Humanity has a Soul

(Much of this article is drawn from my book: “world without war, made possible by empowered individuals” - http://amzn.to/hAGSBH).
Why is Homo sapiens so successful? You’ll say it is our intelligence and our innovativeness. Sure – they are most important attributes as was also a highly developed language, which were also our distinguishing traits among all our relatives, whether human or hominid.
The scientific study of human evolution encompasses the development of the genus Homo, but usually involves studying other hominids and hominines as well, such as Australopithecus. ‘Modern humans’ are defined as the Homo sapiens species, of which the only extant subspecies is Homo sapiens-sapiens, us; Homo sapiens idaltu (roughly translated as ‘elder wise man’), the other known subspecies, is extinct. Anatomically, modern humans appear in the fossil record in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The most accepted model for the extremely rapid development of skills and abstract thinking since then relies on studies of the diversity and mutation rate of nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA in living human cells. It is believed that all humans now living are descendents of a woman who is the ‘matrilineal most recent common ancestor’ (MRCA) for all living humans, who probably lived around 140,000 years ago. The existence of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each co-existed within a large human population. Some of these contemporaries have no living descendants today, and others are ancestors of all people alive today. The Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution proposes that a small, relatively isolated population of early humans evolved into modern Homo sapiens, and that this population succeeded in spreading across Africa, Europe, Asia an America, displacing and eventually replacing all other early human populations as they spread.
With man forming larger groups and consequently communal living, came a need to understand more of the world. Decisions were more and more made by reason rather than experience and conditioning (see Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s dogs), and inventiveness and planning became the background to human dominance over the world. There is evidence found in sites in Spain that a predecessor of Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago also “buried” their dead, but this was more likely a necessity rather than spirituality. Other carnivores were able to consume carrion and to avoid being detected by predators, humans had to dispose of their corpses.
The world man lived in was not perfect as Leibniz or even Kant wanted us to believe. Neither was it as salutary as the world in which the ‘natural man’ of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s early writings lived, often falsely referred to as the ‘noble savage’, a term Rousseau never used. He believed that man living in nature, not in civilisation, was good until humans came to live together with other humans, because from then on there would be the evils of jealousy, envy and competition.
Survival depended entirely on the co-operative strength man could muster. After all, there was no design in the creation of that world, nor was there a Paradise, but a process of development and competitive forces for survival. And man was not very well equipped as a predator. Its nearest relatives were mostly herbivores and man’s preference for hunting left it short with regard to speed, strength and natural weapons. The only way humans could succeed was by grouping together and working as a team, with some division of labour. Mostly men and some women went out to hunt, and most women and some men gathered food near the fixed home base, where they tended to the offspring and defended the camp against predators. This is an exception in the usual habit of apes, as pointed out by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal):
“This act of returning to a fixed home base is typical of the carnivores, but is far less common amongst the monkeys and apes.”
In order to achieve trust among the team members, a man and a woman would be allowed to become a couple without the risk of the head of the group taking his share as among primates. The exception to this is in the closest relative of ours, the Bonobo or Pigmy Chimpanzee, where sexual activity has a socially important role.
About 60,000 years ago, survival for man became more and more difficult, even competitive between rival groups of humans, as with an increasing population the availability of hunting grounds began to come under pressure. Because of man’s physical inadequacies compared to its predators and prey alike, coordination of the individuals within groups became an essential requirement not only for hunting and gathering, but in the end also for the defence of territory. How else could they drive a large herd of animals bigger than themselves over a cliff to get the meat? Such coordination does not happen without leadership, and with leadership comes power, and competition for that power. Such co-operation is not reserved for humans alone, as there are many animal species that rely on their co-operation for survival, even using signals to communicate. We all know about the co-operation among bees, ants, wolves and whales, and between different species as in humans and dogs chasing and cornering larger prey, and more recently killer whales co-operating with humans when hunting larger whales involving established rules about who gets what of the spoils.
In order to ensure cohesion it became necessary that rules had to be formulated and enforced, together with a chain of responsibilities and a code of conduct. It was around that time, when spirituality became evident, where the importance of a code of behaviour, hunting success and the dependence on climatic changes had created the need for understanding more of nature and its effect on tribal co-operation in difficult times. That is most likely the period when a spirit or spirits were created to help in providing the cohesion of the group.
This was the way communities developed, and in principle remained as a Gemeinschaft until the industrial revolution. Such a community had what I call a “village conscience”, where everyone knew what everyone was doing, and the communal moral code was expected to be adhered to or else there would be social sanctions. This meant that the perpetrator of an unacceptable deed would be frowned upon, isolated, or severely punished. The moral code was one of cooperation for the common good, as simple as that.
The industrial revolution cause considerable social and cultural changes. Communities became separated as people went to the cities for work, and in the end individuals became anonymous to the extent that they might not even know their neighbour in the same apartment block. As a consequence their moral code became their own individual responsibility.
Not all was lost, however, as this code was still embedded in each person’s psyche from early childhood on. Social behavioural norms are initially acquired during childhood in the context of behavioural patterns involving others and are merely pre-norms. The child learns through role-playing, often without others present, where it might imagine a situation in which it changes actors and is interchangeably for instance the shop owner of the stolen items, the thief, the policeman and the customer. It will also be exposed to the imperatives for life taught by its parents or carer. It will learn to behave within the restrictions of these imperatives, because if they are not obeyed, the child will encounter sanctions. It learns this not simply because of the positive or negative sanctions, but importantly as part of the caring environment, and becomes aware of a behaviour pattern to be followed. This behaviour pattern then becomes internalised and forms the character of the little person who as a result acquires the authority of its willpower.
During the teens, when ‘team games’ are played, the norms and imperatives will be reinforced and developed through the involvement of other players. By now, the play involves communicative roles, equivalent to the perspective of coordinated participants, where the reciprocity of the interchange of perspectives represents a cognitive structure. This developed from the ‘ego’ to ‘alter’ and self to other situations acted out as a young child. It then develops into a behavioural pattern involving recognition of signals such as speech or action through interaction with others, the ‘alter ego’ as the participating ‘opposite’, as well as through an awareness of the presence of observers of the game with them as a ‘neuter’, all being members of the same group.
The set of norms that develops does then not merely represent the awareness of a behavioural pattern of a group, but also includes the linked expectation that all members of the group, the ‘generalised other’, will act in a certain way in certain situations and by corollary they each have the duty to perform such actions as expected by the others. This reciprocity of mutual expectations and reactions in the surrounding ‘Gemeinschaft’ is referred to as ‘institution’. An institution is the mutual reaction of all members of the ‘Gemeinschaft’, and includes the police, the court and a public hospital, which we mutually expect will react in certain ways if called upon to assist, and who will attract sanctions if they do not. I suggest that such a ‘village conscience’ environment can one day be revived in a wider community like a global village, if the world’s societies want to become a ‘World Gemeinschaft’. Perhaps it already applies in the Commonwealth of Nations.
This social code is innate in homo sapiens, as it existed since man walked on this earth. It starts with the basic normativity of each individual. Normativity is the individual’s abstract realm of thought and awareness. A person’s awareness and sense of justice and a sense of the ‘good that is equal to all’ are the basic elements that inform decisions as to what one ‘ought’ to do in the world. Through interaction with others, it will be developed into an irrevocable set of norms that becomes the ‘social normativity’, which I call the ‘worldsoul’, as it is ubiquitous throughout mankind. The responsibility to firmly hold and follow this set of norms is held by all who agree to its validity.
My concept of the ‘village conscience’ is perhaps similar to the ‘Kollektivbewußtsein’ or ‘collective awareness’ that leads to the collective identity of an individual who is part of a group, as suggested by the French philosopher Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and also discussed in detail by Jürgen Habermas (Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Zur Kritik der funktioalistischen Vernunft):
“The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”
So here is the “worldsoul” that binds us together. It allows us to imbue all our activities with these basic norms. They can then be expanded into principles for the many activities of man.
According to Habermas, Durkheim separated the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’, and tried to find the origin of the ‘sacred’, morality and religion. He concluded that rituals existed first, and they were later joined and to some extent replaced by developed language with semantics and syntax, which were able to formulate clearer worldviews than mere symbols. A consensus on moral values was very much part of the first communities, and became part of the religious context. In more developed societies, these worldviews were seen, by consensus, as an opportunity to use them for the legitimisation of political leadership, and in this way supported the individual’s ‘moral authority’ and the validity of basic norms. This then was the basis for the development of ‘institutions’, which received their energy from the moral worldviews.
Moral values permeate all activities and are therefore applicable to each of the cultures of commitment, the three streams of human activities, namely spirituality, commerce and government. The ‘worldspirit’, that I will explore next time, represents in one concept the combined values of civic virtue, tolerance, justice, fairness, honesty and truthfulness, altruism and co-operation.