EARLY VOICES OF CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

by matthew shapiro

The patterns of cultural and social practice that we’ve inherited and adopted without examination or question are the patterns that have come to threaten our planet and repress human potential. There has been a growing recognition of this fact, and of the need and the opportunity for people around the planet to more consciously participate in the evolution of their cultures and societies. The associated phrase conscious evolution—which refers not to biological evolution but rather to cultural and social evolution—is seemingly a contemporary one. Some readers may associate it with the book of the same name published by Barbara Marx Hubbard in 1998. Some will be surprised (and perhaps either delighted or dismayed) that the phrase and its associated values and ethos actually first appeared in the public conversation well over a century ago.

The unconscious evolution of culture and society that characterized most of human history became unquestionably problematic during and following the Industrial Revolution, as powerful technologies allowed humans to begin making global impacts—some positive, but many negative. At the same time, there was a cultural maturing on the planet around the importance of human development, freedom, and democracy. It was not mere coincidence that just as societies were becoming industrialized—in physical nature and in terms of economics and governance—there emerged a recognition that people could, together, examine the code of their own society, study the development of individuals within those societies, and take active steps to facilitate the flourishing of both.

Contrary to some current views on that era, insightful observers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries recognized that a better society would be achieved not by political revolution but rather through cultural and social evolution; not through seeking utopian perfection, but through eutopian (“good place”) thinking; not through “Social Darwinism” but through cooperation and mutual uplift; not through eugenics, but through education and democracy. How did this alternative perspective come to light?

To begin the story, I’ll step back to 1994. This was the year I began writing about the need for conscious evolution, or what I called co-evolution of nature, culture, and individual, from the grassroots level. A book draft, followed by my founding a local group working for conscious evolution (Coevolution Southern Idaho), led to a meeting with virologist Jonas Salk the next year, and to subsequent meetings with Bela H. Banathy, Alexander Laszlo, and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. The first three had been associated with the General Evolution Research Group, a transdisciplinary group formed in the 1980s with a focus on the patterns of evolution common to all kinds of systems. Among that group, Salk and Banathy in particular were later said to be the most interested in bridging theory and action. Banathy became my mentor and collaborator, and in 1996 he invited me to join a group at an annual conference that he’d founded. Among the required readings for the group was a book published in 1918 by Mary Parker Follett, titled The New State. And in that book, Follett uses the phrase conscious evolution, in the following context:

Conscious evolution is the key to that larger view of democracy which we are embracing to-day. The key? Every man sharing in the creative process is democracy; this is our politics and our religion. People are always inquiring into their relation to God. God is the moving force of the world, the ever-continuing creating where men are the co-creators.

I went for a long time assuming that Follett was alone in having used the term. Two years ago, however, I stumbled on more references, and I began to search. Thanks to the recent scanning and digitization of so many out-of-print books and journals, I was able to continue to pull at the thread of this theme of conscious evolution as it was articulated in an earlier era, and I concluded that it was important to bring these references to light in a coherent body of work, to which I gave the title Early Voices of Conscious Evolution. The following is a selection of these “Early Voices.”

the track of the past

One of the earlier passages I selected was from Edward Tylor, writing in 1873:

The unconscious evolution of society is giving place to its conscious development; and the reformer’s path of the future must be laid out on deliberate calculation from the track of the past.

Some of the passages I encountered were less academic and more literary in nature. The following passage is from a 1888 novella by Catherine Helen Spence, written from the perspective of an imagined visit to the year 1988 and looking backwards:

And how did my new friends look on me? Kindly enough, but with some pity that I had been placed in such a barbarous age. Yet this barbarous age contained in it the germs of all that had been accomplished afterwards. It was the beginning of the age of conscious evolution. Before my day the race had stumbled forward, fighting blindly, struggling manfully for life. In common with thousands, nay with tens-of-thousands, I had entered the epoch of consciousness, the open-eyed, dignified manhood of humanity. We had power and passion, we only paused for knowledge, so as to apply these to the good and happiness of all. I looked back, and I saw the beginning of much that had been evolved in my own mind, and in the minds of others. I, myself, had done something, not much, but still somewhat towards those changes that others had worked more efficiently under more favorable circumstances to bring about.

An impassioned argument can be found in a 1921 pamphlet written by Mina Loy:

Psycho-Democracy

a movement to focus human reason

on

the conscious direction of evolution

to replace the cataclysmic factor in social evolution WAR…

The Tediousness of Human Evolution is owing:

To the tendency of ideas to outlast their origin, i.e. the tendency of human institutions to outlast the psychological conditions from which they arose.

Psycho-Democracy considers social institutions as structural forms in collective consciousness which are subject to the same evolutional transformation as is collective consciousness itself, and that our social institutions of today will cause future generations to roar with laughter.

Early in the research, I expanded my research parameters to include not only use of the specific phrase “conscious evolution,” but to the recognition of a distinctive new perspective on humanity; recognition of the lag between technological invention and cultural adjustment; folks calling out the negative impact of industrial activity on the natural environment; articulation of the distinction between biological evolution and social evolution; spiritual implications of evolutionary theory; and more.

A magazine titled The Arbitrator published in 1920 an article titled “Evolutionary Agencies,” which distinguished between charitable institutions working to address immediate conditions from groups working for deeper change, with evolutionary vision.

This is a catalogue of associations devoted to the alteration of unsatisfactory existing conditions—a partial list of agencies supported by forward-looking people who have visions of a better world. It is not intended to include charitable institutions which strive to mitigate suffering temporarily, nor other organizations, admirable though they be, which have for their purpose the reformation of character in the individual. Eligibility for our catalogue is also dependent upon an altruistic and ethical purpose, a peaceful and legal method, and a reasonable prospect of success in the promotion of political and spiritual evolution. Unpopularity is no bar.

Among the authors I encountered, a few names were familiar to me. John Dewey and others known to historians of education wrote of the importance of education as a transformational force. Patrick Geddes, a well-known and visionary Scottish planner, wrote of shifting from “War=Peace” to “Peace-War.” The suffrage movement came to my attention, and I traveled to the archives of the New York Public Library to draw passages from a copy of Carrie Chapman Catt’s 1893 speech “Evolution and Women’s Suffrage.”

Eventually, a few references led to dozens, and dozens turned into more than 130 passages that I drew from more than 120 different thinkers and social actors of the industrial and progressive eras, ranging in time frame from the 1860s through the 1930s. The only exception was a closing passage from Julian Huxley’s 1959 address “The Evolutionary Vision.” I added a “Topic-Author Index” to help readers navigate the material and added introductory and closing material to help put the body of work into a meaningful context.

It is my hope that the creation of Early Voices of Conscious Evolution contributes in some small way to the movement of conscious evolution, and to progressive change in general. I believe that it shines a light on a dimension of human history that conventional narratives of history overlook. This dimension is the evolutionary story, recounted by a few who have traced the history of the cosmos not in terms of millennia and civilizations, events and personalities, but in terms of the fundamental dynamics at center stage, i.e., physical forces, life forces, cultural and social forces, and now the reflective capacity of people who recognize themselves as enactors of those forces. This history of cosmic evolution is touched on by scholars of “Big History,” but I think not fully recognized by them.

For those people for whom conscious evolution is a familiar concept, whether at the theoretical or the level of advocacy and activism, I believe that this body of work can serve as an epistemological touchstone, and one that pushes the recognized “start date” of what some of us call a new era of evolution—i.e., the era of conscious evolution—back more than a century. After all, the work begun in that earlier era was never finished or transcended, although it may seem that society has progressed in some ways (e.g., gender and racial equality and equity); if anything, the theory and practice of conscious evolution was put on hold until surging forth in fits and starts throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. It is a story that continues to unfold today. As the subtitle suggests, I hope that readers find insight and inspiration in the collection.

Matthew Shapiro is a community organizer, researcher, and writer. Matthew has focused on fostering capacities for participatory democracy, participatory design, and other core capacities for conscious evolution at grassroots level for three decades. His current grassroots focus is Boisevolve (https://boisevolve.org) and a full representation of his writing can be found at shapiromatic.wordpress.com. His new book, Early Voices of Conscious Evolution: Insight and Inspiration from the Beginning of the Modern Era, was published in 2024 under imprint Plusvalent Press, and is available in paperback through any book retailer and in Kindle format.