THE POLITICS OF EVOLUTION

“Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

“We are star stuff, contemplating the stars” is one of the many mind-expanding statements credited to Carl Sagan. And he was correct—science has discovered that many of the elements in the human body were manufactured in the cauldron of distant exploding stars. The natural creative process that has brought us to life and created the abundant world we live on is inextricably linked to the violent processes of massive stars that long ago vanished into the cosmic void. So in the same way that violence, or at least some kind of force, may be important to the functioning of a healthy social organization, it can also, we are coming to learn, play a vital role in the evolutionary process of life itself.

“I would say quite categorically that God is not a pacifist,” declares Jim Garrison. “The natural order is full of violence and cataclysms, star systems bursting into supernova status, whole galaxies exploding and transmuting into something else. And if you look at nature on earth, and the food chain, everything eats everything else. The further up the food chain you go, the more ferocious are your eating habits. Whoever God is, God is manifested through his handiwork. And I don't see a pacific universe.” Garrison's observations about the nature of nature are hardly novel—“red in tooth and claw,” the old saying goes—but his observations about the universe are a product of more recent revolutions in science. Indeed, in the last half-century, scientists have begun to incorporate into their theories the awe-inspiring recognition that we live in an evolving universe, one that is billions of years old. Over those vast tracts of cosmological time, we now know, our universe has changed, developed, and evolved through what physicist Paul Davies calls “a long and complicated series of self-organizing and self-complexifying processes.” And those processes haven't exactly been calm and peaceful, as Hubble has shown us, revealing cannibalizing galaxies, exploding stars, colliding nebulae, and all kinds of cosmological train wrecks displayed across the heavens for high-powered telescopes to see. “Phenomenal existence itself seems to be a violent mode of being,” writes eco-theologian Thomas Berry. Simply put, we don't live in a Leave-It-to-Beaver universe. It's violent, it's wild, it's out of control, but it does have one extraordinary thing going for it. It's evolving, it's changing and developing, and no one could question the unbelievable success of the evolutionary process—from the Big Bang to the Big Dipper to the Big Apple—that ultimately has created all of us.

So what about peace and pacifism? Where is the God of Peace in the heavens above, or for that matter, in nature all around? Peace, order, and equilibrium are simply not as central in this new conception of our cosmological heritage. Gone is the once-dominant paradigm of a steady-state universe in equilibrium. Gone is the notion of a natural world that exists in some relatively pristine, peaceful, unchanging state. We live, as complexity scientist Stuart Kauffmann points out, in a universe that is expanding, self-organizing, and always creating “novelty and diversity.” And we live in the midst of a biosphere, scientists tell us, that is dynamically poised on a dangerous edge of disequilibrium, a creative sort of chaos that contains just enough order to keep it from spinning out of control.

“The universe isn't just a happy, friendly, creative, harmonious, have-a-nice-day kind of place. It's also chaos, violence, destruction, and breakdown,” says Christian minister and former environmental activist Michael Dowd. Dowd has spent the last couple of years studying and teaching the spiritual implications of our new understanding of cosmological evolution, and he points out that nature's acts of violence are often creative and serve larger evolutionary ends. “Evolution, by and large, does not proceed by peace and tranquility,” he says. “Evolution proceeds by the greatest amount of conflict or tension that the organism or living system can creatively bear.” God, at least as expressed through nature, may have a violent temper, but, as Dowd explains, he or she also has a specific motive—a motive that, in the end, is not peace or violence, but creative development toward higher levels of complexity, harmony, and integration.

This evolutionary vision has already begun to impact the work of a number of pioneering philosophers, mystics, and theologians, who see in this conception of nature not a pacifist God, but a creative, self-transcending divine impulse seeking ever higher expressions of itself in this world. And as this vision begins to work its way through our culture, many believe we will see paradigm-changing effects on the way we think about a host of issues, not the least of which are war, peace, and conflict resolution. As Thomas Berry points out, “Everything depends on a creative resolution of our present antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of our present antagonisms, rather than to peace, in deference to the violent aspects of the cosmological process. . . . Neither violence nor peace in this sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place.”

Dr. Don Beck, who worked in South Africa to help that society transition out of apartheid, uses a new model of cultural development based on similar evolutionary principles. He explains that human nature and human culture are also governed by the same deep principles that we find at the heart of living systems across the universe. If we want to genuinely resolve conflicts, he suggests, then we would do well to pay attention to how they work. “What we have to be able to do is learn how to manage emergence—not peace, but emergence. Trying to create peace means we're operating in a closed system, and then once we bring tranquility, harmony, and unity, everything will be fine. But that's homeostatic, equilibrium thinking. It's not human nature. Human nature is evolutionary, dynamic, always shifting. So, if our attempts at peacemaking are based on homeostasis—getting this group and this group to stop fighting—it won't work out.”

Understanding the big-picture vistas of evolution and human development does not necessarily answer the nitty-gritty questions about if, where, when, why, and how to use violence. Nor, for that matter, does it tell us the right thing to do in the sands of Mesopotamia. But it can begin to expand the context in which we are asking these crucial questions, and make us deeply consider what our goals are, as we look to transform the tremendous conflicts that beset our world. Peace, pacifism, and nonviolence will no doubt continue to play a role as important moral sensibilities that inform our personal and political lives, but they may have to share the limelight with other emerging spiritual values. Our rich cosmological and biological heritage is giving birth to a new vision of the spiritual impulse, one that incorporates the evolutionary principles at the heart of living systems. The more we understand about the developmental processes of life, including our own lives, the more we can develop solutions appropriate to the complex, multidimensional human world that we live in. We can hope that those solutions may be more effective at leading us toward a lasting and comprehensive peace, but that does not mean that peace itself will be the ultimate goal of our efforts. “If people try to put peace ahead of evolution, they won't get either,” says Michael Nagler. “If they put evolution ahead of peace, they'll get both.”