Chapter 3: The Human Expanse of Time

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One of humanity's fundamental challenges actually has to do with our sense of time.  Most people consider time not by clocks but through the experience of their lives and their extended family, their parents and siblings.  When they are younger, their grandparents are part of the equation.  When older their own children and grandchildren are major measures of time.  

This isn't true of everyone, of course.  But, as rule, we are accustomed almost universally to give context to time and our lives through five generations or so.  This is a mistake.  To understand the effect of accelerating change upon humanity we must first widen our context because our brains and our bodies are basically the same as they were 70,000 years ago (or so).  

We need to broaden our awareness and to witness our humanity not only during the reach of our own lifetime but also within the reach of all generational lifetimes over the past 70,000 years.  That is basically how long our contemporary brains and nervous systems have been operating (some say 40,000 years.  Either way, it is long enough to seriously hardwire stuff in our brains).  The basis for our present perception of reality is very, very old and, because it is old, dominated by our hard-brain through the sheer repetition of time.

For most of human history we lived and died and the world did not change.  Fire came along.  The wheel came along.  Ice Ages came and went.  By and large, the world changed very little for vast stretches of pre-history.  Suddenly, about 70,000 years ago humans started making jewelry and began having ritualized burials.  But that quickened pace of change went unnoticed by our ancestors.

Change remained slow enough for many generations to pass without anything significant ever happening in terms of human experience.  Obviously at some point, language became more complex, a feedback loop with the brain was intensified.  The more the brain vocalized, the more the brain learned to tell stories.  Separately yet almost simultaneously across the world, the oral traditions were established, exerting a karmic influence that is so underappreciated today.

Human knowledge begins to really accumulate with the maturation of oral traditions.  By 10,000 years ago this is a sophisticated global tradition and human culture is far more advanced because of these traditions.  We are definitely moving at a faster pace at this point but it is still unnoticeable to people as they lived.  

They continued to carry knowledge along in their stories and songs until writing was invented.  Suddenly, grand fictions could be created.  New methods of using the brain emerged in architecture, philosophy, religion, symbolism, and technique, generating robust cultures everywhere.

With the development of writing the world changes much more quickly, shifting into a higher gear of glacial.  Probably for the first time, humans became aware of the changes and sensed a rudimentary “pace” of change.  Architecture changed.  Technique and tool-use changed.  This expanse of change became something more individual human beings could distinguish as they lived.  

By the Western Enlightenment, as we have seen, the pace of change shifted in an unexpected (unintended) way and created a world where story is not what we forever previously thought it was.  Secular history transformed human understanding in a shocking way.  Everything radiating from the sacred was trivialized by being, in fact, nothing more than the efforts of humanity itself, by itself, on its own.

Now we have reached a unique time when the hard-brain influences of humanity need to become more flexible.  Neuroplasticity is obviously required when, abruptly, the world is changing multiple times within a single generation.  This has never happened before.  

It is, quite literally, too much for most of humanity to take all at once.  In my lifetime we have gone from black and white television to video streaming, from computer punch cards to the internet, from generated special effects to virtual reality and genetic alteration and so on to whatever comes next.  

This is why most people are anxious and upset, even angry.  Fundamentally, the world has already changed and they feel disoriented, many people want revision, regression.  Most “experts” couch this angst in political, economic or religious terms and everyone sort of blindly nods their heads about these inadequate explanations.  

“Income inequality” or “climate change” or “my gun rights” are not our most fundamental problems.  They are, rather, symptoms of something deeper and far more basic.  If you somehow solved these particular problems to everyone's satisfaction everyone would still be angry and fearful.

We contextualize all of those “problems” into pre-existing stories and yet these narratives themselves have to change.  This reality is simply too much for ordinary humans.  Those expecting to “change the world” in the early 21st century are moving at a pace that is not normal.  

Those of us at the leading-edge of societal change need to understand we are not normal.  Then, perhaps, we will understand the trauma we are causing society even though we would say it is necessary pain.

Normal people (75%-90% of the population) are ethnocentric, they tend to view the world through the lens of their ethnicity.  Their favored stories are deeply ethnic.  Almost universally, ethnicity defines the people possessing it, including gender, for example.  

Thanks to evolving science and ethics, individuals today are free to choose their gender, bypassing any concept of “god” entirely in the creation process, making gender a human-controlled choice.  Which is why it is so controversial.

Because this is an abrupt, novel issue, coming out of nowhere for most people, it is fundamentally disruptive to almost every ethnic group.  While a few groups are supportive of transgender freedom, most ethnic groups find it strange and/or threatening not just in the existence of trans-persons but in the shocking “humanity over god” power grab that it implies.  Power previously attributed by the ethnicity to a “sacred” realm is not sacred anymore.  It is under secular, human control.  The idea of gender as a human choice is destabilizing on a variety of levels.    

This is a collision of wills to power.  Pre-modern and novel contemporary stories create fissure points for societal conflict.  Humans, not gods, control the birth of life (through abortion – at one end of the spectrum - or artificial insemination and cloning at the other).  Humans control intelligence (through academia and science).  Humans control the climate (through pollution and the resurfacing of the natural world).  Humans control morality (via ethics, again the sacred gives way to the secular, symbols are now signs in the Jungian sense).  Humans increasingly control lifespan and, now, gender.  Unintentionally, this is a story that does great violence to the accustomed stories of knowledge.

The scientific narrative might or might not tell a story, which is fundamentally, neurologically confusing for most people.  The stories science does tell are not easily assimilated into our traditional stories.  In the true expanse of human time, the Western Enlightenment is a shockingly precipitous change in the storage of knowledge and the application of wisdom.  Suddenly, we must base our favored story on a catalog of facts and/or purely secular inspiration.  70,000 years of behavior has to change in 500 years.

The frustration and anxiety present in the mass of humanity comes from the attempt by contemporary forces in science, academia and the media to replace old stories with new ones.  The ability of technology to completely redefine what it means to be human and what lies within the grasp of tech-empowered humans is traumatizing to most of humanity without anyone particularly noticing the catastrophe.  Most people will defend their cherished stories over any fact.  And that's a fact.

This challenge has to do with how our brains fundamentally work but it is not related to intelligence, nor is it related to economic circumstances nor political leaning.  The mass of humanity is psychologically hardwired to experience the world in a story-based reality that is premised upon “knowledge” that is thousands of years old.  

Nevertheless, there were plenty of highly intelligent people all over the globe during the Roman, Egyptian and Mongol Empires.  Nor does this have anything to do with the capacity to engage with modern technology and, hence, function in modern society.  On the contrary, pre-modern humans find technology as addictive as contemporary ones, for reasons I will discuss in a future post.  

For most of human existence, our memories were required to place knowledge into stories and songs.  Generally speaking, ours is not a factual mind but, rather, a narrative mind, a mind of stories.  Certainly early humanity remembered many facts about living and surviving but (this is crucial) they did not experience them as facts.  Quite the contrary, they experienced them as stories and songs.  Their brains are neurologically wired for that.  And it is important to understand that these are “normal” people.

Again, the hardwired habits of mind can be changed.  All brains are also geared to learn and grow.  New narratives and narrative styles can be adopted.  In fact, our life narrative is really a collection of interchangeable narratives.  Contemporary humanity is multi-narrative Being.  

But most people don't change their favored story naturally or easily.  Orientation to this modern multi-narrative requires effort on the part of the person within any specific story.  Since these previous multi-narratives are based on story and song, for most humans it requires tremendous discipline to rewire themselves to where the stories and songs are not as important as the reasoned facts.  They are geared to “trust their gut” so it can be difficult to rewire.

We all possess story elements that are fundamental to our sense of meaning, safety and control.  Most of humanity resists a complete change of narrative.  Our plasticity is challenged by the neurohabits established within the brain over thousands of generations.  In absence of an overriding truth value (which is usually easy to assimilate and still preserve the original story, like making “money” and improving “health”), special skills are usually required to remap the neurology of our brain (so that we can better understand secular/scientific narrative).

Of course, we can change our habits and we can adopt new stories, the adaptability and neuro-plasticity of our brains toward change is also a basic characteristic of human survival.  But such change, especially of deeply established habits of mind such as belief, requires not only effort and discipline, but, above all, the recognition by a given person that they need to change.  

The more basic the habit, such as the narrative bias, the more difficult it is to change.  In fact, few of us ever bother to question our favored stories, why would we expend any effort to change them?  It is the world that is screwed up, not me.  Why change when you are “normal”?  

Some of us are not “normal.”  We are emergent.  We came pre-wired for change in the narrative, to create our own stories.  To create our own values, as Nietzsche would stress.  We are born looking for a different set of facts, for different stories, for new knowledge, new experience.  

We are the cultural mutations, so to speak, influencing the last 500 years or so, living in a world based upon scientific and secular facts over all other stories to the contrary.  This change, like all change, is accelerating.  Today's 10-15 year-olds are being more or less reared in a tech-human hybrid environment.  They will almost certainly not see much difference in the real versus the virtual world, except that the virtual world is way more cool.

This inherent coolness is abhorrent to most people.  It is the root of most problems we are facing today like the denial of global warming, fear of artificial intelligence, and rejection of secular humanism.  The whole science versus religion debate is competing variations of narrative bias.  

Both sides have sets of “facts” they consider perfectly valid.  One side says it is all due to physics and evolution, the other proclaims that God(s) did it.  This, of course, pisses the other side off and they proceed to demonize one another in flaming culture wars, which are nothing more than a clash of deeply-ingrained stories.

Demonizing other humans is a very old psychological tool.  It is deeply hardwired into many people and an obvious area where the extreme politics of all sides is basically primitive behavior.  Which is why I stress that what I am addressing here has little or nothing to do with political leaning.

But even if we recognize and change our cherished story or stories, it is almost impossible to change the cognitive bias we all have toward narrative itself.  Our minds are geared for stories.  More specifically, they are geared toward what the story means.  You cannot just change that in the matter of a generation or two.  

This is a good thing.  To abandon all narrative in our lives often produces psychotic results.  Humans without any narrative at all can become sociopaths, or are bewildered by the inability to find either grit or meaning in their lives, or suffer from dementia, or any of a myriad of other neurological maladies.  Stories keep us sane.

It is not that these hard-brain people are incapable of rewiring themselves.  On the contrary, neuro-plasticity means almost everyone can rewire their brains through repetition of new choices.  Neurohabits change whenever new skills are deemed important and indispensable.  New ways of thinking allowed civilization to flourish to begin with.  

As we will see, the youngest generation exhibits more neuroplasticity than in any prior generation.  But, whenever a new “fact” or “story” comes along that conflicts with the basic premises of our favored and unquestioned narrative(s), then dissonance results.

An obvious example here is Darwin's theory of evolution.  In our modern science/secular reality, we have discovered many facts to suggest biological, human evolution, though it is still a theory.  This story conflicts with the telling of creation in practically every major religion in the world.  Which makes it a potential threat to “normal” people who are attached to their religion or to “magical” thinking.  This creates tension.  

Radical Christians came up with the idea of Creationism to counter the “sinful” teaching of evolution in our public schools.  They feared the indoctrination of their children with ideas that conflicted with the knowledge of faith.  But Creationism is a not a scientific theory.  It is just a twist on religion in schools.

Billions of human beings are basically living out their lives using stories from the time of the Roman and Mongol empires.  They conduct themselves based on behaviors, rules and facts that were totally accepted 2,000 or 3,000 years ago.  They incorporate and benefit from modern scientific fact in terms of earning a living, providing healthcare, and creating gadgets to consume.  These benefits were readily incorporated into the stories everyone was already telling one another.  

Again, the greatest problem of our time is that most people are neurologically hardwired for a narrative-based world that is already in the past and is morphing ever-faster into something completely different.  Normal people will become more volatile and unstable if they fail to use their neuroplasticity to rewire themselves so that they are living with an improved flex-brain, one that embraces (or, at least, accepts) novelty.  For many of us this requires self-practice of proactive techniques designed to increase neuroplasticity.  What does that look like?