AN EVOLUTIONARY ETHIC
Reaching for a higher moral vision, striving to take more into our view and to become more conscious, implies a recognition of our evolutionary potential. “The evolution of the universe produced what we call life,” Kimura said. “The evolution of life produced conscious beings like humans; the evolution of conscious beings is by nature the evolution of consciousness.” As he observed, “Thinking is the prime mover of the evolution of consciousness” because it literally transforms our understanding of reality. And to create a new moral vision, we privileged postmoderns need to develop a new way of thinking to meet our changing reality because we are now left with a moral view that idealizes diversity but has no way to take action and discriminate within that diversity. The conflicts unleashed by a changing and globalizing world are demanding that we stretch to think in new ways and that we embrace a larger, global context for our actions. Such a global moral context would involve the fullest recognition of our profound unity in the most extraordinary project there is—the evolution of consciousness through the continued development of all human beings.

In this Kimura finds the ground for a new morality, for what he calls an “evolutionary ethics” that gives us a new capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. “What is good is a way of living, of thinking and acting, that is conducive to evolution,” he said. “And what is bad is counter-evolutionary—that way of living, thinking, and acting that causes evolutionary stagnation, truncation, or devolutionary reversal.” This critical distinction is not based upon individual preferences; in other words, it is not morally relative. Instead, the idea is to root the ethic in an empirical reality that comes from “scientific research into human development and the spiritual traditions.” This research shows “an unmistakable pattern of evolution in psychology, behavior, value systems, and what we call consciousness.” As Kimura explained, this pattern reveals that “'more evolved' means that your consciousness, your recognition and awareness, includes more of the universe than others' do. The more evolved you are, the more of the universe is in your view.” In other words, the more encompassing one's worldview, the higher one's level of development. And for a world at the edge of crisis, this is critically important. Perhaps an evolutionary perspective gives us a ground for making moral choices because it can help us to distinguish right action from wrong by determining what best supports individual and collective development.

Kimura stressed the importance of bringing this evolutionary view into a “mainstream conversation.” The more of us who appreciate how this perspective can bring order to the plurality of views that are so much a part of our lives, the more we can use evolution/development as an overarching framework to determine the right course of action when faced with competing interests and possibilities. “Humanity at large does not know how to dialogue together, how to work together, or how to develop together in the face of disagreement,” he said. “This is one of the major problems of the world. The dynamics of an evolutionary co-development requires a sufficient degree of disagreement, of diversity, as well as an alignment in the quest for coherent, continued development.”

What might such a developmental perspective look like in practice? How does it help us to evolve beyond our postmodern view? “The cure for postmodern narcissism is activism,” Darcy Riddell, an environmental activist with ForestEthics and leadership trainer at the Hollyhock Leadership Institute in British Columbia, told me unequivocally. I spoke with Riddell to get a sense of how an evolutionary ethic enables us to confront the complexity we face in the world. Riddell and her colleagues worked for years to bring about a miracle in the Great Bear Rainforest—preventing logging in some of the last pristine rainforest in North America. Grappling with the competing interests of corporations, loggers, union representatives, local government officials, and other ecologists demanded that the environmentalists change from being “bellringers of doom to architects of transformation.” So, rather than simply taking a morally superior position about the dire necessity to protect the environment, they recognized the need for each party—including their traditional adversaries, the logging concerns—to be able to develop and transform. Riddell insisted that “saving the planet was the priority and that everyone's real needs be met. So, for example, we would not allow the loggers to cut the first-growth forests, but they had to have a way to live, so we negotiated for them to have access to second-growth forests.” Riddell explained that she brings an evolutionary ethic “undercover, in a covert way” to her work, recognizing that there are differences in the values held by individuals and groups, characterized by varying degrees of inclusiveness of perspective. The point, she said, is “not to use this knowledge to pigeonhole people but to be able to truly stand in their shoes and understand their needs.” As a practicing Buddhist, Riddell noted that “a strong spiritual ground is a necessity for real transformation to be part of the process.” She called her integral evolutionary perspective “heart-centered with strategy” because it brings together the deepest spiritual recognition of Oneness with a knowledge of development to create the potential for trust and understanding between the environmentalists and their opponents. While this was far from easy or quick—often requiring governmental and market pressures to force movement—the results were surprising. Not only were eighty-eight valleys of pristine rainforest in B.C. not logged, but a senior vice president of a logging company quit his job to join a wildlife organization. A higher moral outcome was the result: the rainforest was saved, and a context was created within which all of the parties had the opportunity to evolve.

Recognizing the desperate urgency of our global situation can move us out of the ironic world of self-centered isolation—“taking the mind out of the head and literally investing it in the world,” as Zengotita sees it. Whether or not we are activists, we can still grapple with the crisis that we collectively face. To do this only depends on our capacity to care, to look beyond the small enclosed space of the separate self, and to engage intellectually and emotionally with the full complexity of our current situation—its potential for doom or deliverance. “You know, it's a blast furnace of complexity,” Robert Richards, former Vice President of the Integral Institute, declared. “And I'm not talking about my little life. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about rain forest disuse, or AIDS in Africa—when I zoom out to there, I go, 'Holy God! This is almost unthinkable!'” But the fact that it is literally unthinkable and ungraspable opens the potential for something new, something evolutionary that is beyond what we can know or imagine. Richards heard an insistent call from the depth of himself, from his conscience—“mutate or die”—which very well could be a motto for our times. “I don't know who's doing the urging,” said Richards, “but I feel the insistence of it. Viscerally, there's nothing quite so insistent as this impulse to evolve.”

What is this impulse to evolve? What is this that awakens in the heart a concern for the unthinkably tragic and glorious whole that we are a part of? Sri Aurobindo, the twentieth-century philosopher and sage, had an intuition of this when he wrote: “There is in the cosmos, in the collectivity, in the individual, a rooted instinct or belief in its own perfectibility, a constant drive towards an ever-increasing and more adequate and more harmonious self-development nearer to the secret truth of things.” This is what we each have to find—the drive of the truth within us, an inner imperative that calls us to act for the sake of something far larger than ourselves. The power of our postmodern moment is that, despite the fact that we have been squandering our extraordinary capacity to think and to reflect by being so self-focused, we are beginning to glimpse the tremendous evolutionary potential of human consciousness. Even just in that dawning recognition, a new moral view can be awakened. A world at the breaking point calls on each of us to stretch, to reach for the mind-boggling possibility that human consciousness could give birth to a new morality that will show us the way to literally transform the world. And facing the enormity of the task—the sheer impossibility of it, the absolute necessity that it happen, the cry from the heart that says it is, in fact, so very real—brings us to the edge of that new morality itself. While as yet this is a morality we do not know, it can be kindled within us to continually evolve to meet the transcendent demand of the human spirit for greater freedom and higher unity, realized on this earth in our bodies and through our souls.