998 [1]), the rhythm of entrainment providing the integration” (Mc Dermott). One of Calvin´s ten books is entitled The Cerebral Symphony.

So we go to the frontiers of the really fundamental and small on the road set out upon by Pythagoras. We go to the frontiers of the really large, and there he is again; we go to the frontiers of the really significant and complex - the physical manifestations of thought itself, and there he is again! We go to relativity theory, and find his famous theorem at its core; we go to fuzzy logic, and find it to be fundamental there, too. No wonder “it is said that mathematicians indulge their philosophy of choice on holidays, but for the rest of the time they are Platonists” (Dewdney, p.3). Oh - Plato was a Pythagorean, too (McClain). Platonists consider that reality is in what Rucker termed the “mindscape” and Dewdney the “holos”, which shapes matter (called fact-space by Rucker). Matter dances to symmetry´s tune, and our passion is to learn that tune. But that is accessible only above a certain level of human development. Plato´s “cave” analogy is his most famous example; the inhabitants of the cave all took shadows to be real. When one, for the first time went out into the light and told the others the truth about their shadows, he was killed.

For a while there, from Newton on, we were sure we had a nice, tidy, rather boringly predictable, clockwork Universe. How silly our certainties! “Just a few loose threads to tidy up at the edges”, we thought. . . but people started pulling at this loose thread and that, and the whole dress we had put over Mother Nature unravelled! Russell and Whitehead tried to encompass all of mathematics in Principia Mathematica, and failed. The Platonist Gödel (see Dawson, 1999, p. 76) came onto the scene, and showed that all axioms - of logic, of maths, of our hardest ‘knowledge´, are built upon other axioms in an infinite regress. Similarly, in 1965, Gregory Chaitin proved that:

“If ‘T´ is a theory of mathematics, and ‘T´ is
1. Finitely given, and
2. Consistent, then
3. There is a number t such that ‘T´ cannot prove that any specific bit string has a complexity greater than t.” (Rucker, p. 286)

Even so, we ‘know´ from messages sent across the Universe that matter behaves exactly according to the same mathematical laws of physics throughout different galaxies, indeed all the known Universe - messages that started out billions of years ago. What is going on here? Are we shaping our perceptions, even of other galaxies, to fit our preconceptions? Insufficient. Can we only see what our preconceptions, our evolutionary and technological hardware and software, allow us to? Insufficient. What is that ‘out there´, and what fit does it have with that ‘in here´?

Enter Charles Darwin. I reckon in the twenty-first century Darwin and Pythagoras will hold hands and walk off together into the sunrise (for example, read Goodwin and Calvin [2]), but they´re not that much together yet. I reckon it will happen something like this:

In his book The Blind Watchmaker (which I passionately recommend to anyone wishing to engage the enormous power of Darwin´s ideas, and thereby enormously enrich their appreciation of life), Richard Dawkins exposes as a canard (to my satisfaction, at least) the objection to evolution that the eye, as a organised complexity of mutually interdependent parts, could not have emerged from the classical Darwinist evolutionary process. He does so with a series of questions and answers (I include the questions in their entirety, but give only short answers, with quotes in italics, the more complete answers being available in Dawkins´ book):

1. Q. Could the human eye have arisen directly from no eye at all, in a single step?

A. No. The odds against a ‘yes´ answer for questions like Question 1 are many billions of times greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

2. Q. Could the human eye have arisen directly from something slightly different from itself, something that we may call X?

A. It just depends upon where you draw the line. Dawkins says - you can draw X as near or as far as you can accept. There´s plenty of time now, remember. Once you´re happy with what X could possibly be, go back another step, to X1, and ask the same question.

3. Q. Is there a continuous series of Xs connecting the modern human eye to a state with no eye at all?

A. Yes; it´s just a matter of taking your Xs back far enough.

4. Q. Considering each member of the series of hypothetical Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them was made available by random mutation of its predecessor?

A. My feeling is that, provided the difference between neighbouring intermediates in our series leading to the eye is sufficiently small, the necessary mutations are almost bound to be forthcoming. We are, after all, always talking about minor quantitative changes in an existing embryonic process. Remember that, however complicated the embryological status quo may be in any given generation, each mutational change in the status quo can be very small and simple.

5. Q. Considering each member of the series of Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them worked sufficiently well that it assisted the survival and reproduction of the animals concerned?

A. In a primitive world where some creatures had no eyes at all and others had lensless eyes, the ones with lensless eyes would have all sorts of advantages. And there is a continuous series of Xs, such that each tiny improvement in sharpness of image, from swimming blur to perfect human vision, plausibly increases the organism's chances of surviving. Just as you can still detect a light source with your eyes closed, so a blur that warns of a potential predator gives survival advantages over not being able to detect even a blur.

If you´re not convinced of the theoretical possibility, please go read the book. The point is, if you have a marginal advantage over another potential breakfast of a predator - bang! He´s a meal, you´re not, and you have some more time to pass on your genes, memes et al - whatever organisational patterns you can transmit.

It appears to me that this “incremental improvement” process has, as a response to such evolutionary pressures, been built into the hardware of our brains.

So in a survival context, we were forced into an incremental process as described by Dawkins, and I submit that this process extended through to the way out brains work - the way we grow in knowledge. I would therefore submit that Grove´s insight - “the brain is a pattern-maker and reality inhibitor” (Grove) - can be adapted as follows, towards a theory of knowledge:

I see the pattern-seeker as the Platonic seeker; the incremental absorber as the Darwinian seeker, and the Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) as the process. But I don´t see that process as just linear; at certain critical levels, there are phase transitions from one level to a higher order integration, transcending but including its predecessors (the analogy of a crystal structure “jelling” in a solution might help). That is, contrary to much traditional thinking I am claiming all three dimensions for the dialectic process through the fourth (time) dimension, not just two. Which, I further claim, introduces qualitative discernment, not just quantitative!

In other words, I see Hegel´s dialectic as the mental expression of the more general phenomenon of an increase in organised complexity through differentiation and integration. This is usually ‘flatland´ - two dimensional - but sometimes it may involve a “Eureka”or “Aha!” experience, which, if you have studied a subject well enough, you may have already experienced personally. Afterwards, you have a higher order integration of your understanding of the subject; everything now “fits together” in a new simplicity; you feel as if, instead of seeing a tree and a tree and a tree and so on, you see the whole forest, and the relationships of the trees within it. You have ascended to a higher level of understanding - a three dimensional result of a dialectic, like what happens when we learn to ride a bike. Dawkins´ incremental steps in your study patterns have suddenly and apparently spontaneously reconfigured, jelled together, into a new whole with new emergent understandings. You have proceeded up a developmental line.

The cognitive scientist Gelernter presents a view consistent with this when he says that the “cognitive spectrum” - a broad to narrow attention focussing capacity - puts emotion right at the heart of thought - that is, just as there are no molecules without atoms, there are no thoughts without bodies - you think with brains and body both. Consequently, “the basic tenet of modern thought science, that mind is to brain as programme is to computer, is wrong and should be junked” (Gelernter, p. 35). In so saying, he has recognised thought as an emergent capacity from emotion, an insight with revolutionary consequences for his discipline. There are several other such shocks in store if this view prevails.

As mentioned by Landy (p. 42), our brains often seek patterns where none exist. But, according to the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992 & 1993) the self evolves by an incremental growth process similar to that described by Dawkins, too much information causing anxiety and regression (too highly stressed), too little information causing boredom and stasis (insufficiently stressed). The opportunity for happiness lies between those extremities in a state he refers to as Flow - the best moments are those spent in trying to achieve something difficult and worthwhile. Note that this is a different use of the term “evolution” than that described by the term “the blind watchmaker”, which is all that Dawkins can honestly report as visible from the lower levels. In our case, evolution itself has evolved from random to (sometimes) purposive. As Daniel Dennett says, “we, unlike the cells that compose us, are not on ballistic trajectories; we are guided missiles, capable of altering course at any point. . . no consideration is alien to us, or a foregone conclusion” (Dennett, quoted in Calvin, 1998 [2]; italics Dennett´s). Often, it´s our dualistic Cartesian myopia that inhibits us from seeing that continuity, or a hangover from Francis Bacon´s pathological separation of self from nature (according to Bacon, Mother Nature must be “ ‘hounded in her wanderings´, ‘bound into service,´ and even ‘put on the rack and tortured for her secrets´ ”) (Merchant, quoted in Young, p. 9).

To continue the analogy with material processes (or, more, the harmonic emergence from material processes?), just as matter configures itself differently at different levels - atoms, molecules, cells, etc - the development of mind goes through several stages - personal paradigm transitions, with early (rough) approximation similarities to phase transitions in matter, and Kuhn´s structures of scientific revolutions in science. Piaget´s cognitive stages are perhaps the best known - concrete operational, formal operational and so on - but there are very many differentiated, sometimes mutually influenced, developmental lines in all of us. For example, as an early approximation Wilber identifies: moral, ego, visual-spatial thinking, logical-spatial thinking, linguistic narrative knowledge, cognitive, worldviews, interpersonal capacity, psychosexual, conative, intimacy, motivational, ultimate concern, self needs . . . (Wilber, 1997).

With the religious introductory paragraphs of this paper, let´s focus on the ‘moral´ developmental line. The biggest name in this field is Kohlberg. Again in keeping with this millennium theme, I will quote extensively from a theologically-focussed paper on Kohlberg.

It begins by describing moral development stages from infancy, as described at the following link (kindly read, as it is essential for the understanding of this paper):

The paper quotes more general observations that were made by Kohlberg, which further explain human development in stages (all lines, not just the moral line). The remainder of the paper is not as directly relevant.

I differ from Kohlberg in submitting that, as with all psychological development lines, one can regress when threatened, like soldiers did - to stage 1 - in the example above. You improve your level of stability, but can still become unstable (see Combs, p. 254). As an orienting approximation - it´s rather like playing snakes and ladders. Note that I am not presenting these theories as established certainties, but, like Darwinism but not as strongly as Darwinism, I consider them to be admissible because they have strong corroborating evidence on their side. They establish general, qualifiable patterns for the incremental absorption of truth.

There are literally hundreds of developmental lines that have been charted so far, broadly classifiable into four ways of manifesting - interior personal, exterior personal, interior social, and exterior social. The above “interior personal” type will be expressed in interpersonal (social) behaviour as exterior personal actions. Sociologists´ narrow focus on the exterior social quadrant, but all social sciences should remember that there are four quadrants to keep in mind for a holistic understanding (Wilber, 1995).

It is now possible to profile someone along a whole series of developmental lines - a psychopath, for example, may be fully developed along the cognitive skills line, but morally ‘stillborn´. Another highly developed individual intellectually may have a low level of interpersonal skills development and motor skills development, and be teased in school as a nerd or somesuch. Some champions at sport have extremely high levels of motor skills development, but an arrested, regressed, narcissistic ego (big-headed). Mozart had developed his musical skills to a sublime level, but was reputedly quite infantile along some other developmental lines. Some with highly developed interpersonal skills may have neglected their moral, intellectual, or motor skills development - and so on: I am sure examples spring to your minds. Every healthy person develops along these lines to varying degrees depending upon stimulus (‘healthy´ because internal chemical imbalances and/or trauma stultify the process).

Even if these lines had not already been articulated by psychologists, a developed view such as Thomas Jefferson´s above could still be identified, because:

all development “proceeds from a situation of relative globality and lack of differentiation to one of increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchical integration.”

(Werner, 1957)

So the question about Jefferson I asked earlier - how did he know the difference? - can now be answered. He was writing from Kohlberg´s level 5 and 6 (as he was also when writing the constitution of the USA). He was therefore able to differentiate between the level 5 and 6 statements attributable to Jesus in the Bible, and those that are of lower levels.

That is not to say that he would necessarily have understood all that Jesus said - Jefferson´s life contained some morally wrong elements by our standards. Kohlberg conjectured that there could be levels 7, 8, etc., but his observation that “in stage development, subjects cannot comprehend moral reasoning at a stage more than one stage beyond their own” meant that he could not “differentiate, articulate and hierarchically integrate” higher stages into his system. Possibly hence, also, Jesus´s silence to Pilate´s question: Pilate would not have been able to understand the answer. Similarly, a level 4 person cannot come to grips with level 6 moral behaviour, and often dismisses it by reducing it to his or her own (reductionist, lower) terms - “He must be mad!”. . . “Bleeding heart!”. . . “Goody two-shoes!”, and so on (compared to what? A “bloodless heart?”, a “baddy no-shoes?”). Nor can they come to grips with stage 4½ (that 4½ stage of development, appropriate for their age, may partly account for the lack of judgmental capacity of college students reported in The Wilson Quarterly [referenced above]).

Perhaps - and this is only a conjecture on my part - the development of various academic disciplines may go through a similar process. The young science of social anthropology, then, at least as reported by Sari Wastell, is ripe for a revolution in accord with Kuhn´s structure of scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1970), and the result may be in approximate accord with stage 5, but in its own context, not Kohlberg´s - that is, there could be a ‘deep structure´ similarity, despite vast ‘surface structure´ differences in subject matter.

Conclusion

Looking through these time/space dimensional eyes, therefore, it is clear that twentieth century science has given us a far more developed world view than the inaccurate approximations of 1,000 years ago - far more differentiated and articulated. But - are its components hierarchically integrated?

I submit that the hierarchical integration part still leaves much to be desired - both within many disciplines, and across disciplines. In fact, I claim that its deficiency in much of science is of pathological proportions - right down there at level one with Francis Bacon (encouragingly, the hard-nosed sociobiologist E.O. Wilson has attempted to address this in his recent book, Consilience [see Wilson, 1998, and The Wilson Quarterly, 1998]). So I am aware that this paper will dissatisfy the readers with positivistic tendencies: that is my intention. The reason?

I am attacking positivism in particular, and two-dimensional, ‘flatland´ fundamentalism in general, including retro-romanticism, because imbalance in development, and the arrest, repression, fixation or regression of the developmental lines of so many people in so many ways is, I submit, a root cause of the appalling dark side of this century. 40,000 children in the developing world dying from preventable causes every day; destruction of the rainforests and other acts of massive environmental despoliation; wars, wars, and more wars - tens of millions slaughtered. . . A disgraceful century in such terms, albeit a glittering one in others (there is probably more opportunity for full, rich, lives to be led now for more people than ever before).

But - 40,000 children dying needlessly, every day! Humanity could stop that easily, if it wanted to hard enough. And not only that! Basic education, water and sanitation, health and nutrition could be provided for everyone on Earth (plus reproductive health for all women) for an annual expense of much less than Europe spends on cigarettes and just over a third of what it spends on alcohol, and one twentieth of what the world spends annually on its military forces! (UNDP, 1998). Why don´t we feel like doing these things? Is there something we need to know to answer that question? That we have the means is not in dispute; we lack the will. Do we know why we lack the will? Don´t you think that a theory of knowledge should have something to say about that?

Kohlberg has an answer - we mostly don´t care because we are mostly not developed enough to care. Those problems are well within our knowledge bank´s capacity to solve. What appears to be lacking is a critical mass of people with enough moral development, as articulated by Kohlberg, in positions of clout to effect it.