Chapter 4: Hard versus Flex - The War Between Our Brains

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If the greatest problem facing humanity today is that hardwired brains resist rewiring despite the exploding pace of change, then, conversely, the greatest opportunity for humanity lies within our brain's inherent neuroplasticity, our ability to accept new understandings of human experience.  Brains can and do rewire themselves all the time.  Everyone learns, especially when we are younger.  We come to new understandings and experiences based upon what I will call the use of a psychological toolbox.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century was that, for the first time, we understood that human beings operate within a “psychology.”  Psychology is vital to understanding human behavior and to developing a well-balanced brain through childhood into adulthood – or not.  Human psychological development not only works at the individual level but also applies to entire societies across time.  This is a radical transformation of our understanding of both history and human behavior.  With definable stages of development, history becomes a tangible psychological enterprise.  

This is particularly true in Spiral Dynamics, a impressive theory of the evolution of human consciousness developed in the 1990's. The psychological model posits stages of development from more basic and essential to more advanced and creative through which not only individuals but entire civilizations are developing/emerging.  Ken Wilber's incorporation of that theory into his Integral Theory remains a brilliant part of his work.  

“This great 'ethnocentric' stage began...around 10,000 BCE, and the rise of the great mythic-membership or traditional civilizations themselves started around 3000 to 2000 BCE and peaked around 1400 CE.  In today's world, every child is born at very early 'archaic' or 'magic' and egocentric stages, which dominate ages 1 to 3;  transitions to mythic-magic for around ages 4 to 7; enthnocentric myth proper, with several substages, emerges roughly ages 6 to n;” (2017, page 18)

“...research by Robert Kegan, of Harvard Graduate School of Education, shows 3 out of 5 – or 60 percent – of Americans remain at ethnocentric or lower stages.  If you think the enthnocentric stage – with its tendencies toward racism, sexism/patriarchy, misogyny, mega-tribal dominance, oppression, and fundamentalist religion – sounds a bit like hardcore far-Right Republicans, and that it starts to push into Trump territory, you'd be right.” (page 18)  My only argument is that what Wilber is pointing out is equally applicable to the far-Left.  Politically, while it might preach “inclusion,” the Left is no less “mega-tribal dominant” than the Right, for example.  The Left has no intent to include anything remotely Trumpian, it has its own ethnocentric demons to address.

Still, I think Wilber's perspective is important.  It resonates with my idea that most human beings are working with psychologies that have not really changed much in the last 3,000 years.  I think Dr. Kegan's work is optimistic from a “forward” leaning perspective.  I think that the percentage of enthocentric Americans is closer to 75 per cent.  But even accepting Kegan's 60 per cent at face value, the majority of Americans are not anything like “modern” in their personal developmental psychology.  We are people thrust into a rapidly changing techno-reality with a pre-modern psychology.

In this sense I claim that “the Modern” has not happened yet; that we are still in a period of pre-modernity and that the Western Enlightenment never finished.  It is continuing today though now on a global scale.  The birth of human reason is only now reaching its unintended consequence with the near-birth of techno-reality.  The Enlightenment is almost complete.  The next great brain transformation will proclaim the birth of “the Modern.”  

Definition for what constitutes the Modern is best revealed in children under age 15 of the developed world and the reality in which most of them are reared.  Representing Generation Z and Generation Alpha, they are already the most technologically immersed generations ever.  They are or will become the most gender fluid generations ever.  With the possible exception of global warming, they are or will be the most disinterested in the natural environment ever (they would far rather be online than in nature).  They will almost certainly accept only cryptocurrency when they start their professional lives over the next 25 years.  

Generation Alpha is aptly named.  Babies born today and over the past 9 years will likely be the first human beings living in the Modern.  They are young and imaginative and intuitive with technology and crave the different stories technology tells.  Thanks to their technological sophistication they will manifest the most neuroplastic human brains ever to populate the planet.

The next transformation in human consciousness is not purely human.  It is a techno-human hybrid which Yuvall Noah Harari calls “Homo Deus” and Gaia Vince calls “Homni.”  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Wilber's distillation of Spiral Dynamics (2000) and, hence, of human history and pre-history works like this.  We begin with the Archaic-Instinctual stage of psychological development.  This is “basic survival, food, water, warmth, sex, and safety.”  Then Magical-Animistic: “magical spirits, good and bad, swarm the earth leaving blessings, curses, and spells which determine events.  Forms into ethnic tribes.” Then come the Power Gods.  “...a self distinct from the tribe;  powerful, impulsive, egocentric, heroic.  Magical-mythic spirits, dragons, beasts, and powerful people...The basis for feudal empires - power and glory.”

According to Wilber these three stages, which demonstrably all children grow through into adulthood, represent about 30 per cent of the global human population.  These people are essentially dealing with “psychological toolboxes” (my term, not Wilber's) that are astonishingly primitive.   Some of us live right now with 10,000-year old tools.  All those people are angry and afraid.  That's over 2 billion humans living within that ancient psychology today.  Obviously, many prejudiced, magical thinking and power-driven people live like this.

Next comes the largest segment of the population, almost 3 billion humans.  About 40 percent of us are in Mythic Order.  “Life has meaning, direction, and purpose, with outcomes determined by an all-powerful Other or Order....unvarying principles of 'right' and 'wrong'...Rigid social hierarchies; paternalistic; one right way and only one right way to think about everything.”  

All of these controlling characteristics are about 2,000 – 5,000 years old.  (They correspond with the development of writing which makes the Mythic Order historically the first written psychological stage.)  70 per cent of human behavior is expressed in the residue of psychological tools that are essentially primitive.

The other 30 per cent of humanity is more rational and pluralistic (relativism) but not necessarily more flexible.  Wilber's analysis criticizes these groups for being too materialistic, nihilistic, and, above all, narcissistic. According to Wilber, there are higher stages of consciousness above where we presently are, the Sensitive Self.  

Beyond the leading-edge of human consciousness today there are something like 1 per cent of the population at the Integrative stage.  Wilber describes their driving qualities: “Flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality have the highest priority.  Differences and pluralities can be integrated into independent, natural flows.”  I think Wilber is wrong about who these people are and how they will manifest upon the Earth.

They are Z and Alpha.  That this is true, of course, flies I the face of Wilber that this stage comes through full “four-quadrant” spiritual living.  In my opinion, Wilber's higher levels are not attainable at a global scale without technology.  And it is impossible to stop the fusion of spirituality with technology anyway, which is how most 20-somethings will feel in 20 years. Without technology whatever Wilber claims is “higher” than where we are is just the power of human imagination.

It is useful to see the human population spread across this spectrum of consciousness, with psychological toolboxes that tend to include useful tools from earlier stages (sex, survival, wonder) with newer psychological tools (compassion, tolerance, curious).  This is another advantage of adopting a wider perspective on time that I previously advocated.  

To be clear, when I advocate that the vast majority of humanity is living today with psychological tools that are 2,000 years old or older this is not intended as a put-down of anyone.  It is perfectly “normal” and I acknowledge that.  More specifically, I am not insulting anyone's intelligence.  As I mentioned in the last chapter, there were plenty of highly-intelligent people living 2,000 - 3,000 years ago.  Many people of high intelligence today are working with an ancient psychological tool set.

Standard habits of mind have formed by narrative bias and repetition over thousands of years. This habit hardwires specific neurons in the brain with a symbiotic feedback loop.  The behavior affects how the neurons fire and the neurons firing affects the behavior.  Over tens of thousands of years, typical human behavior was neurologically hardwired into our brains.

The continuing Western Enlightenment demands that scientific fact be applied to ourselves, our culture and our religion.  Traditional stories are rationalized.  Ethics is in the process of replacing morality in the public sphere, for example.  Freedom is now seen as a right to live as you see fit as opposed to a choice between good and evil, its traditional context.  The narrative story became a catalog of facts.  This is so deeply traumatic that most people are simply incapable of experiencing it from their pre-modern hard-brain perspective.  They devote themselves to a future controlled by their past ways or they run away to Planet Trump or other similar “alternative” realities.  

Side note:  The birth of Trump's so-called "Big Lie" (the 2020 election was massively fraudulent) could ironically mark the birth of virtual reality.  The switch to virtual will become easier once people accept that the story they want to believe trumps all facts.

I call humanity's future “the Modern” because I do not think the genuine “project of modernity” has actually started yet.  The coming of the Modern is strange and disorienting.  Psychologically speaking, most of us have gone almost nowhere since Roman times and yet we must deal with a seemingly absurd tomorrow now.  For the most part, there is nothing “modern” about our psychology, which I claim, of course, is our greatest challenge.
 
In his notebooks Nietzsche wondered about “falling in love with becoming.”  (2015, page 266)  He found becoming to be the existential end result of the will to power.  All power relations are reducible to ever-adaptive change within a multiplicity of human drives.  This is because power must always have something to overcome, something to establish that uniquely human tension in life.  He felt the overcoming of life's challenges and, more importantly, the overcoming of yourself are the essence of human existence.  Therefore, Nietzsche sees as few others have that we are “orchestrating our soul” by navigating the interplay of our instincts.  I would simply add our cognitive biases to the short list.

The good news is we don't have to go insane like Nietzsche did.  While our brains are indeed hardwired rather easily, especially in our years of infancy, the brain nevertheless has a wonderful capacity that is at the root of all human innovation and imagination.  It has the ability to use itself in different ways, to rewire itself.  Because our brains can change and not become permanently stuck in certain hardwired ways we have been able to accelerate the pace of evolution itself and create the world today.  That the world is the way it is right now is because human beings are hardwired.  That it changes the way it does is because we have neuroplasticty.  

This is the war between our brains, occurring unconsciously in each of us and within our societies.  Having lost the need for the oral tradition, most of us are still hardwired in our ways of understanding the world and our behavior.  But the world of accelerating change, begun by human beings, demands adaptability.  This has historically and will continue to mean adaptability to the strange, the unfamiliar.  It is into the strange today we are proceeding and that procession demands that our brains be nimble and diverse and open, not fixed and rigid and, well, hardwired.

The tensions in the world today are the result of a clash between frustrated and angry brains.  Hard-brains do not desire most of the changing world and the resulting disorientation.  They regress and reorient toward the past, attempting to use Time's Arrow to their favor and perpetuate the past.  Flex-brains are frustrated and angry at this regressive tendency and are oriented toward the present-future, the world we are living into.  They crave and facilitate the world of constant becoming.  

We are lucky that our neurology is genetically malleable in addition to being biased toward narrative.  Our narratives change through time given the right circumstances like the merger of clans or to account for shocking new experiences like earthquakes or eclipses.  We readily applied these new secular/science facts to medicine, machines, entertainment, warfare, education and business, for example.  An unintended consequence of all this rationality was that it that led to longer, healthier lives with a variety of talents generating previously unfathomable wealth.  But when those facts intentionally conflicted with belief or emotion we wholly invest in our favored narratives, most of us thought the facts were absurd.  

I stress again this is not an evaluation of politics.  Both the alt-Right and the far-Left are wired into their own perspectives and are equally inept (because they are using the same ancient psychological tools) at being truly inclusive of the other.  Both sides are theoretically capable of altering their perspectives but, instead, most members of these groups feed into the narrative bias of their favored story.  That is why liberals are suddenly opposed to free speech (ban Trump from social media, for example) and conservatives rage against every emergent aspect of human psychology (transgender people are immoral, they need "treatment").

A central question is whether this will even matter.  So what if virtually all of humanity is hardwired against the Modern?  Nations heavy in ethnic tradition could react strongly, passing laws against manifestations of the Modern.  Cryptocurrencies, transgender persons, neurolinked persons populating an increasingly virtual world, all of these things can be outlawed in the alleged name of human decency.  

But there are more than enough nations ready for the change in ethnic tradition.  There is nothing in the communist materialist worldview, for example, to oppose virtual realities or transgender rights.  It does not matter what mere governments may choose to do with the Modern, it is a trans-political, global phenomenon.  Politics are already behind the curve of it.  Since it is not a political question, it is beyond their understanding or control, which terrifies them.  

Global generations known as “Z” and “Alpha” are already and will continue to be more flexible and more virtual than any humans in history.  Over the next 15-20 years they will become a powerful demographic and they will facilitate change into the Modern.  I expect 10% or so of Gen Alpha to be transgender, for example.  An astonishing number!  What is it about them?  From where will they find their power?  One answer is in neuroplasticity and the resulting psychological tools, which I have mentioned generally.  The other has to do with technology itself, which I will explore after we look at examples of tools that are helpful and unhelpful for the world we are living into.