Part I: The West
Evolution is a concept that has many different kinds of relation to religion, metaphysics and tradition.
In the eyes of most Western people and those in other countries who have adopted the current Western world-outlook, it is simply a factual description of the way biological species came into being.
However, in the first place we must remember that this aura of factuality/neutrality was won over time by the triumph of the “scientific world-outlook”.
Upon its introduction to the world, the theory of evolution created a seismic shift in the way Western people thought about the very nature of existence. Until that point, the culture as a whole was dominated by a theistic/Platonic view of being.
In other words, all entities were created by God or from the Platonic point of view were the earthly reflection of eternal Forms. These two concepts are closely related and have cross-influenced each other in many ways.
The theistic/Platonic tradition posits a world in which all entities, all creatures, from a mouse to a star, hold some form of meaning for us.
Evolutionism, at least apparently, posits a world in which these things have no meaning for us.
I say “apparently” because the world posited by evolutionism had a very definite, though completely unscientific, meaning to many of the people who embraced it. And this, to a considerable degree, accounts for the early popularity and triumph of the theory.
This meaning was tied up with the idea of “progress” in the sense of human technical, social and other forms of progress.
Clearly, this ascribing of human meaning to a purely biological process had no scientific basis, but in the minds of many, “progress” and “evolution” became practically synonymous.
These people were only too delighted to overthrow what they saw as the old, rigid, outdated notions of the theistic/Platonic model.
However, there was another strand contributing enthusiasm to the new model. And this consisted of people who had long believed that the universe was a purely mechanistic environment driven by laws that had no relation whatever to human wishes or feelings. These people were the real precursors of the modern “scientific world-view”.
Often the two groups merged at the edges and cross-influenced each other. For both of them the new model was their fundamental mythos, their “creation story”.
Because all human beings, however “scientific” they may believe themselves to be, live by narratives.
The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of the Traditional Model
A somewhat mysterious phenomenon surrounding the huge paradigm shift that took place during the mid to late nineteenth century is the rapid and near-complete collapse of the forces in support of the traditional model.
At first the new evolutionism was greeted with ridicule as well as rapture, but within a relatively short space of time, opposition to the new model was limited to a fringe, with the majority being more afraid of ridicule from the new evolutionist establishment.
This becomes perhaps less mysterious as we realize that the twin ideologies of “progress” and scientism (a term I use to designate “the scientific world-view” as opposed to science itself) had been growing as the working models for much of the thought and culture of Western “intellectual” circles since at least the late seventeeth century.
So we might say that the successors to the traditional model had been steadily growing in cultural strength and were only awaiting the narrative, the mythos, the “creation story” that would validate and consolidate them in the cultural sphere
In the story of evolution they found this.
The two successors to the traditional model
1. The “Scientific World-Outlook”
I said above that I use the term “scientism” to distinguish “the scientific world-outlook” from science itself.
Science is a means of inquiry whose strengths derive to a large extent from its self-imposed limitations.
These limitations are that science, being based on the empirical method, restricts itself to things that are quantifiable and measurable. Of things that are non-quantifiable and not measurable, it has and can have, by its own definition, nothing to say.
This allows science to create models of reality that are extremely useful for practical application and freed from the need to concern themselves with areas of human perception and reality that are irrelevant to its method.
Clearly these areas outside the domain of science do not cease to exist. It is possible to claim that they can be reduced to epiphenomena of models created by the scientific method, but equally clearly such claims are tendentious and “ideological”. Such claims are certainly made by scientists of the highest order.
But they are not speaking as scientists.
They are speaking as human individuals with their own ideological needs. Equally, other eminent scientists take a completely different view, one closer to the traditional standpoint. Science itself does not and cannot weigh in on either side.
Stephen Hawking declared that heaven is a “fairy tale” and that there is no life after death. Stephen Hawking was the most eminent scientist of our age, but when he made statements like that he was not speaking as the most eminent scientist of our age. He was speaking as an individual who feels the need to hold certain beliefs that by their very nature are unproven and unprovable by science.
The “scientific world-view” is not science but it is very much akin to a religion.
In the modern West, probably the majority of people would say that they accept the scientific world-view, but this is really only because of the suggestive power of its high status in contemporary culture. In practice, unless they are hard-line “true believers” like Stephen Hawking, the scientific world-view is what they hold when they are thinking in “science” terms. When they are thinking in other terms, they hold other ideas, like most humans.
2. “Spiritual evolutionism”
In a certain sense, the second of the two successors to the traditional Western model seems diametrically opposed to the first. The true “scientific world-outlook” denies meaning and purpose to the manifest universe and was able to do this to a large extent because the theory of evolution allows an explanation of the diverse forms of living nature that is based on “accidental change” over large periods of time. In other words, it allows the denial of Form or Essence in nature.
The creed of the rigorous “scientific world-outlook” was summed up by Nietzsche not long after its consolidation:
The total nature of the world is… to all eternity chaos, not in the sense that necessity is lacking, but in that order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other human aesthetic notions we may have are lacking.
On the other hand, the creed of “spiritual evolutionism” sees in the concept of evolution purpose and progress. The notion of continual and inevitable progress in human society was extremely strong long before Darwin’s work but was picked up enthusiastically by progressists who felt enabled to believe that progress was built into the very nature of biological life.
Beginning with pseudo-esotericists like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, this was elevated to what is sometimes termed the “spiritual” plane, although it is more accurately described as merely psychic.
This has grown into a major (although somewhat unstructured) belief system in the West and in other parts of the world. Adherents readily describe people whom they believe to be of a high spiritual quality as “more evolved” than others. The end point of “spiritual evolution” appears to be something very vaguely akin to the Realization of the Platonist, the Saint, or the advanced practitioner of Vedanta or Buddhism.
But the relationship is very vague and lacking in definition. Such people often like to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.
However, since religion and spirituality are fundamentally the same thing, it would be better to describe these attitudes as “psychic but not spiritual”*.
While these two successors to the Western traditional model may seem diametrically opposed, they are also closely linked in that both focus on the flux of matter – the samsara as it is called in the Dharmic traditions – rather than on what the West has always regarded as the fixed and absolute Forms that transcend the flux and yet give it everything it has of form and meaning.
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*By “psychic” here I mean the middle realm of dreams and nightmares between the Spiritual domain of Absolute Reality and the domain of “brute matter” (the world of the “scientific world outlook”) devoid of all meaning and purpose.
The psychic domain is in a sense “superior” to the purely material. On the other hand it has more potential for evil and negative activity (springing from the self-interest that is in every soul). In this regard the world of simple matter can be seen to have a certain “innocence” in contrast to the psychic realm.
In Buddhist terms this negative potential of the psychic domain is described in terms of the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance – in other words desire for some things, aversion to other things and the ignorance that leaves us unable to see through these psychic snares and illusions to true Spiritual Reality. In Christianity this is expressed as original sin.
These two tendencies that have replaced the traditional Western world-outlook – “the scientific world view” and “spiritual evolutionism” – may be regarded in a certain sense as opposites, since one postulates a world in which meaning and purpose are mere human aesthetic illusions and the other posits a world driven by the underlying purpose and meaning of “spiritual” (i.e psychic) “evolution”.
However, while superficially they may be opposed, they are both based exclusively in the world of the samsara – the ultimately meaningless flux of being – that was opened to the West as a valid and acceptable model of Reality by the loss of its true Spiritual underpinnings.
This explosive change was largely driven in the first place by the suggestive force of “evolutionism”, which de-coupled living beings from Spiritual Form.
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